Who says only superficial or nominal religious people have been indoctrinated when they were young? And who says indoctrination is the only factor in a complete explanation of every religious phenomenon?
I'm talking about explaining the general spread of religion. No one who's sane would deny that religious people all around the world and in every time period of human civilization tend to adopt the religion of their parents, because their parents indoctrinated most of them when they were young. That's a ceteris paribus generalization, so there are exceptions, as there are exceptions to every generalization made in the special sciences.
What's "lazy" about explaining the bulk of a phenomenon with a single, commonplace generalization, with one fell swoop? That's like killing someone with the dreaded death touch (the dim mak).
Rather than admitting that their parents and their country's whole religious culture were woefully wrongheaded, most people double down on their religious upbringing. That's not to say they all become true-believing saints, but they at least become proud of their traditions rather than being embarrassed by them. Perhaps they become defensive because they suspect that anything that survives mainly by conditioning children to accept its nonsense must be pretty fragile and hollow.
What does the Christian doctrine of hellfire have to do with justice? The God of Judaism isn't so concerned with justice either, since he uses the Jewish people as a scapegoat. So by criticizing the appalling doctrine of everlasting punishment for the rejection of Christian balderdash, an atheist hardly shows he wouldn't prefer a perfectly just world that only an all-knowing, all-powerful deity could provide.
You say Christianity imposes heavy burdens, but that's because you think you can define the essence of Christianity, disposing of the sects you don't care for as fake. Alas, it's precisely because there are no such self-evident borders around the religion, that folks get to still call themselves "Christian" even as they make it up as they go along. That's what Protestantism is all about. It's not just a problem of rationalization. It's that Christianity is unfalsifiable because it's essentially empty, so it's ever-renewable with a fresh interpretation of the myths.
What are the Christian "tenets" you think couldn't possibly be interpreted to justify any behaviour under the sun, from stealing to murder to sexism to racism to genocide to capitalism to war, and so on?
