I find it interesting that you register religion as a lifestyle choice. One part of me says you're absolutely right, and the other part of me says you're not. If you're brought up religious, it can be seriously bound into your worldview in a way that a lifestyle choice isn't.

I think this is approaching being precisely my point, in fact. It's entirely possible, and a major thrust of my speculation on this subject, that the main reason that (say) smoking falls into the things-other-people-do category for me is because my extended family and their friends have all always been non-smokers, and hence I grew up with a basic ingrained attitude that said smoking was something done by people on TV and not real people. This was, as you put it, "bound into my worldview" in a way that remained unshaken by starting to meet people who did it in real life. In precisely the same way, being brought up in an entirely atheist family and social group caused me not to even consider the possible existence of God until I started reading theologically inclined fiction and having secondary-school lessons which encouraged us to give it serious thought.

Perhaps smoking is something you can genuinely choose, whereas (one of) belief or disbelief in God is a conclusion you find yourself inevitably drawn to once you sit down and think about it seriously. But in either case, the common element is that as things-other-people-do they were things that for a long time it never even occurred to me to sit down and think about seriously.

Actually, I find it rather more interesting that you consider religion as something which people actually sit down and think about. Whilst I suspect that a lot of the people reading this (myself included) are the kind of people who actually would want to have a careful justification for their religious position, the fact that the vast majority of the world follows (or at least claims to adhere to) the same religion as their parents tends to indicate fairly strongly otherwise.

Of course, the fact that this statistic also applies to my own smugly-enlightened atheism is something I'm not sure I could argue my way out of. I'd like to believe that my considerations of the issue have a fair degree of logic to them, but proving that it's not just worthless self-justification is non-trivial.

Hmm. I don't think I intended to suggest that everybody sat down and thought seriously about religion: only that some people eventually do, and people who haven't (or haven't yet) will tend to follow the religion in which they were raised because it's never occurred to them to consider alternatives. I'm not sure this contradicts you.