From an interesting article by Dawkins:
"If I have done my softening up work well, you will already have completed the argument about child brains and religion. Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. And this very quality automatically makes them vulnerable to infection by mind viruses. For excellent survival reasons, child brains need to trust parents and trust elders whom their parents tell them to trust. An automatic consequence is that the 'truster' has no way of distinguishing good advice from bad. The child cannot tell that 'If you swim in the river you'll be eaten by crocodiles' is good advice but 'If you don't sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, the crops will fail' is bad advice. They both sound the same. Both are advice from a trusted source, and both are delivered with a solemn earnestness that commands respect and demands obedience."

Source:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/dawkins_24_5.htm

A good deal more can be learned there.