Religious indoctrination begins at the earliest possible age. Kids are asked to believe the most amazing stories, and encouraged to think that accepting those tales without any evidence is a virtue called faith. Similarly, many children are indoctrinated in the cult of Santa and Fairy, beliefs strongly reinforced with material rewards.
Nonetheless, with predictable regularity and at early ages, children see through the Santa/Fairy fictions, despite the positive reinforcements, and realize there is a real world truth to where those presents came from and why their tooth under the pillow was replaced with a quarter. They reach those conclusions by critically assessing the evidence. Our brains are pretty good at that.
Despite religious indoctrination during their most formative years, millions of folks abandon the tenets of their parents' faith to become agnostics, atheists, or adherents of a radically different faith.
I was raised in a Southern Baptist household and believed the Bible narrative fiercely. At about the age of 8, I began having reservations about the savagery of the Old Testament, and by age 10 I had decided that evolution made more sense than Poof the Magic Creator.
Rest assured that no teachers or TV shows urged me to believe in evolution; in the Bible Belt in those days we were excused from public school to attend Bible classes twice weekly. I endured much abuse from both school authorities and peers, and church authorities and peers, because I began asking questions about the rightness of, say, god slaughtering 40 children via a she-bear because they teased a prophet about his bald head, etc. I was banned from my parents' church because I refused to stop asking critical questions.
My point? The most common forms of indoctrination are religious and folk myth, yet many children reject them at an early age and always have, long before mass media. The children who reject them soonest are in general precocious and the most disposed--not by indoctrination but by capability--to pursue careers in science.
Social and religious opposition to the theory of evolution has always been fierce, and it is prima facie absurd to suggest that anyone has been indoctrinated into blind acceptance of it. The argument being made to that effect in this thread is self-contradictory, made in bad faith, way off topic, and a waste of time.
EDIT: IMHO
This message has been edited by Omnivorous, 07-29-2005 11:03 AM