*cough*

[charlie]

U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey

Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education...



http://pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx

[sakabatou]

1. If I'm a Jewish atheist, what does that make me?

[immoderate]

2. My brother.

I'm a Jewish atheist too.

--imm :hi:

[TZ]

4. Me three!

Seems to be alot of us types floating around....:)

[Goblinmonger]

5. Wait, they let Jews in here.

You gotta be frickin' kidding me.

[realisticphish]

6. there goes the neighborhood

:(

[TZ]

9. Watch what you say, mister

Remember we control all the banks, made 9/11 happen AND sank the Titanic. Clearly you shouldn't mess with TEH JOOOOS!!! :rofl:

[sakabatou]

11. LOL

[realisticphish]

14. .

[TZ]

22. Oh speaking of which..You'll LOVE this

http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/10/cnns-rick-sanchez-jon-stewart-is-a-bigot----and-jews-dont-count-as-an-oppressed-minority-audio.php?ref=fpblg

[awoke_in_2003]

25. "we control all the banks"

brother atheist- could you float me $5,000? :)

[sakabatou]

36. I'll give you 400 Quatloos.

[LeftishBrit]

29. And me

And the British Leader of the Opposition if it comes to that.

[BlueJazz]

3. If you can add Mormon to that moniker, you'd be a Theological Genius!

:)

[ZombieHorde]

20. The poll concerns religion, so go with atheist, if the poll concerned ethnicity, then you would go

with Jewish.

[sakabatou]

34. I don't see Jewish as being an ethnicity

Since anyone can become Jewish.

[lazarus]

35. I asked my Jewish step-brother about that, once

back when he was my step-brother. He says being Jewish is both an ethnicity and a religion. You can join the religion, but you have to be born into the ethnicity.

[Codeine]

31. I'm pretty sure that puts you in charge of CNN. nt

[realisticphish]

7. Some people will probably be surprised at this

those people haven't really paid attention. Most atheists have looked into religion far deeper than their theistic fellows; often, that depth of analysis is part of the reason they rejected their church.

I would say that upwards of 80-90% of Christians have never read more than a quarter of the Bible

[amyrose2712]

8. Yes, my sister argued...

that they only THINK they know. Only through studying Strong's Concordance as read by pastor of The Shepherd's Chapel know the TRUE word of Yahweh. Who she lovingly nicknamed Yah.:banghead: :banghead:

[TZ]

10. Here's what I find interesting.

I've never really read the Bible. Read a children's illustrated book of Old Testament stories. Watched The Ten Commandments and have done more than my share of Passover Seders (some very orthodox and traditional most not) and I STILL know some of the Bible better than some "practicing" Christians. Ran into someone on FB who did not KNOW that the Last Supper was a passover seder..uh whut?

[immoderate]

13. I met a teacher who was a sub at a Catholic school...

This teacher had questioned her class about why they thought Jesus was in the synagogue when he was twelve. They made several wild guesses and she revealed it was to prepare for his Bar Mitzvah. "You mean he was Jewish?"

The next day the teacher was called in to the Mother Superior's office. "I've been getting a lot of calls from parents. Did you tell the students that Jesus was Jewish?"

"Well, that's the truth, isn't it?"

"That's the problem. Now I'm stuck with having to explain that to all the parents."


--imm

[trotsky]

16. Hahahaha

That is an awesome account.

[awoke_in_2003]

26. good thing she didn't note...

that he wasn't a blonde :rofl:

[sakabatou]

12. You know what's funny

If people read the Bible in-depth, they may come out as an atheist. That's how many came to be.

[Warpy]

19. That drove the final nail into the Irish Catholic church's coffin

for my mother, who finally got around to reading it in her late 60s. She was furious, "That's what I've been told is the word of god, what I've been told to hold in high reverence? That?" It was pretty funny. As long as she obeyed the admonition of the church to leave the reading to the priests, she could almost buy some of the message, although she claimed to be an agnostic. Once she read it for herself, she realized the emperor (and his priests and bishops and all the way up to the pope) wasn't wearing any clothes and never had been.

It was a thing of beauty.

[awoke_in_2003]

27. the bible...

is seedier than a harlequin novel :)

[trotsky]

15. The various threads elsewhere on DU about these survey results...

have borne that out. One reply in particular tried to brush aside the results as the quiz just being about "trivia" rather than true theology. Pretty damn funny seeing them sputter when confronted with evidence that evil, foul atheists actually know more about their holy book than they do.

(Of course I've been in discussions with Christians who, when faced with my biblical knowledge, run away with a "The devil can quote scripture too!")

[realisticphish]

17. haha

"who is job?" is fairly important, I would think, theologically.

Primarily in the sense that one has to defend God letting Satan fuck with Job's life because he hadn't invented dog tracks yet, and still wanted to bet.

[awoke_in_2003]

28. "who is job?"

there is only one Job, and he wears turtlenecks and makes kick ass computers (which bear a satanic emblem :) )

[onager]

18. But...but you just don't understand the intricacies of theology!

:rofl:

Those excuses were hilarious. "It's only trivia." "It was only a 65% vs 50% split." "Catholics don't read the Bible." Bla-bla-bla.

ANYTHING to avoid the awful truth! "W-a-a! The Evil Atheists won the game in our own ballpark!"

[muriel_volestrangler]

21. Aye, the Courtier's Reply was fairly obvious (nt)

[Goblinmonger]

23. Yeah, Mr. Comparative Religious Studies

was fun to play with for about a day.

[WillParkinson]

24. I took the test...

Got 25 right. The only ones I didn't know were the first 4 books of the bible and a couple other of the first 5 questions.

[LeftishBrit]

30. I knew all of them except the Great Awakening one

What surprised me was that only 71% knew that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. You'd think that people would get that one from Christmas carols, even if they had no other contact with religion.

[onager]

32. The G.A. is mostly a regional American obsession, I think.

Its enthusiasts are still nostalgic for that eighteenth-century "wave of Gawdliness" that "swept over America." (I often hear them ranting about it on Xian right-wing radio stations.)

Except it mostly swept over New England. And there wasn't a "United States of America" yet, since the First G.A. took place fairly early in the century.

Where I grew up, near the Appalachian Mountains in the South, it was very different around that same time.

Many settlers in that part of the country migrated to get away from the Northeastern theocrats, especially those in New England. A region where Thomas Jefferson once noted, "no mind beyond mediocrity dares to develop itself," thanks to the iron grip of local Xian orthodoxy.

Churches seem to have been a fairly low priority down there on the Southern frontier. After stuff like not starving to death and not being massacred by justifiably pissed-off American Indians.

The area was religiously served by "circuit riders" - itinerant preachers who rode from one churchless community to another on horseback.

The diaries of those preachers often complained about the drunkenness, lust, profanity and general lack of religious interest among the locals. e.g., the preachers observed that, when they performed weddings, many of the brides were already obviously pregnant.

So IMO, at best it was a Mediocre Awakening...

[charlie]

33. Mediocre, and a pain in the ass

As they all are. I consider it a misfortune of my life to live through another one of their god-blighted eruptions.

They're lucky an interlude between Great Awakenings allowed them the lucidity to realize Jefferson and Madison's notions of separation saved their dumb asses from Anglican or Congregationalist States of America. Which, of course, carried no weight when they "awakened" again and vexed Jefferson for being an infidel. Ingrateful pinheads.