A Recent Pew Research Center survey of American’s knowledge about religion shows widespread ignorance. The study asked 32 mostly relatively basic multiple choice questions about various religions (including a few on religion and public life):
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…..
More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. About half of Protestants (53%) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity. Roughly four-in-ten Jews (43%) do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish.
In addition, fewer than half of Americans (47%) know that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist. Fewer than four-in-ten (38%) correctly associate Vishnu and Shiva with Hinduism. And only about a quarter of all Americans (27%) correctly answer that most people in Indonesia – the country with the world’s largest Muslim population – are Muslims.
There is also widespread ignorance about constitutional restrictions on the teaching of religion in public schools. Most survey respondents believe that the Supreme Court has banned the teaching of the Bible even as “literature,” and most believe that public schools are not allowed to have “comparative religion” classes:
[A]mong the questions most often answered incorrectly is whether public school teachers are permitted to read from the Bible as an example of literature. Fully two-thirds of people surveyed (67%) also say “no” to this question, even though the Supreme Court has clearly stated that the Bible may be taught for its “literary and historic” qualities, as long as it is part of a secular curriculum. [J]ust 36% of the public knows that comparative religion classes may be taught in public schools.
I. Who Knows the Most About Religion?
Which groups have the highest knowledge levels? It turns out that it’s atheists and agnostics (an average of 20.9 correct answers out of 32), though Jews (20.5) and Mormons (20.3) scored almost equally well. The differences between the three groups are statistically insigificant. Atheists, Jews, and Mormons still score higher than other groups even after controlling for education.
Interestingly, atheists and agnostics (6.7 correct answers) score significantly higher than Christians (6.0) on the 12 questions that cover knowledge of Christianity and the Bible. Mormons (7.9) and white evangelicals (7.3) are, however, clearly the high scorers in this subcategory.
II. Is Ignorance About Religion Rational?
In some ways, ignorance about religion may be rational, just like the equally widespread political ignorance. For most voters, it is rational to be ignorant about politics because most people aren’t much interested in politics, political knowledge is rarely useful for everyday life, and the chance of any individual vote determining the outcome of an election is infinitesmal. Of course, individually rational decisions not to spend much time acquiring political knowledge may lead to bad collective outcomes, such as poor electoral decisions and terrible public policies.
In the case of religion, theological knowledge has little utility for everyday life, most people have only limited interest in religious doctrine, and any one individual’s ignorance about religion probably has very little effect on society. Thus, it’s possible that most people are ignorant about religion for much the same reason that they are ignorant about politics. However, economist Bryan Caplan – a leading scholar on public ignorance – has some reservations about this analysis:
If people sincerely believed that their eternal fates hinged on their knowledge of religion, their ignorance wouldn’t be rational. If you could save your soul with 40 hours of your time, you’d be mad to watch t.v. instead. Unfortunately for religious believers, this leaves them with two unpalatable options:
1. Option #1: Deep-down, most religious believers believe that death is the end. (This is consistent with the fact that even the pious mourn their loved ones at funerals, instead of celebrating the good fortune of the deceased)….
2. Option #2: Most religious believers are so stupid and/or impulsive that they’ll knowingly give up eternal bliss for trivial mortal pleasures. But why then do so many believers show intelligence and self-control in other areas of life?
An alternative possibility is that most Americans believe that in order to be saved in the afterlife you just have to be “spiritual” in some vague way. So long as you believe in God (or perhaps multiple gods), the precise details of religious doctrine don’t matter too much. This is consistent with survey data showing that most Americans believe that a variety of religions can lead to salvation, but 50% say that you can’t be a good or moral person if you are an atheist. If all you need for salvation is a kind of vague general religiosity (plus, perhaps, some good works), then you don’t need much actual knowledge of religion.
This, however, still leaves open the question of why most people don’t make more of an effort to determine whether this kind of ecumenical spirituality is actually true. After all, many great religious leaders (e.g. – Luther and Calvin) argued that your soul can only be saved if you embrace the one true faith. Some atheist writers (e.g. – Christopher Hitchens) contend that you are more likely to become a moral person if you reject religion altogether. It may not be rational to reject these possibilities without investigating them in greater depth than most of the American public apparently has. On the other hand, it’s possible that getting at religious truth is so difficult that most people rationally choose not to study it in depth because they know they are unlikely to increase their chances of salvation very much even if they do.
On balance, I think that religious ignorance is somewhat less rational than political ignorance, though far from completely irrational. But the issue is complex and deserves further study.
UPDATE: Some argue that in many religions, it’s faith, not knowledge that determines salvation. This, however, doesn’t really counter Caplan’s point. You need knowledge to know which theological doctrines are the ones you have to have faith in. Should you have faith in Christ, Vishnu, or the doctrines of the Koran? It’s hard to make an informed choice unless you have at least basic knowledge of Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam.
UPDATE #2: The Atlantic has a summary and links to various commentaries on the Pew survey.
Anderson says:
About half of Protestants (53%) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity.
Tell me about it. I’m a Lutheran in Mississippi.
September 28, 2010, 5:48 pmBlue says:
I’m trying to get my head around how knowing or not knowing First Amendment law is related in any fashion to faith. People can be utterly wrong about that question and yet have a very strong faith in God–and it is faith, not knowledge, that is the determinant of salvation.
Similarly, grieving for a dead relative is no argument against faith. Even the most committed member of a religion knows that when a loved one dies their time with them on this world is over. But we also weep when we leave our relatives to go to school, to go to war, to move to a new job. We weep for the ending of a particular type of life–but it doesn’t mean we think they’ll never be seen again.
September 28, 2010, 5:51 pmIlya Somin says:
I’m trying to get my head around how knowing or not knowing First Amendment law is related in any fashion to faith. People can be utterly wrong about that question and yet have a very strong faith in God–and it is faith, not knowledge, that is the determinant of salvation.
That’s true. But these are only 4 of 32 questions on the survey, and public knowledge about the others was no higher than about these 4.
As for faith, not knowledge, being the determinant of salvation, the question is faith in what? According to many theologies, faith will only save you if it’s faith in the right doctrines and/or gods. And you need knowledge to determine which doctrines are the right ones.
September 28, 2010, 5:54 pmPliny the Elder says:
I went through a period of agnosticism (which I take to be the view that knowledge of God’s existence and relevantly similar claims are beyond human knowledge) and I must admit that I thought about religious assertions more then than I do now. (I would consider myself a believer, but to discuss what I mean would take too long.) It may be a function of the “lack of momentum” (my phrase). When one attends a church (or its functional equivalent) with some regularity one can permit oneself to be carried along by the rituals and the belief-reinforcing behavior of others. When I was an agnostic, there was very little of that even from the similarly situated. Even now, I probably reflect on religious qustions more than most, if only out of respect for the second commandment.
September 28, 2010, 5:55 pmOTOH I got all 15 questions right on the quiz. Maybe I had extra karma (or whatever) because I am currently reading Davidson’s biography of Maimonides, whose Guide for the Perplexed I read as an undergrad almost 30 years ago.
Anthony says:
This, however, still leaves open the question of why most people don’t make more of an effort to determine whether this kind of ecumenical spirituality is actually true.
How are they expected to do that? There’s a shortage of direct evidence, and the vague spiritualist view implicitly rejects religious authority, so what’s left as a viable means of investigation? (Note: I am personally an atheist).
As a side point, I suspect the reason why atheists scored high is that they classified atheists and agnostics as distinct from people who are merely nonreligious.
September 28, 2010, 5:57 pmD.O. says:
What is the American public, when taken as average of total population, knowledgeable of? Baseball?
September 28, 2010, 5:58 pmI would hazard a guess that in religion, like in politics and other complicated and somewhat abstract spheres, people defer to the knowledge and good judgment of others they respect. In politics, it might be your party, neighbors, activists etc. In religion, definitely priests of all stripes.
Blue says:
I just went and took the quiz. It’s interesting, but the questions really have nothing to do with rationality or irrationality in ignorance. The name of the preacher who started the Great Awakening, heck even Luther himself, are irrelevant to faith. Theological distinctions between Christian denominations are similiarly irrelevant.
For the vast majority of Americans, the question comes down to belief in a Judeo-Christian god. That’s not something that arises out of a rigorous weighing of the pros and cons of each religion in an attempt to determine The Truth. Rationality doesn’t enter into it–people either have faith and believe or do not and don’t. (Yes, there is a small cohort of people who have linked a rational line of argument to faith, the Aquinas and C.S. Lewis’ of the world. That’s not a normal pattern.)
September 28, 2010, 6:00 pmA. Criminal says:
None of the (popular religious) doctrines are “right” in any substantial way, hence faith, not knowledge.
September 28, 2010, 6:01 pmBen Ibach says:
“In the case of religion, theological knowledge has little utility for everyday life”
Oh? I’d say knowing who Martin Luther is will not influence your everyday life, but knowing that Jesus taught his followers to “turn the other cheek” could have quite a bit of influence.
There’s a difference between knowing trivia and knowing principles, so the measure of utility will depend on what you consider to be theological knowledge.
September 28, 2010, 6:03 pmByomtov says:
If people sincerely believed that their eternal fates hinged on their knowledge of religion, their ignorance wouldn’t be rational. If you could save your soul with 40 hours of your time, you’d be mad to watch t.v. instead.
But this is true only of one’s own religion. If a devout Roman Catholic believes that her fate hinges on knowledge of and adherence to Catholic doctrine, then she would be wise to learn as much as possible about it. But there would be no incentive to learn about Judaism or Buddhism. Those faiths would be irrelevant to her salvation.
And even some of the questions asked don’t seem to bear on issues of salvation. Do Protestants think that salvation depends on knowing the history of Protestantism? If not, what difference does it make who Martin Luther was?
September 28, 2010, 6:07 pmMark Horning says:
As an Atheist this does not in any way surprise me, as most Atheists (at least in the US) are Intentional Atheists. We have examined religion, and found it wanting. Having examined it, we know more about it than those who have not.
(I got all 15 on the on-line quize, though I admit to guessing ont he lastone)
September 28, 2010, 6:09 pmD.T. says:
Well, John Wycliffe, a century earlier than Luther, is actually “The Morning Star of the Reformation”—especially for English and American Protestants. But he wasn’t one of Pew’s choices.
I took the survey earlier today. I’m not sure it tells much about anything.
D.T.
P.S. I only missed one of Pew’s online questions. Doesn’t say much about me either, except I thought Finney was with the First Awakening instead of the Second.
September 28, 2010, 6:11 pmMark Horning says:
Oh, and I didn’t see it broken out in the numbers, and it may not have even been in there, but I would bet tht the Neo-Pagans would score higher than the general populace as well.
September 28, 2010, 6:13 pmPierre Corneille says:
Agreed. I just took the 15 question quiz and as far as I could tell, the only question that might be related to one’s salvation (depending on one’s faith) is the one about trans-substantiation (the bread and wine becoming the body and blood). The other questions seemed, indeed, more like trivia (with a few exceptions….I suppose a Buddhist would need to know about Nirvana). It’s probably a good thing, for instance, to know that the Golden Rule was not one of the ten commandments, but it’s still the Golden Rule (if you’re a Christian) whether it’s part of the 10 commandments or not.
I consider myself an agnostic (although I “lean” toward Christian theism), and I do believe that people should in general be more knowledgeable about religion, especially about the faith they profess. (I believe similarly when it comes to professed atheists and agnostics…..not all avowed atheists or agnostics have really thought through their atheism/agnosticism).
September 28, 2010, 6:17 pmBlue says:
But the core theological knowledge to be a Christian is quite simple.
1) There was a historical figure named Jesus who was the Son of God.
2) He was crucified and resurrected.
3) He called on humanity to accept his sacrifice.
That’s it. Now, it also follows that because he was the incarnate Lord what he did in his life was an exemplar of what all believers should do–but that’s not the core of the faith.
September 28, 2010, 6:18 pmMDT says:
I took the online “short” quiz and got 15/15. I’m frankly surprised that the general-population scores weren’t higher, because most of the quiz was basically stuff I remember learning first in middle school social studies. We aren’t talking fine doctrinal distinctions here. (The one question that might have tripped up my middle-school-age self was the one about what day of the week the Jewish Sabbath begins.)
Ilya, a quibble:
After all, many great religious leaders (e.g. — Luther and Calvin) argued that your soul can only be saved if you embrace the one true faith.
Calvin, IIRC, argued that you were saved or damned before you were born, and there wasn’t anything to be done about it either way. It’s true that the saved would embrace the faith, but it is not embracing the faith that enacts the salvation.
September 28, 2010, 6:18 pmpete the elder says:
I was a religion major in college and knew all the answers to the quiz and the full test(here is the full quiz), but only 45% of americans know the 4 gospel authors? And that most people could not identify Martin Luther as the inspiration of the protestant reformation on a multiple choice question is even worse. It may be rational to not know these things, but I would think you would learn most of the answers to these quesions through history classes and the media, even if you were not paying that much attention.
A few of the questions that most people missed were relatively difficult: for instance the transubstasiation question, the great awakening question, and the majority religion of indonesia could easily have been missed in school and not seen on TV so I could understand not knowing those answers.
September 28, 2010, 6:21 pmArthur Kirkland says:
Sure, it would be easy to crow about agnostics’ superiority on religion’s home turf, but I will choose the high road and point out that many of my friends score surprisingly badly on Animal House trivia, so let’s just chalk it up to the majestic beauty of human imperfection.
September 28, 2010, 6:21 pmKen Arromdee says:
I wouldn’t count the communion question. Imagine a tribe somewhere which claims to believe that the Earth is literally flat, but when pressed will then explain that the Earth has all the characteristics of a sphere, and can be measured just like one, but it has a non-observable “essence” which makes it flat despite any observed properties.
Does that tribe think the Earth is flat or round? I haven’t the faintest idea, because their belief system isn’t coherent.
September 28, 2010, 6:22 pmtom952 says:
.
I think this is close. Some religious people have no motivation for further study of religion once they satisfy their inner need, and satisfaction of their inner need does not require a rational basis.
Down deep, hardly anyone actually believes in religion, as illustrated by Option #1. Consider the contradiction between the doctrine of an omniscient, omnipotent god, and the conclusion that the same god needs the assistance of a puny mortal [me] who just happens to be living on earth right now, to whip up votes for the GOP to pack the Supreme Court to outlaw abortion, for example. Such a god merely an invention to serve the ego of the believer. I have an important purpose! Further inquiry not required.
The rules of the universe cannot be broken; one cannot break the law of gravity or create or destroy matter or energy. If God existed and did not wish abortion to happen, it would not happen. If one actually believed that the supernatural god creator of heaven and earth existed and still controlled things, one could only retire to ponder why God allows abortion to occur, for example. On the other hand, why would anyone believe and worship a god that admittedly can’t actually do anything? So, to be religous and maintain faith, it is better not to think about it too much.
September 28, 2010, 6:27 pmBlue says:
It was an elicited response and ended after four guesses. I’ll bet a bunch of people named Paul as a Gospel.
Some interesting things in here…for instance, 71 percent knew Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
September 28, 2010, 6:30 pmMark Field says:
Your second sentence strikes me as very contestable by any number of historical religious leaders.
It’s more accurate to say that they argued for justification by faith alone, but it’s a pretty limited faith. There may be certain tenets of faith which are irrelevant for salvation.
September 28, 2010, 6:33 pmAnatid says:
The general population is not in the habit of remembering everything it learned in middle school. In middle school you probably also learned how to graph an equation, what the Noble Gasses are, that “chrono” means “time,” what the primary and secondary colors are, where China is on a map, and other basics. If you quizzed adult Americans on these 6th-8th grade concepts, I bet most would be able to answer less than half correctly.
It gets even worse when you expect adult high school graduates to remember information from high school, such as what a phospholipid bilayer is, or which war General Sherman fought in, or what a sine wave looks like, or how many Senators each state gets, or what onomatopoeia is, or how to say “Thank you” in another language.
If you are smart, and you naturally have good memory and do not forget things, and you paid attention in school, it can seem ridiculous that someone might not remember these things. If you are not as smart, and you have difficulty remembering things you do not care about, then to retain such knowledge would require active effort. In order to expend that effort, there must be a motivation to do so. And if ignorance is rational …
September 28, 2010, 6:34 pmSpocougar says:
14/15. The researchers looked at how often respondents attended church services; perhaps they should have looked at how long those services are. Mormons usually do a standard three hour block every Sunday. That’s probably quite a bit longer than your typical Catholic attending a Saturday evening mass and might account for the statistical difference.
September 28, 2010, 6:36 pmgecko says:
The old secular=smarter chestnut. I’m pretty sure American communists have higher iq scores and knowledge in certain areas than the general population. Doesn’t mean Marx was right. And the Mormons show than religiosity and education can go hand in hand. Perhaps its just the way most Americans approach religion that’s flawed not the core beliefs itself.
September 28, 2010, 6:37 pmBlue says:
We’re not talking about religious leaders–we’re talking about the religious life of normal people. For them, knowing Jesus was born in Bethelem is important. Transubstantiation…not so much.
September 28, 2010, 6:37 pmBaseballhead says:
I also got all 15, and I’m pretty sure it took me less than two minutes to take the test. I don’t think this quiz tells us much about America’s ignorance on religion so much as America’s ignorance in general.
Perhaps it’s me, but, relative to other countries, the general american population seems to be very bad at math, geography, and knowledge of other cultures. Perhaps we’ve been on top for so long, we never bothered to look around us?
September 28, 2010, 6:40 pmChris says:
I think that most people’s religious beliefs aren’t motivated by the desire to know the truth. I think that many people are religious because it satisfies their desire for a sense of purpose, satisfies their desire to be part of a group, and provides hope and comfort when life isn’t what you want it to be. None of those motivations require that your religious beliefs be true in order to satisfy those purposes.
Some religious people are very much in search of truth, and they often support science and are willing to adapt their beliefs based on what they learn (like the Jesuits), but I don’t think that’s most people. And, because they aren’t motivated by a search for the truth, most people never worry about whether they are in fact true, or even consider the logical consequences of their beliefs.
That, or most people are not rational.
September 28, 2010, 6:43 pmAnatid says:
Out of curiosity, why? Knowing what city Jesus was born in doesn’t have any impact on the contents of his teachings. So far as I can see, the only utility in knowing he was born in Bethlehem is that it adds a bit of flavor to Christmas stories. But then, I’m not Christian and wasn’t raised Christian … can anyone fill me in here?
September 28, 2010, 6:43 pmBlue says:
I should have phrased that differently. Bethlehem is important not as quotidian town but rather because Jesus’ birth as a man is a critical part of the Christian faith and being born in humble conditions in a strange location is part of that, literal, origin story.
September 28, 2010, 6:51 pmkrs says:
Reality TV
September 28, 2010, 6:54 pmAnatid says:
Okay, that makes sense. Thanks!
September 28, 2010, 6:57 pmMDT says:
baseballhead,
Perhaps it’s me, but, relative to other countries, the general american population seems to be very bad at math, geography, and knowledge of other cultures. Perhaps we’ve been on top for so long, we never bothered to look around us?
Other cultures? We don’t know squat anbout the “cultures” of large numbers of our neighbors. And I mean large numbers. I’d bet that more Americans know what Ramadan is than can accurately define the Immaculate Conception.
True story: In the same year that I was taking the middle-school social studies class I mentioned, the one in which I learned about Brahma and Siva and Vishnu, about Gautama Buddha and the Eightfold Path, a classmate passed out copies of a crossword he’d designed. It was your basic crossword, unthemed and not very hard, but I puzzled over “Billed himself the Son of Man,” and discovered the answer was supposed to be “Jesus” only when I’d filled in the vertical clues. It didn’t occur to the people who designed our World Religions Unit that there might be kids who knew bugger all about Christianity.
September 28, 2010, 6:58 pmChris Travers says:
The Church of England broke off before Martin Luther, right? Also there was a lot else going on at the time which suggests to me that Martin Luther did not arise in a vacuum but instead capitalized on a sea-change that was already occurring.
Also the idea that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ is perhaps not quite what it sounds like in Modern English. Aquinas was, if I understand his logic correctly, basically saying that the metaphorical transformation is essential and inward in nature. It isn’t that these become outwardly the blood and flesh of Christ but that they become inwardly as if they were. In other words, there is no spiritual difference between consuming the communion wafer and wine and the flesh and blood of Christ.
So I wonder at how well religious scholars would score on the test if they tried to answer the questions truthfully instead of just shooting for a high score.
Secondly, most people have no real interest in studying religion. They go to the churches where they were raised. Atheists who have done a search and decided that religion isn’t for them will of course score higher, but if most of the country was truly atheist, I bet they’d score even lower.
For those of us who a) seriously study religion, and b) do so seeking answers beyond authority, however, the questions often become very difficult, this becomes a fascinating topic. The major questions lead one to understand that things can’t be literally true, and yet the wisdom becomes deep and apparent.
However, salvation is overrated.
September 28, 2010, 6:59 pmChris Travers says:
Except that usually people don’t learn what the primary and secondary colors are with any accuracy. For example, which of these is a primary color and which is a secondary color: red, yellow
September 28, 2010, 7:03 pmMDT says:
Blue,
I should have phrased that differently. Bethlehem is important not as quotidian town but rather because Jesus’ birth as a man is a critical part of the Christian faith and being born in humble conditions in a strange location is part of that, literal, origin story.
Yes. I think part of the specificity in the Gospels is to emphasize the humility central to the Incarnation. Another is just to emphasize, via the particularities, that these are things that happened. I think Pontius Pilate appears in the Credo not because he’s specially evil in the Passion story (he isn’t), but because “this happened under such-and-such Roman Governor” is the sort of factual detail one could check.
September 28, 2010, 7:04 pmChris Travers says:
What about us polytheists who don’t believe in a singular, omniscient, omnipotent god, but rather believe in a multitude of wise and powerful gods, all of whom fall short of omniscience and omnipotence?
September 28, 2010, 7:06 pmMDT says:
Chris Travers,
The Church of England broke off before Martin Luther, right?
Um, no.
September 28, 2010, 7:07 pmChris Travers says:
And interestingly, it’s one detail where Tacitus and the Gospels disagree.
September 28, 2010, 7:07 pmBruce Hayden says:
Was there a correct answer as to whether Mormons are Christians?
My understanding is that the Roman Catholic church says no, the Mormons say yes, and a lot of the rest are in between. And, if you are ever in Salt Lake City during the Christmas season, you are likely to lean towards the Mormon side – I have never lived anywhere where Christmas carols, etc. were more omnipresent as when I lived there. Their Christian heritage is obviously now being emphasized these days, as the name on their churches has “The Church of Jesus Christ” in large letters, and “of the Latter Day Saints” in small letters.
I refused to answer that question, as well as the questions about age, race, religion, sex, income, education, and sexual orientation. And, I missed the questions on the Great Awakening and Maimonides.
September 28, 2010, 7:10 pmChris says:
I was going to say that it depends on whether you’re talking about additive or subtractive primaries, but in looking up the names for the two different types, it turns out that things may be even more complicated than that, so now I’m not sure. Damn knowledge and its tendency not to be simple!
From Wikipedia: “Any choice of primary colors is essentially arbitrary; for example, an early color photographic process, autochrome, typically used orange, green, and violet primaries.”
September 28, 2010, 7:13 pmAnatid says:
They are both primary colors. Red-yellow-blue. Cyan-magenta-yellow is for advanced students who are actually going to continue their studies of art or design.
September 28, 2010, 7:14 pmWalker says:
While I’m a fan of your political ignorance work, I think your arguments here are off base.
To show that a religious believer is irrational with respect to their faith, it must be shown that either 1) the religious belief itself is irrational or 2) the persons other beliefs or actions are not consistent with their religious beliefs.
Caplan tries to use #2, but then commits a strawman fallacy. Clearly if anyone believed that their eternal salvation was dependent on their religious knowledge, it would be irrational to not acquire more knowledge. But, to the best of my knowledge, no religion believes this. In Christian faiths, salvation turns on either faith alone (Protestants) or faith plus actions (Catholicism). Knowledge of transubstantiation or SCOTUS jurisprudence on the establishment clause is neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation.
A stronger argument would be that people are incorrectly self-identifying. People with the faith Christians teach is necessary for salvation would want to learn more about their own religion. A person who cannot name the Gospel writers might self-identify as Catholic, but their actual beliefs are not from an objective standpoint.
September 28, 2010, 7:15 pmBlue says:
Or I could be completely wrong!
September 28, 2010, 7:15 pmWalker says:
Would a person not having this knowledge be irrational or merely not of the faith they profess to be?
September 28, 2010, 7:18 pmChris Travers says:
After looking it up, it looks like they were pretty much exact contemporaries, but there doesn’t appear to be a connection between the English Reformation and the Lutheran one.
September 28, 2010, 7:19 pmMDT says:
Bruce Hayden,
IIRC, the question wasn’t whether Mormons were Christians, but whether Joseph Smith was a (pick one), with “Mormon” and “Christian” as two answers. Yes, not a well-designed question, but I think the intent was to see how many people knew who Joseph Smith was.
The Great Awakening featured in my own public school education as an illustration of how nasty religious people used to be. Apparently (to us) all there was to it was “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Having scared the pants (or skirts, as the case may be) off us with this, our teacher moved on rapidly to other topics.
Maimonides didn’t make the syllabus at all, which is practically criminal.
September 28, 2010, 7:20 pmBlue says:
Chris, I should have Googled before posting. I was thinking that Henry was a couple of decades before Luther, but that’s not the case.
September 28, 2010, 7:20 pmChris Travers says:
Well, not really. Or rather they are primary colors only on different scales (and secondary colors on eachothers scales).
The human eye only sees the additive primary colors: Red, blue, green. Red plus green makes yellow.
Now, many in some contexts are subtractive. If I add a red pigment to glass, this subtracts out the blue and green, so if I add blue and green pigmants (just to be safe) I get black. On the subtractive scale, the primary colors are cyan (white minus red), magenta (white minus green), and yellow (white minus blue). Mixing magenta and cyan gives us white minus red minus green, or blue.
Saying that red, blue, and yellow are primary colors is incorrect and it doesn’t really work in any context.
September 28, 2010, 7:23 pmChris says:
I think you’re missing his point. The point is not that people should learn about these things because they think their beliefs require them to know them, the point is that people should learn about these things because they should be concerned about whether their beliefs are true and, consequently, should have spent a significant amount of time examining the beliefs of and differences between different faiths.
September 28, 2010, 7:25 pmsomeotherdude says:
Most people understand their religion as part of their ethnic and national identity.
The fact that so many US Christians didn’t know the basic building blocks of their faith will support the idea, that their faith/religion is only valuable only in so much that it can sustain their ethno-nationalist identity.
########
It dragged up an old memory of preaching one evening maybe twenty years ago about what the Bible had to say about a Northern Ireland Protestant’s attitude and relationship with their Catholic neighbours. Whatever I said that evening, it struck a chord with a few young guys who afterwards asked me if I was a Protestant. I suggested that that depended what they meant by Protestant. What did they think a Protestant was I asked? Someone loyal to the Queen they replied? They were surprised when I told them that there were Protestants all over the world who had absolutely no allegiance to the Queen of the United Kingdom. When did Protestantism start I went on? The battle of the Boyne in 1690 they confidently responded. Again, people like Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and Knox were completely unknown to them.
These guys had absolutely no cognitive understanding of Protestantism but in every part of their being they were very clearly defined as Protestant in their own parochial form. They were wearing Glasgow Rangers football tops, they were in “kick the Pope” flute bands and were probably some of the guys who painted the pavements in their town red, white and blue. They were not what they had clearly thought through but what they had a chest thumping grá for; though as Northern Ireland Protestants they would have hated the utterance of an Irish word to describe it! There is a “peace” wall in Belfast between the divided communities of the Protestant Shankill and Catholic Falls roads and very few of the people on either side have come to hate their close neighbours on the other side by a well thought through in depth historical, religious or political analysis. They are divided not by what they think but what they have been shaped to love.
From:
http://stocki.typepad.com/soulsurmise/2010/07/desiring-the-kingdom-james-k-a-smith.html
September 28, 2010, 7:25 pmMDT says:
Chris Travers,
After looking it up, it looks like they were pretty much exact contemporaries, but there doesn’t appear to be a connection between the English Reformation and the Lutheran one.
Henry VIII and Luther may have been “pretty much exact contemporaries,” but Luther’s challenge to the Pope was twelve years before Henry’s. And there certainly was a “connection,” if only in the sense that by the time Henry was challening the Pope, the latter’s authority had been under fire for more than a decade already.
September 28, 2010, 7:28 pmBruce Hayden says:
Maybe the answer is that he chooses to allow us free will, and as a result, sin comes into the world. And, free will is what distinguishes us as human.
September 28, 2010, 7:31 pmMark Horning says:
They were essentially contemporanious:
Luther (1483-1556)
Henry VIII (1491-1547)
Luther however nailed the 95 Theses to the door of the church about 20 years before Henry Declared himself head of the Church of England.
September 28, 2010, 7:34 pmDuffy Pratt says:
I’m reminded of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ9myHhpS9s
September 28, 2010, 7:34 pmChris says:
If you believe in some version of heaven, do you have free will in heaven? If so, is there sin in heaven?
If not, I’ll have other questions.
September 28, 2010, 7:37 pmBruce Hayden says:
What is interesting though is that their brand of Northern Irish Protestantism likely was more influenced by Calvin and Knox than Henry VIII. Their allegiance to the crown came, arguably, much later, as a counter to the Catholic allegiance to the Pope. In other words, that allegiance was almost more political than religious.
September 28, 2010, 7:39 pmGina says:
From the Pew Survey on their sampling technique:
Sampling for Pew Religious Survey
“For the landline sample, half of the time interviewers asked to speak with the youngest adult male currently at home and the other half of the time asked to speak with the youngest adult female currently at home.
If no respondent of the initially requested gender was available, interviewers asked to speak with the youngest adult of the opposite gender who was currently at home. For the cell-phone sample, interviews were conducted with the person who answered the phone; interviewers verified that the person was an adult and could complete the call safely.
In addition to the landline and cell phone samples, the survey included oversamples of Jewish, Mormon, and atheist/agnostic respondents; oversampling was accomplished by recontacting
households identified by previous surveys as having a respondent belonging to one of these groups.
The recontacted sample received a special screening interview to verify respondent eligibility for this survey (i.e., that the respondent was Jewish, Mormon, atheist or agnostic). For
additional details, see Appendix A: Survey Methodology”
Where in the reports of this survey is the information that it was a sample of the youngest adults? and over-sampled for Jews, Mormons, and atheists?
This is very bad reporting and I will never read a Pew Report again without wondering how they biased their sampling. Bad sampling, bad survey, dishonest reporting. Disgraceful all around.
September 28, 2010, 7:40 pmDuffy Pratt says:
Indeed, with the editorial help of More, Henry VIII wrote a pamphlet called the Assertio which attacked Luther. Luther responded by publishing a response calling Henry “a pig, a dolt and a liar.” (I don’t know if truth was a defense to defamation in Henry’s courts, but it was probably a good idea for Luther to stay out of England after this.) And the Pope awarded Henry with the title “Defender of the Faith” for his attack on Luther. I think the Church may later have had some second thoughts about the award of this title.
September 28, 2010, 7:40 pmAnatid says:
But how much of this is appropriate to teach to 12-year-olds who likely haven’t yet studied the function of the eye or light-wave physics?
What level of education about color is it appropriate to expect the average adult member of the American public to have? Does everyone need to know the $64,000 answer or just the $10 answer?
September 28, 2010, 7:40 pmBruce Hayden says:
Maybe you need to nail down what heaven is first. But good question, never the less.
September 28, 2010, 7:43 pmDuffy Pratt says:
Assuming one believes in the Bible account (or in the variation put out in Milton’s fanfic), then there certainly can be sin in Heaven. Lucifer’s sin was pride, and it came before a fall. But suppose God is a decent gatekeeper for Heaven. (He’s got to be good at something, right?) Then its possible that there is no sin in heaven even though all the inhabitants have free will, simply because they all always choose to act without sin.
September 28, 2010, 7:48 pmChris says:
Well, I don’t believe in a God or a heaven, so I’m probably not best qualified to define either. I was hoping that you would supply your definition, at least as you best understand it.
I think that the idea of an afterlife in general is problematic though. Why would a God want to have people do two different lives rather than one? Why would a God make the first one kind of shitty and the second one pretty awesome (or perhaps, infinitely terrible?)? What kind of God would create these things, and these rules, and is that kind of God consistent with the God you believe in?
September 28, 2010, 7:49 pmD.O. says:
I don’t see anybody advancing this argument in the thread before, sorry if I didn’t pay much attention and repeat somebody. Theological questions are tough. People have debated them for millenia and still are in disagreement. And not the most stupid people either. So what’s the use for the person of average intelligence in trying to decide that question by educating themselves in all doctrinal niceties of all religions. If better minds did not find the answer, why should I?
September 28, 2010, 7:55 pmPerseus says:
Or for people with printers that use separate color ink cartridges.
September 28, 2010, 8:01 pmD.O. says:
Addendum: In the comment above, I’m trying to argue form the position of a “rational person” in (as I imagine it) Prof. Somin’s mind view. A person deciding whether to spend an afternoon watching TV or contemplating Eternity. I do not think that it is a good description of actual living people though. Whether it’s true or not and whether not corresponding to the model “rational person” implies any defect on public’s part are separate questions.
September 28, 2010, 8:02 pmWalker says:
You are proceeding from an unwritten premise that there is some chance that each of the religions is true. Clearly if grant this premise then the irrtaionality of religion follows. Rational behavior would consist of acquiring knowledge and continually updating your beliefs in a Bayesian fashion based on how well they square with the information. As Ilya notes, there might be some point at which you stop when the cost of research becomes less valuable then the knowledge gained.
But your choice of prior assumptions is not necessarily the correct one. In fact, it is biased in favor of atheism. Why couldn’t I select a prior of 100% chance Islam is correct, for example? A true believer in their faith would never concede to any sort of diffuse prior assumption. The think they are right.
Unless I’m missing something, showing that this assumption is irrational requires showing that the underlying religion itself is irrational. I don’t think you get anywhere by attacking the faith formation procss rather than the faith itself.
September 28, 2010, 8:02 pmleo marvin says:
I found it interesting on the online quiz that the only answer Evangelical Protestants got right at or near the highest rate was the unconstitutionality of public school prayer, while on the companion issue of the constitutionality of reading from the Bible as literature, they were back in the pack. It creates the impression that evangelical Christians are well informed on the subject of their oft-alleged persecution by the secular state, they mistakenly think it’s more sweeping than it is, and when it comes to knowing their actual religion, not so much. On actual Bible learning, the Mormons kicked everyone’s ass, even knowing more often than Jews that Moses led the exodus out of Egypt.
(FWIW, I suspect the above says more about leaders who hijacked Evangelical Christianity for political ends than it does about rank and file who take on faith what they’re told.)
September 28, 2010, 8:04 pmChris says:
I suppose that’s possible in theory, although it’s also possible in theory that there is no sin in life #1 if everyone chooses not to sin. I think even if God were a very strict gatekeeper, he would have trouble finding anyone who would be able to avoid sin for, say, 3 trillion years, much less the 3 trillion after that. As far as I’m concerned though, we’d all go insane by the 3 trillion year mark just from living that long.
There are probably as many definitions of the afterlife out there as there are definitions of gods, so I don’t want to assume too much, but it seems that there are a lot of problems with it. For instance, are we still made of matter? If not, why make us out of matter in life #1? If we are, how do we get around entropy in an infinite life? Why don’t our bodies age and decay like they do in life #1?
All the questions depend on the definition of the afterlife, but I don’t think the logistics of it are something to ignore, or something that get explored often.
September 28, 2010, 8:07 pmMDT says:
D.O.,
Theological questions are tough. People have debated them for millennia and still are in disagreement. And not the most stupid people either. So what’s the use for the person of average intelligence in trying to decide that question by educating themselves in all doctrinal niceties of all religions. If better minds did not find the answer, why should I?
Because it’s human nature to try to understand the existence of yourself and everything else? Because “better minds” than yours (by your own hypothesis) thought it worth doing? Because if it is true that we are created beings, there can’t be any question more urgent than what that means for us?
Hey, just riffing here (she said, trying to appear casual). But I’m reminded of a Chesterton essay about an unexpected bestseller titled The Great Problem Solved. Apparently the book was selling phenomenally well; bookstalls couldn’t keep it in stock; it went into a second printing; … and then the demand disappeared, because the reading public had finally twigged that it was a work of theology and not (as they had assumed) a detective story. Chesterton says, not unreasonably, that if the “Great Problem” really had been “Solved,” everyone would want to know all about it; but that works of popular theologizing being what they are, no one wanted to read far enough to see whether it set the Great Problem, let alone Solved it.
September 28, 2010, 8:09 pmBel says:
I dont know in the uSA but in Latin america most catholics think that reading the Bible is banned by Church. I heard a priest saying that. Agnostics know more because they were fanatics first and the swing go the other way
September 28, 2010, 8:22 pmAlbert Gedraitis says:
Ilya Somin’s engaging and invigorating post “Public Ignorance of Religious Knowledge,” Volokh Conspiracy (Sept28,2k10) draws me from my current vow of silence in regard to posting on other than my own blog.
If we go thru his blog-entry, for his sense of “knowledge,” one may feel stranded. Not all knowledge is propositional, nor theoretical, nor even analytical (in the empiricist sense). Pisteutic knowledge belongs as much to the seriously-mentally challenged as it does to Benedict and Dawkins. In fact, a pisteutic edge is present even when we wake in the morning, arising from bed and putting feet on the floor. We have faith the floor is there, and it will carry weit and one won’t bounce to the ceiling (if one pauses to reflect a moment we can discern a pre-theoretical knowledge of the lawfulness of the gravitational givens). Ilya seems to have made the pre-theoretical religious choice for rationalism in extrapolating from the Pew Survey to his own unexamined faith in Reason (old school rationalism in the West, whether empricist or more directly Cartesian) or rationality (new school rationalism embarrassed by the capital “R” in Reason, a reification and an assumption that there are some abstract laws out there or in here that are uncreated and that govern us like the law of gravity (physical), the laws of nutrition and reproduction (biotic), the laws of sensation (psychology) and sensibility (aesthetics), etc. I woud say nevertheless that members of our species usually do have analytic functioning at one’s command, so formulation-evasive lawfulness of analysis is yet another mode of knowing — so that we can know somewhat analytically, empirically, and theoretically entities qualified by a law order embracive of the physical, biotic, psychic, and aesthetic modes. Religious knowledge involves trusting the floor and the open window set in the ceiling — if your religion gives you access to the transcendent. Not all religions are equal in this respect.
In America, much religious knowledge comes from a pre-theoretical experience of metanoia, change of heart. This kind of religious knowledge (in my case, reformed Protestant Christian) has to do often enuff with an experience of (this kind of) faith which, depending on one’s cognitive and thinking capacities, motivates reflective thinking upon the experience itself. That is, the experience of knowing God in Jesus Messiah, as some Jews believed before and after His death and resurrection. Some did not. They too may have had the ceiling window open to Judaism’s offer of transcendence. Atheisms come in many varieties, some of which offer abortive semi-transcendence as in Freudian psychoanalysis (a contrary view may be found in James Olthuis’s The Beautiful Risk, a psychotherapeutic guide to the self, the with-others relationship, and the with-God relationship. The evangelizing forms of atheism in the West do not preach transcendence (tho atheists often attempt transcendence thru Reason or a closed-universe-with-no-window, these latter often content simply to acknowledge they lack faith to the extent they are aware of it in society and their immediate societal milieux).
We differ in ultimate values, but undoubtedly share many less than even penultimate values. We are all members of moral communities that that are not predetermined by the law for believing. Some atheists, Judaists, and Christians may share some morals and some mores. While others in each faith-community may have a contrary common moral stance in contrast to the hypothetical sharers mentioned in the previous sentence. The laws of faith-functioning (pisteutics) that in some take the form of open-window transcendence, or a form of abortive transcendence again are different from ethos-based moralities (governed by laws of the ethical mode of creational reaility).
Sorry, that I do go on at length here. Ilya started it all, I say smiling wryly.
In the above I am following in my own way the jurdical philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd (Encyclopedia of the Science of Law, 5-volumes, one already translated. The leading Christian philosopher of the Netherlands has also published a 3-volume work already published in full in English, a general philosopohical work, New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Or in Owlbirdbet Crossover spelling, thawt.
September 28, 2010, 8:25 pmChris Travers says:
Where do I find that account in the Bible?
September 28, 2010, 8:25 pmChris Travers says:
I had it figured out by 12. It doesn’t depend on actually understanding the types of cones in the eye or anything. Just knowing “all light is seen as red, blue, and green, and here are our subtractive colors you see in your print cartridges” is good enough.
September 28, 2010, 8:27 pmD.O. says:
If you think so, better application of your energy would be to study physics and biology. But even people who do think that those two subjects are the closest answer that there is to the “understand[ing of] the existence of yourself and everything else” do not usually spend their spare time on those questions, because they are hard and our abilities are limited.
They had their reasons (including the power of their minds) and I have mine. They might have believed rightly or wrongly that they can crack the problem and I don’t think I can.
Not really. You have to have a very special set of intellectual interests and priorities to bump that problem on top of the list. I guess the vast majority even of so called rational people would choose something completely different.
September 28, 2010, 8:29 pmBobC says:
I question your questioning. It seems you cherry-picked details and then concluded that their methodology was wrong? Why? Is there a consensus among professionals that this is unsound? Did they at any time act unprofessional or unethical? Is their method correct enough that their results are significant?
September 28, 2010, 8:29 pmresh says:
On the point of atheists and agnostics knowing more about religion…than Christians, well, quite true. I have long been on an A/A forum, and one thing that always intrigued me was exactly how much religion was both known and vigorously discussed by atheists and agnostics.
Indeed, not only is their knowledge more advanced and sophisticated, but so too the scrutiny and study of the theological and, yes, scriptural matters. If there is a god, he works in very strange ways.
September 28, 2010, 8:36 pmChris says:
Please, she would have to understand what she was talking about to answer your questions!
September 28, 2010, 8:36 pmmattski says:
That seems to be in tension with something else you recently wrote:
Because I don’t see how to reconcile “seeking answers beyond authority” with “finding meaning by recreating the old ways.”
September 28, 2010, 8:42 pmLC says:
The supposed “two options” simply don’t follow. There are degrees of fervency in faith: the most devout tend to be the more knowledgable .
(And the thing about mourning your loved ones even thought they’re in heaven has been addressed for centuries.)
September 28, 2010, 8:42 pmChris Travers says:
I think the issue is that religion, properly studied, doesn’t provide theological answers. Instead it provides puzzles and patterns, both of which are meaningful in ways that physics and biology are not. Neither physics nor biology will ever be able to tell us the nature of evil or even define such. Different religions provide different frameworks for addressing the topic of evil (Christianity tends to see it as an existentially positive value, i.e. something that exists in a cosmic way, while Norse Paganism tends to see it as an existentially negative value, i.e. something that is defined as a lack rather than a quantity). My understanding of Hinduism suggests that evil there too is seen as a lack rather than something that has independent existence but I could be wrong there.
The patterns which help give meaning to our lives are similarly orthogonal to science. What stories we value, we relive in our lives. I suppose one could find this same element by studying Classical mythology, etc. but then one is essentially finding patterns which were intended to be applied in the same way. Even modern literature tries to do the same but IMO is inferior to the conservative traditions (of mythology) in this area.
I personally think that belief is a spiritual trap which prevents one from fully experiencing religion. People think it’s the same thing as faith but its not. To be truly faithful we have to get over our beliefs.
September 28, 2010, 8:43 pmGina says:
The Pew Survey selected for the youngest male, then the youngest female. But it then oversampled for Jews, Mormons, atheists and agnostics. It offers no information whatsoever except statistically how much US teenagers don’t know about religion. That this knowledge is slight should not surprise anyone.
That it over-sampled for Jews, Mormons, atheists and agnostics explains the difference in scores.
This is a deeply deceptive and dishonest survey. The bias in the sampling could not have been accidental.
September 28, 2010, 8:45 pmChris says:
I would tell you to look at the demographics of the survey and see that you are wrong in your assumption and that the methods you’re decrying are simply means of removing the sampling bias of asking the person who first picks up the phone, but you wouldn’t listen anyway.
September 28, 2010, 9:02 pmBlue says:
Sampling youngest male/female but oversampling atheists/agnostics probably biases the ath/ag sample upwards in age…it would be interesting to see the cross tabs on that.
September 28, 2010, 9:05 pmMark Field says:
Sure, but the point is whether it should be. According to many past leaders, such doctrinal differences were very important to salvation.
September 28, 2010, 9:10 pmBob (from Ohio) says:
Frankly, this is nonsense.
Christians don’t choose between Christianity and those other religions. How many native born Americans who are not Indian choose to be Hindu?
Most religious believers follow the religion of their parents and their parents. They may stop being religious but will not just switch to an entire different religion.
Protestants may change sects but don’t suddenly decide being a Moslem is better. Often a change is motivated by social reasons as much as religious ones.
Moslems do not suddenly analyze things and become Jews instead, either.
I know you are not religious but you must know someone who is, I’d wager. You can’t tell by this post though. [Though you are not as ignorant as Kaplan. His ignorance concerning believers is grade A.] Why don’t you talk to some non-academics you know.
The bottom line is that knowledge of trivia may be useful but hardly essential to faith. It might help to look up the definition of “faith” for starters.
September 28, 2010, 9:11 pmElemenope says:
This is a deeply deceptive and dishonest survey. The bias in the sampling could not have been accidental.
Yeah. It’s clearly a conspiracy to stick it to orthodox and protestant Christians. The only question is, is it the atheists or the Jews who are behind it?
————-
On a more serious note, there is a strong argument to be made that it is irrational to believe in the beliefs that you were born into. The argument goes that for any religious context you were born into you could have just as easily born into any other which has an equal prior probability of being correct. Hence to not engage with knowledge regarding other religions is an irrational refusal to seek truth wherever it might reside.
September 28, 2010, 9:14 pmGina says:
My quote was from the Pew Survey protocol.
September 28, 2010, 9:21 pmsecond history says:
As someone who completely rejects religion (and is much happier for it), I find this discussion’s relationship to reality similar to discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
September 28, 2010, 9:26 pmgeokstr says:
The server was too busy to get to the survey, but the above question about Islam is patently irrelevant and ridiculous in light of the others cited, which all deal with arcane details of dogma, doctrine and religious history, which it might be expected that many would not know. But a geography question about Islam?
Did any of the questions ask whether Aisha was 6, 9 or 10 years old when Muhammed consummated their marriage? I’ll bet that most Americans would correctly answer a current events question on religion like – “The adherents of which Religion of Peace perpetrated 98%+++ of the 15,000+++ terrorist attacks in the last 10 years and are the aggressors in almost every one of the current wars raging worldwide?” (Including Indonesia, I might add.)
September 28, 2010, 9:40 pmRandy says:
People learn things that are important to them. If certain aspects of their religion are not terribly important, then they simply don’t feel the need to learn them, or if they do, retain that information longterm.
My people who quote scripture have no clue what’s in the Bible. Whenever someone quotes Leviticus’s prohibition on gay sex, I merely list other prohibitions and ask whether they follow all the edicts there. You never get a good response. When they raise the story of Sodom and Gommorah, and I ask them why God destroyed those cities. They say for sexual immorality, and so I merely point out the exact reason, which is inhospitality, and that silences them again.
In short, people just learn a few sound bites about the religion that makes them feel good, or helps them through a tough time. I think that’s a good thing.
My sister is a deeply religious person, talks to God many times a day, thinks that if she just prays hard enough, God will answer any prayer, no matter how reaching.
Yet whenever she quotes scripture to me, I always find something to flummox her. When she says that the muslims are evil and that 9/11 brought us closer to the end of the world, I said then they can’t possibly be evil. The end of the world is clearly planned out in the Bible, and so anyone who helps bring about the end of the world is doing God’s work. Therefore, the 9/11 doers should be thanked for helping us get closer to the 1000 year reign of Christ.
Naturally, she didn’t have any response.
Patty: ” And the Pope awarded Henry with the title “Defender of the Faith” for his attack on Luther. I think the Church may later have had some second thoughts about the award of this title.”
All British monarchs since then have passed the title on, and the present Queen carries it too. You would have thought that some Pope would have revoked the title, but I guess they’ve all been busy with other matters.
September 28, 2010, 9:42 pmgeokstr says:
And it’s likely that most of those that do also suddenly become dead shortly thereafter.
September 28, 2010, 9:43 pmtom952 says:
Then you would not have that contradiction Chris.
Bruce, I think that is just a supposition to help believers dodge the contradictions in their belief. Animals have free will. Since there is not a shred of proof that anyone ever had a life after death, I do not have a shred of confidence that my days on earth are a test by god to determine my reward in the next life. I think it is much more likely that the guy telling me I am a sinner, and offering salvation and passing the collection plate made it all up.
September 28, 2010, 9:44 pmDebrah says:
“…it’s possible that getting at religious truth is so difficult that most people rationally choose not to study it in depth on for the rational reason that they are unlikely to increase their chances of salvation very much even if they do.”
I think that’s a distinct possibility.
And in a peculiar way, this amorphous kind of “faith” buttresses the argument of atheists.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
” Some atheist writers (e.g. — Christopher Hitchens) contend that you are more likely to become a moral person if you reject religion altogether.”
Witnessing the potential destruction and damage that so often accompany religious zealotry, I find merit in Hitchens’ sentiment.
Why can’t the religious simply live their beliefs instead of proselytizing, weaving them into every aspect of daily existence, and constantly putting them on exhibition?
September 28, 2010, 9:48 pmAnatid says:
I am uncertain of the extent to which you could defend that claim.
September 28, 2010, 9:49 pmRicardo says:
No, it oversampled these groups because they are tiny in the U.S. Jews are less than 2% of the U.S. population. If you survey 1,000 people at random, on average you will only have 20 Jews in your sample and so any group averages will have a huge confidence interval on them. If you want to break it down further into Orthodox v. Reform or Northeast Jews v. West Coast Jews, you won’t be able to.
Oversampling is a common technique in surveys where you want to cross-tabulate or do multi-variate regression analysis.
September 28, 2010, 9:49 pmRicardo says:
This is a strange statement in light of the enormous amount of missionary work that has been done — at considerable cost and effort to Christians living in the West — in order to convert non-Christians to Christians. A non-trivial number of Christians must have compared some other religion to Christianity and chose Christianity just as a non-trivial number of Catholics and mainline Protestants have decided over the years that the non-religious have the better arguments.
Of course, this is all written from a Western, Euro-centric perspective. It’s true that outside the West religion is pretty closely tied up with ethnicity just as it also is in the former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. But then these places are hardly models of what religious belief should be.
September 28, 2010, 9:56 pmSarcastro says:
Ah, geokstr. Truly a public service. This thread was bordering on getting too informative for the internets anyway – 10 minutes of hate about
September 28, 2010, 10:06 pmliberalsObamaMuslims will be much more fruitful!Dave Ruddell says:
Youngest adult male or female. Teenagers would not be included (I don’t count 18 and 19 year olds as teenagers, since they are adults). You should read your own posts.
September 28, 2010, 10:07 pmgecko says:
Its no longer a contradiction if the explanation is plausible.
Beware The Society of Secretly Atheist Priests and Collection Plate Handlers.
September 28, 2010, 10:09 pmgeokstr says:
Not doing anything from the right that you don’t constantly do from the left. Hate it when ridicule is used by us on you, non?
September 28, 2010, 10:22 pmGina says:
I emailed Pew that I had questioned their sampling in a comment to Volokh.
They are now offline. No connection of course.
September 28, 2010, 10:24 pmEvan says:
It’s alluded to in Isaiah 14:12-16 and Revelation 12:3-9.
According to the Bible, God didn’t create things this way. Rather,
See Genesis 3 and Romans 8:19-22.
September 28, 2010, 10:26 pmyguy says:
So having been born into a family in which the prevailing belief was that blacks and whites were equal, I’d have been showing rationality by joining the neo-Nazis?
September 28, 2010, 10:33 pmtom952 says:
Well, Anatid, I’ve observed dogs clearly deciding to cooperate or not cooperate during their interaction with a person. I’ve seen Chimps decide to throw poo at people and act with obvious forthought, purpose, malice (and accuracy). I’ve observed birds engage in overt behavior to express displeasure and disdain toward a human being who disturbed their habitat. What in the world makes you think animals do not have free will?
September 28, 2010, 10:36 pmSarcastro says:
Yeah, I’m all about making off-topic attacks on people.
September 28, 2010, 10:46 pmGina says:
So is no one interested in whether this survey has any validity or reliability?
And if it has none, whether the sampling has created the results? Whether Pew has been bought/used to propagate survey results that denigrate Christians? And who and why would pay for that?
September 28, 2010, 10:47 pmDuffy Pratt says:
You have to patch it together. Relevant passages include:
Ezekiel 28:15-17
Isiah: 14:12
Revelation 12: 4-9, and 20:10
2 Peter 2:4
Jude 1:6
2 Corinthians 4:4
The text that cuts most strongly against this account, in my opinion, is in Job. This shows a much different relationship with the devil.
September 28, 2010, 10:50 pmElemenope says:
So having been born into a family in which the prevailing belief was that blacks and whites were equal, I’d have been showing rationality by joining the neo-Nazis?
I should have been more clear. It is irrational to prefer the beliefs you are born into simply because you are born into them. There are usually merit factors that make the eventual choice less arbitrary than the accidental factors of birth.
September 28, 2010, 10:53 pmDuffy Pratt says:
The better question is how one could support the claim that animals don’t have free will while maintaining that other people do. Or put it this way, what experiment can you do to determine whether something has free will or not? (Could quantum mechanics be explained by saying that subatomic particles have free will?)
September 28, 2010, 10:54 pmRicardo says:
From the perspective of most serious, believing Christians, the vast majority of the world’s population are highly irrational for preferring the beliefs they were born into rather than accepting Jesus as their savior. Romans 1 is quite clear — those who reject the teachings of Jesus are “without excuse.”
September 28, 2010, 11:07 pmDSW says:
Given that it’s a major news story across the the ‘net, the papers, the radio and most of the TV news shows, I’m guessing that their server is getting hammered and can’t accept any more connections.
(I’m not entirely sure WHY it’s a major news story, since it’s relatively unimportant)
September 28, 2010, 11:08 pmGina says:
Well, Pew is still offline. I’m not going to say that they care that I questioned their sampling on this survey. Or that they went offline on Tuesday night just ten minutes after I emailed them about my commenting on Volokh. But I will be interested to see whether Pew has anything further to say about this poll.
September 28, 2010, 11:12 pmyguy says:
Romans 1:20 says there is no excuse for sin. It says nothing about rejecting any teachings, unless you count instruction by the voice of conscience.
September 28, 2010, 11:23 pmRicardo says:
Sure it does, at least in the King James Version. Remember the context: St. Paul is a Jew who had a vision and becomes committed to spreading the Gospels to the heathens of Rome.
September 28, 2010, 11:32 pmElemenope says:
From the perspective of most serious, believing Christians, the vast majority of the world’s population are highly irrational for preferring the beliefs they were born into rather than accepting Jesus as their savior.
Oh, I’m aware. It’s just that the same logic also applies to them. The original disposition to believe a set of propositions stems primarily from having been taught that the belief is correct prior to exposure to any competitors; there is no exemption from this original position bias problem, and consequently a degraded ability for a person to make credible claims to truth having not explored other competing claims.
September 28, 2010, 11:56 pmMark Field says:
Hey, geokstr agreed with Arthur Frickin’ Kirkland in the Afghanistan thread. He’s trying to recover from the cognitive dissonance, so cut him some slack.
September 28, 2010, 11:58 pmpc says:
Indeed, it was most likely your email that caused Pew to go offline. Good detective work.
September 28, 2010, 11:58 pmChris Travers says:
The Isaiah passage is clearly a reference to another story, not an account itself. There is considerable debate as to what that passage refers to. Reading Revelation 12:3-9 to be a story of something other than a vision of the eschatology raises questions I think you’d be uncomfortable answering.
AFAICS, the source of the story is actually the Talmud, and then Milton’s rendition of it.
September 29, 2010, 12:04 amChris Travers says:
One of my interesting projects right now (strange, I know for a Norse Heathen) is translating Aelfric’s Homily to Job from Old English into Modern English (it’s mostly a translation exercise, but sometimes really interesting things are found in medieval religious literature).
September 29, 2010, 12:07 amyguy says:
No, it doesn’t. He is talking about conviction by conscience, which phenomenon was no less common before the Resurrection than after it.
The problem with your interpretation, especially in the present historical context, is that it acts as a snare to those who only know His teachings on an intellectual level and feel, or are made to feel, that if there is no peace in their lives it’s because they don’t study the Bible enough, or won’t swallow the interpretation of His teachings favored by their peer group, or whatever.
September 29, 2010, 12:07 amRicardo says:
I’m confused: are you saying it is mainstream Christian doctrine that people who do not accept Jesus as the Son of God and who do not believe in the Judeo-Christian God will still go to heaven? That was the point of my comment and Romans 1 is just one of several passages that hint at the fate that awaits those who do not accept the core beliefs of Christianity.
I should add that I am not religious so I have no dog in this fight.
September 29, 2010, 12:16 amAnatid says:
Canidae, psittiforms, corbidae, cetaceans, octopi, apes, and the other species that have demonstrated the capacity for tool-using, coordinated group behavior, deceit, and purposeful long-term planning certainly all have free will, at least in the same sense that humans do. This I am not arguing. (Whether humans have free will is another argument. Let us assume that there exists something in humans that we call free will, and we are discussing the extent to which it exists in other animals.)
These signs of sentience aren’t found in most animals, though. “Animals” includes not just chimps and dogs and parrots and dolphins, but also ants and shrimp and sea sponges and voles. Most animals do not have anything resembling theory of mind, which suggests that they may have little or no self-awareness, either. Many animals follow fixed action patterns from which they are utterly unable to deviate or improvise. On the most extreme level, consider insects which do not even have brains, only ganglia – instead of thinking of them as tiny pockets of self-awareness, it might be more useful to think of them as well-programmed machines.
We can trace this neural programming in a number of species. We can even manipulate it. Knock out the necessary circuit to perform a certain action sequence, and the animal can no longer choose to initiate that action, and will never innovate the action on its own. I forget which species it was, but I saw a study awhile ago in which scientists were able to implant an electrode into the brain/ganglion of a test animal and, with a computer, tell it where to move. They said it was like steering a car with a console in a racing video game.
The greater neocortical functions that are available to an animal, the more it is able to flexibly engage in different behaviors, and I would argue, the more free will it has.
September 29, 2010, 12:19 amReasoner says:
Most people are not cautious. Before it was the law 80% of people didn’t wear their seat belts. You might loose your soul if you don’t know enough about religion, but I see little reason to expect that people will be all that more cautious about losing their possibly non-existent afterlife than they are about an obviously existent regular life.
Most people probably give hell some thought. One obvious point is that if everyone who sins will go to hell, then there is nothing you can do to keep yourself out, so there is no need to worry about it. But if sinners can get into heaven, then there isn’t much to worry about either as long as you’re not too horrible of a person.
Which religion is the correct one is a non-issue because either the correct one is the one all your friends and family believe in or else it doesn’t matter which religion you believe in or else all your friends and family are going to go to hell. If god is going to let all your friends and family go to hell then you wouldn’t want to worship him anyway.
Remember I’m not presenting all the above as solid logic, I’m just saying that for people who don’t wear their seatbelt, the above logic is good enough and one needn’t worry about it much more. One can concentrate on seeking pleasure of various kinds, as most people do.
Personally, I like to think there is a purpose to the universe. And since I don’t know what that purpose is, the logical first task is to work towards figuring it out.
September 29, 2010, 12:26 amPaco McDooby says:
An alternative possibility is that people believe that because they don’t like the consequences of the alternatives.
September 29, 2010, 12:41 amyguy says:
I can’t speak for what “mainstream Christian doctrine” says. I’m just pointing out that doctrine, regardless of its correctness, is not the core of Christianity.
September 29, 2010, 12:43 amLitigator London says:
As a Muslim, I approach the question thus: (1) Paradise is for those who have submitted to the Almighty and sought to His will in accordance with their best understanding. (2) Given that the Almighty is infinitely just and infinitely merciful, he could not exclude from Paradise anyone who has sought to do
His will. Therefore a Jew or a Christians expressly named as one of the “people of the book” and who try to do the Creator’s will accordig to their revelation are certainly admissible. But one can go even further. Is an infinitely Just and Merciful Creator going to deprive the animist in the depths of the jungle who has never met a missionary of the chance of paradise? It is logically impossible to say no.
It seems to me therefore that more is asked of those who have been given the opportunity of more knowledge.
And on the question there is also the old joke of the Anglican and the Methodist at Oxford for an interfaith conference. They both have to take the train back to London. “We should hurry”, said the Methodist. “It’s OK”, says the Anglican consulting his watch, “We have plenty of time”. When they get to the station they see that the train is just pulling out. “Bother”, says the Anglican, “I had such faith in that watch”. And the Methodist replies: “Ah, but what is faith without good works?”.
September 29, 2010, 1:01 amsomeotherdude says:
“Judeo-Christian” is a recent concept developed by liberal Protestants and then appropriated by right-wing Protestants.
Up until the late 1990s conservative and liberal Jews and conservative reformed and Roman Catholic decried the use of the term. End Timers began to embrace the term in the 1970s. Around the 2nd Intifada and 9-11, “Judeo-Christian” has become synonymous with Western/European/WHITE.
I challenge any of you to find literature or classes in Europe or the United States about “The Judeo-Christian” tradition. Prior to the 1970s.
Any conservative/orthodox Christian and Jew, would remind you that you are either a Christian or a Jew, you can’t be both…unless your some liberal.
Coen, Arthur A. (1971). The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition and Other Dissenting Essays, New York: Schoken Books.
Grossman, Marshall. (1989). “The Violence of the Hyphen in Judeo-Christian” In Social Text, pp. 115-122.
Hartmann, Douglas, Xuefeng Zhang and William Wischstadt. (2005). “One (Multicultural) Nation Under God? Changing Uses and Meanings of the Term ‘Judeo-Christian’ in the American Media” In Journal of Media and Religion, pp. 207-234.
Moore, Deborah Dash. (1998). “Jewish GIs and the Creation of the Judeo-Christian Tradition” In Religion and American Culture, pp. 31-53.
Silk, Mark. (1984). “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America” In American Quarterly, pp. 65-85.
September 29, 2010, 1:08 amDuffy Pratt says:
The purpose of the universe is to fool you into thinking that it has a purpose.
September 29, 2010, 1:40 amD.R.M. says:
Matthew 25:31-46 is pretty clear. The people who inherit the kingdom are the ones with good works, and the people who go to hell are the ones without good works. The sheep and the goats are not separated on the basis of faith, nor interrogated as to their beliefs; they are judged on their actions.
I would suggest that it is more sensible for one who claims to be a follower of Christ to strain the words of Paul to make them conform to the words of Christ, than to strain at the words of Christ to make them conform to the words of Paul.
September 29, 2010, 2:15 amJoshL says:
Given the number of comments here, I’m amazed that no one has noted that a great many scholars suggest Nazareth as a much more likely birthplace for Jesus than Bethlehem.
September 29, 2010, 2:16 amJustthisguy says:
What’s worse is other folks assuming that I know nothing of their religion. For instance, we were working on a house which had a mezuzah on the door frame. I pointed this out to the owner, an Orthodox Jew, and he vehemently told me to leave it alone, as if I did not know what it was. I attended Methodist Sunday School for years when a kid, and I most assuredly did know exactly what it was.
Owhell, may the Lord watch over us while we are absent from one another.
September 29, 2010, 2:20 amLHB says:
I found my religious faith as a Catholic to have a much smaller impact on my life for the better when I was more concerned about dogmatic precision than with trying to incorporate the faith of my childhood into my life. Back then it just seemed so “right,” as it does once again.
I’m not arguing in favor of ignorance about one’s faith; I’m rather suggesting that it’s possible to “overthink” religion at the expense of fully incorporating it into one’s life. Oddly enough, acceptance of the more abstruse principles of my faith comes much easier the less I engage in argument with myself or others over those principles.
Insofar as I “evangelize,” it consists mainly of trying to “be” a certain way in the world. If anyone wants what they think that I have, I’m always happy to try to explain where I think it can be found. If not, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody “reasoned” into changing their faith (or lack thereof) unless they already decided to let it go in the first place.
Obsessing over infallibility at the expense of charity simply doesn’t work for me.
September 29, 2010, 2:32 amJustthisguy says:
P.s. I mind Robert E. Lee’s apology to his Jewish troops, in the last desperate days just before the end, that he could not give them leave for Yom Kippur, the situation being so desperate. His custom had been to give them leave for that.
September 29, 2010, 2:33 amfooburger says:
Churches would hardly be doing their job if their followers knew as much about other religions of the world as an atheist.
I’d guess that part of being an honest atheist would be examining the various religions and finding them all bunk.
Whereas for a believer in a faith, xianity being one of them, there’s not much need to look farther.
There’s also not that much need for a xian to be all that aware of biblical contents. Books, bible included, are a relatively new thing enabled by our good friend Gutenberg, among others. Certainly xians before widespread literacy were xian, right? Most xian’s I have met have a particular story about how they came to be xian. Sure, we can analyze such a personal thing for psychological or social pressures, but what’s the point? To prove the unbeliever better in some way than the believer? Wow, you made your saving throw versus religion … congratulations.
In many religions, adaptability is coded into the religion in the form of acknowledging a human structure (such as the catholic church) that will be divinely guided to lead the faithful. That itself, downplays the importance of religious texts.
September 29, 2010, 3:24 amAlex S. says:
It’s interesting. And I wouldn’t care much one way or another how much people know about the details and history of their own religion compared to other religions if so many “average people” would simply stop telling me how I have to behave based on their beliefs.
September 29, 2010, 4:43 amSimon K says:
The problem with salvation by faith: is faith assent to particular doctrines, or an attitude of the heart? Most Christians I think would answer it is an attitude of the heart more than assent to particular doctrines. And yet, I think they would also insist a certain amount of assent to particular doctrines is also necessary – otherwise the being ones heart is directed towards becomes a different being. But agreement on 100% of all doctrines is not required, just sufficient agreement to certain core doctrines. While this all sounds nice in theory, the problem in practice is that no one can agree on precisely what’s core and what’s non-core, nor whether certain non-mainstream interpretations of some of those core doctrines stray too far from orthodoxy.
It’s one thing to say “Jesus is the Son of God”. But what does this actually mean? There is a mainstream interpretation (Chalcedonian Trinitarian orthodoxy), but many other interpretations too. Do these other interpretations stray too far from the core belief to be valid Christianity (and saving faith)? Can Arianism be a saving faith? Semi-Arianism? Mormonism? Oneness Pentecostalism? People don’t agree on that.
So, even if saving faith is not primarily about having the right theological beliefs, one would think they would be concerned to have the right theological beliefs, in case their theological beliefs were too wrong for their faith to actually be saving. It seems to me therefore that Christian believers, who believe in salvation by faith, should be very concerned to make sure their theological beliefs are right, or else their salvation may be insecure. So maybe for Protestant Christians at least, ignorance about Christian theology is not rational.
September 29, 2010, 4:45 amSimon K says:
I’m more a liberal than a conservative, so I think God would want me to help the Democrats pack the Supreme Court with liberal justices who favour a constitutional right to same-sex marriage :)
But I think a useful distinction (I think it originally comes from some versions of Protestant theology) is the idea that God has two wills — a revealed will, and a will of decrees. With her revealed will, God tells people not to murder. With her decretal will, she makes them do it. So for me, there is no contradiction with God wanting me to fight for same-sex marriage, even while God makes conservatives oppose it.
I think God creates both good and evil; but she creates good as an end in itself, but evil as a mere means to an end. How is evil necessary for good? Well, evil is not necessary for good in general. One can conceive of a world filled with people, where there is never any starvation, disease, cancer, war, genocide, rape, murder, tyranny and so forth. God could have created such a world (and maybe she even has, but if she has, it is another world from this one.) But she could not have created this world, with these particular people, and the particular goods those people know, without those things. A world without evil is a world without you and me and everyone we love. So God creates evil, because she loves us, not just as abstract human beings, but as particular individuals, and as particular individuals we cannot exist apart from this particular world, as overflowing with evil as it is. But in God’s estimation, her love for us outweighs the evil necessary for our existence — to her, we are worth it, each and every one of us, even if we don’t feel that way ourselves.
But I also think, that God is slowly moving the world in a direction of more and more good and less and less evil. Progress is slow, and we are far off the destination, but I believe we will one day get there (in the escathon). Thus, if I do what I think is right, I am serving God’s will for the end, even if God’s will for the now is to frustrate that end (yes, but not yet.)
I don’t want to do good because God will reward me. I am a universalist, I believe that in the end everyone is saved, whatever their works, whatever their faith. Even Hitler goes to heaven in the end — although he may well have a few million years in hell before that — but I think hell is for people who commit seriously wrong acts like murder or rape, not for people with quotidian foibles. So I don’t want to obey God’s (revealed) will out of hope for reward or fear of punishment. I just do it because I believe it is right, and in doing so am becoming (ever so slightly) more like God herself.
September 29, 2010, 5:28 amSimon K says:
I have three responses:
1) No one can break the laws of physics, because one can never observe the laws of physics being broken. An observation that appears to “break” a law of physics, is not evidence that the laws of physics are being broken, but simply evidence that they are different from what one thought they were.
2) Given the non-deterministic nature of the known laws of physics (whether due to quantum mechanics, or classical statistical mechanics), the laws of physics permit absolutely everything, they merely assign some events vanishingly small probabilities. But, if the universe is large enough in spatiotemporal extent, then almost surely even these vanishingly small probabilities occur somewhere, even many times. And in an infinite universe, any event of non-zero probability, no matter how small that probability is, will almost surely occur an infinite number of times. So, if the universe is infinite, someone somewhere somewhen is about to live through the events of the Left Behind Trilogy — and whose to say that someone couldn’t be me?
3) The law of physics are inventions of the human mind. They are just patterns humans are capable of observing. There are other patterns which exist but are beyond our ability to comprehend — therefore we do not call those patterns laws of physics. Consider, that whatever actually happens in a universe (containing finite information) can be described by a finite string. There is a shortest possible program whose output is that string. The length of that program is the Kolmogorov complexity of the universe. In one sense that program is the ultimate law of physics, the most perfect and concise and all-encompassing law of physics possible. In another sense, we would never call that program a physical law, because clearly we can never know what that program is. So physical laws, rather than ultimate properties of the universe itself, are a product of the meeting of an essentially unfathomable universe with a very finite human mind.
September 29, 2010, 5:36 amyankee says:
Mormon atheist Jews, apparently. It seems going a bit far to say that the results “denigrate Christians” when they denigrate every demographic group. I’m less surprised by the relative levels of knowledge than the absolute level, though Americans’ knowledge of religion is still light-years ahead of their understanding of the federal budget.
September 29, 2010, 5:46 amSimon K says:
I have my answers, which I think are reasonable, although they are very different from most religious people’s: God, loving individual particular persons, has to create evil in order for those particular persons to exist. To compensate for some people having awful lives, and others brilliant ones, God creates many parallel universes, in universe 1 person A has a brilliant life and person B has a horrible life, in universe 2 person A has a horrible life and person B a brilliant one. These universes are branching, so that one person can exist (in different versions) in different universes. Heaven is actually a process in which those from the poorer universes are granted knowledge of the lives of their counterparts in the more brilliant universe so perfect that they near forget they are not (any more) that person. Hell is simply being exposed to the subjective experiences of those you have murdered/tortured/raped being so murdered/tortured/raped as if they were your own experiences. After heaven/hell, God convinces all souls to submit to reuniting, so all the souls merge together, and then merge into God. Then time is circular, and God willingly divides herself and empties herself of divinity to become the many universes once more. So we used to be God and will be God once more; in fact, we used to be each other and will be each other once more. I used to be you and you used to be me; I will be you and you will be me. And God does this because she enjoys it.
Yes, its all really out there, but I think it holds up better to the kind of objections Chris is making than e.g. traditional Christian belief.
September 29, 2010, 6:03 amMike Twain says:
As to the odd suggestion that it makes no sense for people to cry at funerals I have two words:
“Jesus wept.”
September 29, 2010, 7:54 ammike says:
Is it any wonder that atheists, Jews and Mormons lead the pack? Atheists studied their asses off and figured out it was all BS. Jews, well, learning is like crack for them. And Mormons stay at church for 3 hours each Sunday, go back several times a week, and send all their boys off for 2 years to study and live like monks (quit knocking on my door, btw :).
However, I was a little surprised that Jehovah’s Witness or 7th day weren’t up there.
September 29, 2010, 8:11 amsomeotherdude says:
I’m sure a separate list for Orthodox Presbyterians would kick the “educational” asses of religion or sect. .
For better or for worse, it is the premier Protestant denomination on education, bar none.
September 29, 2010, 8:37 amRicardo says:
Zing! It would nice if there was an analogy here: that libertarians (“atheists”) knew more about the federal budget than liberals and hawkish conservatives (“believers”). Sadly, that is far from the case.
September 29, 2010, 8:47 amtom952 says:
Anatid, the assertion was that only humans have free will. My response is that free will is not unique to humans. I make no assertion about the mental abilities of all animals.
September 29, 2010, 8:57 amricky says:
Unsurprisingly the results seem to follow the general pattern of group IQ distribution, with a few anomalies.
September 29, 2010, 9:18 amDebrah says:
That’s a new and ingenious one.
ROTFLM-T’s-O !!!
September 29, 2010, 9:48 amMark Field says:
Under many views, quantum mechanics is deterministic.
September 29, 2010, 9:56 amMark Field says:
Huh? Lee surrendered in April. Yom Kippur is in September (roughly).
September 29, 2010, 9:58 amJaimeInTexas says:
I got the “nirvana question” wrong. I always think that it is a Hindu concept.
I am not surprised by the result.
Many interesting posts and questions.
It is not of primary importance where Jesus was born. In so far that he was born in Bethlehem, under the shadow of the Antonia, is a juxtaposition to earthly powers. Jesus, The Son of God, God in the flesh, in the line of King David, born in humble surroundings, barely noticed, and a true Israelite. The Antonia, symbol of power, symbol of Rome, where an Idumean would sit to rule Israel.
Maybe I will tackle the issue of whether there is or can be sin in heaven. The answer is no. Part of the answer is in the definition of heaven. The other part has to do with the nature of the “new” heaven and of those who are to inherit it.
September 29, 2010, 10:20 amruralcounsel says:
Why should anyone allow the factual history of the many established religions be any measure of whatever spirituality they themselves choose to believe/hold?
You don’t need knowledge of any official “faith” or theological doctrine to decide for yourself what you want to believe. What is this, a requirement to hold a religious union card? A “religion medallion” or license in order to practice?
Religion is self-defined. That this annoys the established religions is no surprise. They want everyone to buy their “brand”. This sounds like a trademark dispute!
September 29, 2010, 10:34 amDebrah says:
Could someone please define “heaven”.
I mean, in such a way that wouldn’t make even a preschooler blush.
Several years ago a good friend (brilliant, law professor, Princeton and Harvard-educated) was dying of cancer that had recurred after he thought he had beaten it.
I’d visit him periodically and we’d sit over lunch and have conversations about such things as religion and the “afterlife”.
He was Jewish but not an overly enthusiastic one. A scholar in the truest sense of the word. Although a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal, he fought his colleagues constantly in order to keep academic standards from being compromised by diversity formulations du jour.
Knowing he was dying, he’d describe to me what his x-rays showed with the same matter-of-fact delivery of a tort lecture.
About the afterlife, he simply said……”This is it, baby. People who don’t do very much in this life console themselves with the idea that something grand is waiting for them in ‘the next one’, but this is it.”
September 29, 2010, 11:01 amtom952 says:
The examples I provided are examples of observations of principles of the behavior of matter and energy that have withstood challenges and thus are accepted as universal. If there is a creator, then these are the creator’s rules. There is no need of the threat of hell or damnation to coerce humans to comply, because the rules of the universe cannot be violated. These are rules worthy of attribution to god.
September 29, 2010, 11:27 ampoll geek says:
Some of the gap here probably reflects different education levels and other demographic differences. The full report says that gaps remain even after correcting for that, but some of the gaps shrink. Atheists, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants have different education levels. Overall, education is more closely correlated with doing well on this quiz than any other factor, including denomination.
Some of this is apparent even in the top level results, without education correction. Note that “atheist” and “agnostic” have much better scores than those who just say “nothing in particular” as their affiliation. I think that reflect the fact that college grads are more likely to use the terms atheists or agnostic, while non-college respondents are more likely to just say “nothing in particular,” even if they are in fact atheist or agnostic. If you asked them, “is there a god,” and offered yes/no/not sure, and then slotted them into the atheist/agnostic groups accordingly, the merged numbers would dilute much of the higher performance listed.
Also, look at the major gap between white and black Protestants, and between white and Hispanic Catholics. Again, that’s mostly about demographics and education, not about the religion per se.
I suspect that even the corrections for education do not fully correct, as asking about college level — 2 yr, 4yr, post-grad, etc. — does not fully capture the differences between types of education at different colleges.
If you gather a bunch of upper-middle-class alumni of the same school — whether Yale or Midwestern State U. or whatever — you probably won’t get much of a religion-based gap at all.
September 29, 2010, 11:28 amLHB says:
Even Jesus Christ only used very loose similes to “describe” Heaven. I don’t think about it that much, because I always thought that if you could imagine and clearly describe it, then it wouldn’t be much of a Heaven.
If one could define Heaven in some descriptive terms that reflect the most perfect state of being that the human imagination is capable of imagining, the best that could happen to you would be the best that you could imagine. I always hoped for something better than that.
September 29, 2010, 11:30 amAaron says:
The $10 answer isn’t really an answer at all though. It’s just vocabulary — we classify these colors this way, these others the other way. Without explaining why or how these classifications matter, there’s no point in teaching the classification at all.
September 29, 2010, 11:38 amChris Travers says:
The words usually translated into English as “faith” from both Greek and Hebrew in the Bible have less to do with belief and more to do with actions. Think “is your marriage faithful” instead of “do you believe?” A closer English equivalent would be “troth.”
September 29, 2010, 11:45 amMike P Wagner says:
As a convert to Judaism, I have to agree with that.
That is not unrelated to our history – for at least a millennium, the exemplar of what it was to be a (male) Jew was a Talmud scholar. If you were a man, you wanted to be a Talmud scholar, or have you daughter marry a Talmud scholar, and support him.
That was quite a change from my upbringing, where I suspected that most of the (non-Jesuit) priests I knew wanted to be the padre in a quaint Irish village – the only literate man surrounded by simple souls. The Jesuits were, of course,, very different.
In general, lack of knowledge of specific doctrinal issues among Christian denominations has a long history. I don’t this ignorance is particularly American or related to educational changes in the 20th century.
In a history class that included the Reformation, we looked at some records collected by the German government about religious knowledge about the doctrinal differences between Protestants and Catholics. The surveys – as I recall – were taken in the mid 17th century, though they may have been earlier. As this was Germany, the forms were properly filed away.
Some survived, and make for interesting reading. The surveyors were instructed to try an obtain honest answers, and it was very clear that the average person had no clue about the differences between Catholic and Protestant doctrine. Note that at the time of these surveys, Europe had been in a paroxysm of violence for almost a century, nominally over these very doctrinal differences!
My own anecdotal evidence supports the report you cited. I frequently teach a class on “Fundamentals of Judaism” at local churches. The second time I was asked to teach the class, it was for a high school group at a large Southern Baptist church.
In the class, I explain the Jewish ritual elements reflected (and rejected) in some of Jesus’s miracles. I asked the youth pastor if the kids would be biblically literate. “Of course,” was his answer.
I talked a little about tsit-tsit (the knots at the four corners of a talis, the ritual “prayer shawl”). These are referred to in the miracle of the hemorrhaging woman – when she touches the “hem” of Jesus’s garment, the word “hem” almost certainly means the tsit-tsit. I prompted for someone to remind the class about the miracle of the hemorrhaging woman. Utter silence. I prompt about a woman who is cured who touches something Jesus was wearing. Utter silence – including the youth pastors, who were finally red in the face.
Through the course of the class, it was pretty clear that no one present (except for me) knew any of the miracles. It was not that the kids (and apparently the teachers) did not understand the halachic elements of miracles, it was that the apparently didn’t know the miracles themselves. I finally stopped prompting for miracles, and just gave chapter and verse numbers and asked for readers.
I was actually a little dumbfounded. I would have guessed that knowledge of the miracles and teachings of Jesus would have been important – this was a church that had a statement of faith on their website, and lots to say about biblical inerrancy, divine inspiration, etc.
As a former Catholic, I had heard about the “sola scriptura” my whole life. But these folks didn’t know anything about the miracles – which were to my mind the most colorful and easiest to remember portions of the New Testament.
September 29, 2010, 11:47 amAaron says:
AKA the Lucifer or Satan of the Reformation?
September 29, 2010, 11:52 amCan't find a good name says:
The exact question asked in the survey was “Where, according to the Bible, was Jesus born?” The choices (presented in a randomized order) were Bethlehem, Jericho, Jerusalem, and Nazareth. Regardless of whethere Jesus was actually born in Bethlehem, the “according to the Bible” qualification makes Bethlehem the correct answer to this question.
September 29, 2010, 11:56 amChris Travers says:
The problem in my view is that Christianity (and to a lesser extent Islam) makes belief a religious requirement. Not all religions are this way. For example, the Hopi very carefully cultivate such a belief in their children only to intentionally and spectacularly destroy it. Judaism isn’t about what you believe, nor is Hinduism, nor is any other traditional religion. Ramakrishna (one of the major figures in the development of modern Hinduism) taught that there was no essential difference between Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam as far as spiritual experience and knowledge of the divine went.
If a religion centers on what one believes about historical events or theological questions, this is a problem in my view because it abridges the human quest for understanding. Christianity is the prime example here though Islam to a lesser extent falls for the same trap (you can’t be a Muslim and be a polytheist for example, but you can be a Hindu and be an atheist or a monotheist without contradiction). Instead most religions through most of human experience have been centered on customs and actions. In ancient Athens, it didn’t matter whether you thought that Athena was a physical goddess in a celestial city, a numenous presence, or just a useful social concept. What mattered was whether you participated in the sacrifices. Atheos referred to those who, whatever they believed, did not participate in the practices. The same basically was true in Rome prior to the conversion, and elsewhere in Europe.
September 29, 2010, 11:56 amChris Travers says:
Now you get into territory of whether Jesus claims to be Satan in Revelation…..
September 29, 2010, 11:58 amCatholic guy says:
I assume that this poll, like most, simply asked people to self-identify their religion, and did not screen for “practicing” or “haven’t been there in 20 years.”
All religions and denominations have members with different degrees of involvement, or those who have left totally but still instinctively answer with the “how my parents raised me” answer. But this seems to have the greatest effect with Catholics. The US has so many ex-Catholics that it’s been said that “ex-Catholic,” if it counted as a denomination, would be bigger than most other groups.
This shows up in political polls all the time. Catholics are closely divided on presidential races if you go by mere self-identification. But if you ask about attendance — weekly, 1-2 times a month, monthly, Christmas and Easter, or “haven’t been in 10-20 years” — then each level of tightening moves it farther right. That’s not to say that there aren’t millions of Catholic Democrats, but the 50-50 ends up 60-40 or more when it comes to still-practicing.
The same is true of issue opinions, especially on hot-button issues for the Church. Polls often trumpet that rank-and-file Catholics disagree with their own Church on abortion, etc., but much of that is often skewed by including anyone who says “Catholic.” Whittle it down to attendees, and the internal dissent shrinks rapidly.
The Church does not make this point often, perhaps because it is happier to have people’s perception shaped by the inflated numbers of raw numbers of Catholics, and percentage of Catholics in America. Correcting the internal skews by urging pollsters to screen would mean that more people realize the Church is not as big in the U.S. as it seems.
I suspect that this issue, which affects opinion surveys, also skews the knowledge quiz. True, a lot of people in the pews might still get the communion question wrong, but I bet the scores improve dramatically if you screened out the ex-Catholics.
Again, that might affect everybody, but not as much. Or everybody but atheists, as ex-atheists who have become religious probably never self-identify as atheist.
September 29, 2010, 12:05 pmCan't find a good name says:
Actually, Pope Paul III revoked the title during Henry’s lifetime after Henry had broken with Rome (I would not be surprised if Henry just ignored the revocation but I can’t find the details at hand). The English Parliament re-granted the title to Henry and his successors in 1543.
September 29, 2010, 12:11 pmCan't find a good name says:
They didn’t screen for that, but they did ask about that in a separate question: “Aside from weddings and funerals, how often do you attend religious services… more than once a week, once a week, once or twice a month, a few times a year, seldom, or never?” So they do have that data for researchers, whether or not it appears in the main report.
September 29, 2010, 12:15 pmAnthony says:
I suspect it reflects the fact that someone who chooses a particular viewpoint will, on average, know more than someone who merely fell into it by default, and you probably only call yourself atheist or agnostic by informed choice. It would be interesting to get statistics on how recent converts compare to people born into the faith (actually, the same thing can be done with other topics; I think naturalized citizens on average know the constitution better than natural-born citizens).
September 29, 2010, 12:18 pmCan't find a good name says:
As Dave Ruddell mentioned, they asked for the youngest male adult or youngest female adult. As it turned out, 22% of the respondents were age 18 to 29, 35% were age 30 to 49, 25% were age 50 to 64, and 16% were age 65 or older. See page 16 of the PDF here.
September 29, 2010, 12:20 pmMark Horning says:
No. You have to oversample for Jews, Atheists, and any other low percentage subgroup in order to perform statistical analysis. If you call 500 people you get anough Christians to reduce your error bars to a couple percent, but you would still have about 20% error on the atheist answers because you only talked to 35 of them. (ok 35 +/- 5.9 of them) Thus you keep calling atheists untill you talk to about 100 of them to get a decent sample size.
It would be deceptive if they did the oposite and tried to draw conclusions from too small a sample size.
September 29, 2010, 12:26 pmCan't find a good name says:
The question was reasonably valid. “Christian” was not an answer choice offered for this question — they asked if Joseph Smith was Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Mormon, or Hindu.
September 29, 2010, 12:30 pmRicardo says:
That simply raises another question. It’s not as if most people going to college or grad school actually learn much of anything about different religions aside from those who specifically study religion. So I think any causal relationship between education and knowledge of religion can be dismissed pretty easily.
Instead, education would be proxying for intellectual curiosity. That still raises the question of why the people most curious about religion are those who do not practice it which is surely interesting in its own right.
In other words, I’m not sure what it means to “control for education” in this context. Education and religiosity are both outcome variables that may be linked to some underlying factor.
September 29, 2010, 12:41 pmMensreaJim says:
Everyone has pointed out already that few of these questions deal with doctrinal issues–and far fewer to an individual adherent’s doctrine– so the way it’s being spun is (of course) disingenuous.
I had a 50/50 guess on question 15, but that doesn’t affect my understanding of my own religion…and neither would 10+ of the other questions.
As the responder above me said, “Christian” was not a choice for Joseph Smith’s religion, “Catholic” was. I think it’s funny people jumped right into that argument instead of reading the answers. More funny, to me, is that 10% of Mormons missed that question (10% of my income allows me to find that funny).
September 29, 2010, 12:58 pmAnatid says:
You said “Animals have free will.”
I said “I do not think all animals have free will.”
You said “Dogs and chimps have free will, so animals have free will.”
I said “Dog and chimps have free will, but ants and shrimp do not, so not all animals have free will.”
I think we agree – I was just originally criticizing your use of the word “animals” to refer to “highly developed, sentient/pseudosentient animals.” A lot of people make this mistake since we’re biased to think of mammals and birds when we think of animals, and not arthropods and cnidarians and platyhelminthes.
But how much else gets taught this way? How many kids can graph X2 + Y2 = R2 but are unable to conceptualize why this forms a circle? How many kids have dutifully calculated the approximate age of the earth from data on strontium-rubidium isotopes without really understanding why radioactive decay takes place? How many kids learn that Columbus sailed in 1492 but are unaware of the personal, social, political, and economic pressures that drove him to do so?
The problem is that understanding many concepts on a fundamental level can take years of meaningful education. For those who seek to learn and understand, this is no burden or loss. For those who don’t seek to understand, who could care less … well, we still expect them to have at least basic knowledge. I had a college roommate who didn’t get a joke that referred to the “1945 bucket of sunshine from the States” in Hiroshima. I doubt she ever would’ve understood the factors at play between Japan, the United States, and the other Pacific powers and states during that time period, but to be unaware that we dropped an atomic bomb on Japan during WWII is an unacceptable level of ignorance for an American.
I had one or two fantastic high school teachers who made sure we really understood our topic of study. The rest of high school was at the “isn’t really an answer at all” level of education, and true comprehension didn’t crop up until I returned to those topics in college.
The quiz on religions seems to be testing at the basic factual level, not the comprehensive. While I’d love for everyone to comprehend as well as to know, I’m not sure that’s a realistic dream.
September 29, 2010, 1:01 pmbbbeard says:
Ricardo answered your question at 9:49 pm. No one else is responding to your posts about sampling bias because we all understand this is how such surveys are conducted, and the method for unbiasing deliberately oversampled subsamples is quite standard. Get over it.
September 29, 2010, 1:05 pmditdatdude says:
What Americans Really Believe by Rodney Stark (pub. 2008) has a chapter on “credulity” that seems (to me at least) to be related to the issue of “ignorance” and whether believers are “rational.”
Credulity is related to the species of faith thought to be identified with believing without or in spite of the evidence, whereas saving “faith” and its requisite “knowledge” is available to people to whom “rationality” and the related ability to evaluate evidence may not, such as young children, the illiterate or those with mental disabilities.
In 2005 Baylor University created a survey about religious belief that included questions about Bigfoot, Atlantis, haunted places, UFOs, Loch Ness, astrology, palm reading and psychokinesis. An index to occult and paranormal belief was created from these questions and using quartiles of low, medium, medium-high and high to indicate strength of belief. One of the findings Stark points out is that educational level has little impact: 28% with just high school vs 23% of those with postgraduate degrees. Further, it is not religion generally that impacts credulity but conservative religion. Church attendance has a big negative effect: 31% of non church attendance vs 8% church attenders attending more that once a week. Church denomination also matters: 48% of Unitarians vs 14% of Assemblies of God. Those who identify themselves as theologically liberal score 40% compared to a 26% score for Americans in general for belief in the occult and paranormal. I don’t have the book and can’t find the quote but I believe the author says something like: attending a Sunday school of a conservative church has a greater negative impact on credulity than eight years of advanced education.
This book is available on Amazon and can be searched.
September 29, 2010, 1:06 pmMike P Wagner says:
I am not altogether sure that I agree that limiting the definition of “Catholic” would change the scores much.
I would expect that a few more of the “regular attenders” would get the transubstantiation question correct – but not a lot more.
On the other hand, if people who identify as Catholic but don’t attend regularly are more likely to have dabbled in other religions, perhaps they would answer more non-Catholic questions correctly.
Mike
September 29, 2010, 1:09 pmDebrah says:
That’s not good enough.
It reads like a fantasy or the way you see a person when you first fall in love before reality sets in.
Life is one huge ball of uncertainty.
Why do people invest so much in even grander uncertainty?
Let me say that I believe in a Higher Being and actually pray; however, I consider it more of a spiritual kind of ritual that is personal.
Most everyone would like to have the answers.
The fact that we don’t…..does absolutely nothing to weaken the arguments of atheists and agnostics…..with whom I agree on a multitude of things.
September 29, 2010, 1:27 pmALB says:
Al Mohler, who is one of the leading Southern Baptists in public speaking, says Mormons are not Christian. See his debate with Orson Scott Card at Beliefnet.
Similarly, Richard Land calls LDS as the fourth Abrahamic religion. See here.
September 29, 2010, 1:30 pmMDT says:
CFAGN,
The question was reasonably valid. “Christian” was not an answer choice offered for this question — they asked if Joseph Smith was Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Mormon, or Hindu.
Oh, dear; my bad. I had assumed that the earlier commenter who paraphrased the question as “Are Mormons Christian?” had had something to go on. I did remember that the question was about Joseph Smith rather than “Mormons,” but didn’t remember that “Christian” wasn’t even one of the choices. As it stands, absolutely it’s a valid question.
September 29, 2010, 1:33 pmAlessandra says:
Ahem…
In 1941, Martin Bormann, a close associate of Hitler said publicly “National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable”.[51] In 1942 he also declared in a confidential memo to Gauleiters that the Christian Churches ‘must absolutely and finally be broken.’ Thus it is evident that he believed Nazism, based as it was on a ‘scientific’ world-view, to be completely incompatible with Christianity.[52]
Debra: Why can’t the religious simply live their beliefs instead of proselytizing, weaving them into every aspect of daily existence, and constantly putting them on exhibition?
Given your usually very thoughtful comments on a variety of topics on VC, I imagine either someone did something recently that bothered you along the above lines or there is some other kind of explanation that is very related to personal experience.
Because when you think about it on a macro level, without even considering any religious precepts that push people to proselytize, it’s obvious that from a purely pragmatic level, proselytizing (in the sense of spreading the religion and subsequently potentially increasing membership) has enormous benefits, especially if the membership increase does happen.
Lastly, there is no democracy without proselytizing, the only difference is that a different vocabulary is used to describe the “proselytizing” if the ideology being proselytized does not include a god, as compared to one which does. Individuals and groups will always try to use all manner of actions to convince others of the views and values they believe to be cardinal.
September 29, 2010, 1:34 pmMDT says:
I think it would have been amusing, and instructive, if there’d been a question about the Immaculate Conception. Granted that a large percentage even of Catholics would get it wrong; but practically everyone else is virtually certain to get it wrong.
September 29, 2010, 1:37 pmbbbeard says:
The notion that good works in the absence of faith can provide salvation is called the “Pelagian Heresy”.
Only a couple of commenters here have noted that Catholicism, in contrast to Protestantism, de-emphasizes the role of scripture relative to the doctrines of the Church. It may make sense to a Protestant to quote a single verse from the Bible and believe it to be dispositive of a complex doctrinal question, but to a Catholic, not so much. The Church convenes large councils of clergy and theologians to argue these doctrinal points. The Council of Carthage in 418 condemned Pelagianism. If this makes no sense to you that the leaders of a body of believers can decide points of doctrine, it perhaps means that you aren’t aware of the biases that a largely Protestant culture (and upbringing?) have ingrained in you.
BTW In Buddhism, the “Three Jewels” are the Buddha [the enlightened being], the Dharma [the teachings], and the Sangha [the community of believers]. So, as in Catholicism, there is an allocated role in Buddhism for the evolving interpretation of doctrine according to the wider “church”.
September 29, 2010, 1:38 pmbbbeard says:
I agree the laws of physics are human mental constructs, but within that construct it is not true that “absolutely everything” is permissible. For example, 4-momentum is always conserved. Even in quantum field theory, when we compute the integral for a given Feynman diagram, we put in a 4-momentum-conserving delta function at every vertex. There is no “vanishingly small probability” that 4-momentum is not conserved — the “probability” is zero.
September 29, 2010, 1:50 pmDebrah says:
Yes, everything is, essentially, personal……even as people pretend to the contrary.
I can’t stand to be met with those whom I know to be dishonest, cowardly, and greedy as they cop a pious facade for public consumption.
I could just slap them and tell them to snap out of it.
Of course, I’m more candid by nature than the average person; however, that kind of self-serving mendacity is really quite nauseating.
Excellent points.
For some reason, however, I can take a loudmouth blowhard pushing an ideology easier than one pushing their religion.
My religion is simple: When you go outside your door each day, don’t do harm to anyone. If, however, someone does deliberate harm to you or someone important to you, a special brand of hell will be delivered to their door.
:>)
September 29, 2010, 2:11 pmpoll geek says:
Ricardo,
I agree with you that education might largely be a proxy for intellectual curiosity, as opposed to in-class learning in college. But I disagree with how far you go in saying
Many college students, including most of my peers, took a basic history or world civilizations class (was often “western civ” in the old days). Much of the information in this quiz, like the identity of Martin Luther, or the Koran and Ramadan, etc., should be standard fare in such a class, not just a class labelled as a religion class.
Also, many people might learn about other religions by attending college because it’s their first real exposure to people of those faiths, as well as to public events reflecting those faiths. Small towns in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania might still have zero Jews, let alone Muslims and Hindus or open atheists. But Ohio State or any big state school will have a sizable Muslim population, and students who never take a religion class will meet friends of other faiths or see signs in the student union for end of Ramadan fests, and so on.
That makes the knowledge in this quiz fairly likely to result from college, and not just as a proxy for curiosity.
September 29, 2010, 2:14 pmbbbeard says:
Small-minded, peremptory, and jejune.
How about:
In other words, what’s the rush?
September 29, 2010, 2:26 pmAnthony says:
However, it’s not at all obvious that this view was dominant among Nazis. While I’m not convinced by Hitchen’s arguments about the moral superiority of atheism (in the end, atheism isn’t a moral theory at all, it’s a theory about how the world operates), dragging in the Nazis doesn’t really do much to improve the discussion. If nothing else, the case for Communist atheism is much better.
What atrocities in the name of religion mostly prove is that religion isn’t particularly effective at preventing people from being evil. Most ideologies are prone to being abused to justify evil behavior, and religion doesn’t seem to be any better or worse than, say, nationalism.
September 29, 2010, 2:27 pmMDT says:
bbeard,
The notion that good works in the absence of faith can provide salvation is called the “Pelagian Heresy”.
That’s not how I remember Pelagianism. It was not “good works in the absence of faith,” but “good works in the absence of grace.” The Pelagians, basically, denied the existence of original sin; they didn’t think that redemption was necessary. The idea they fought wasn’t that you had to believe to be saved, but that God had to suffer and die so that you might be saved.
September 29, 2010, 2:33 pmAlessandra says:
Totally agree, my point is just that one can (or at least I can) definitely find just as many atheists as religious people who fit the above description perfectly.
Speaking of liberals and a certain other group with a certain other problem, I could add… ;-)
September 29, 2010, 2:37 pmA. Criminal says:
Here’s one, maybe: “Do Fruit Flies Have Free Will?” (Science Daily)
September 29, 2010, 2:42 pmDebrah says:
Halt, Allessandra!
While we await the arrival of Leo with his cross-against-the-vampire!
September 29, 2010, 2:44 pmAnatid says:
And here we get down to the definitions. The scientists in that article appear to be defining “free will” as “the capacity for spontaneous behavior.” Does that definition apply here for the purposes of our discussion?
September 29, 2010, 2:47 pmAlessandra says:
Alessandra: Thus it is evident that he believed Nazism, based as it was on a ‘scientific’ world-view, to be completely incompatible with Christianity.
However, it’s not at all obvious that this view was dominant among Nazis.
dragging in the Nazis doesn’t really do much to improve the discussion. If nothing else, the case for Communist atheism is much better.
==============
September 29, 2010, 3:14 pmIt’s true that Stalin would be more quintessentially the anti-religion atheist monster, but in some ways it can be argued that present-day liberals have much more in common with several top Nazis than with Stalin, concerning religious views and respective institutions. I’m thinking of ways liberals attempt to manipulate or control, exclude or silence, and demonize, at the same they co-exist with the religious, instead of attempting to exterminate.
Jerry says:
good thing the zero wants to extend the school year so our chillin can finally learns them somethin
September 29, 2010, 3:34 pmLaura Victoria says:
Let’s get real. The U.S. is a declining power whose populace is poorly educated in almost everything but low brow TV viewing. So glad I don’t live there any longer. Reading about it is bad enough.
September 29, 2010, 4:25 pmChris Travers says:
These are good points. However I’d also point out that people generally get uncomfortable when forced into a discussion the grounds for which are defined by the other party’s ideology. Here’s a fun example.
A while ago, JW missionaries came to my door. As you know I am a Norse pagan. So I answered the door and they said they were discussing with people where they turn for answers to life’s problems.
“I turn to ancient mythology,” I volunteered.
“We look to the Word of God,” they relied.
“That’s your mythology,” I said, approvingly….
At that point they got very uncomfortable read a verse from the Bible and left in a rather nervous hurry. I wished them well. I don’t expect them back.
I think this was uncomfortable for them because I kindly and carefully attacked a core element of their belief system without arguing about it. I reframed the discussion in such a way that my beliefs prevailed. The same goes in both religious dialog and political ones.
September 29, 2010, 4:34 pmAnthony says:
Fixed that for you.
September 29, 2010, 4:48 pmAJ says:
I think religion represents the innate human need to deal with the realities of death and meaning. We (as a species) prefer a higher power over pure cold nothingness — or a slow creep along the evolutionary trail. Many are simply OK with a God of the intellectual gaps — how did the universe start? Must be God — how else would we have so much order and the appearance of design? But as others have alluded to here, many stop short of a serious inquisition of religion and instead fill-up with “just enough” — some stories, some rules, and tradition of course! Others who want “intellectual religion” either seek out philosophers like C. S. Lewis or, being disappointed by lack of evidence, seek out comfort with Richard Dawkins. Prove the resurrection? Why do we believe the gospels are accurate? How do we know that Paul’s teachings are “inspired” and not just Paul’s opinions? At some point the mind either says “enough…I want the comfort of faith over answers to hard questions” or “enough…religion is unsatisfactory…I need something else.” So, if the desire to alleviate the fear and unknown of death gives us religion, then does religion represent a positive or negative evolutionary trait? Oh wait, can’t answer that…Beck is starting…
September 29, 2010, 4:58 pmMDT says:
Laura Victoria,
Let’s get real. The U.S. is a declining power whose populace is poorly educated in almost everything but low brow TV viewing. So glad I don’t live there any longer. Reading about it is bad enough.
I see. So you are reading a comment thread on a blog run and written by US citizens, read and commented on mostly by US citizens, in the grand old tradition of slum tourism?
September 29, 2010, 5:20 pmbbbeard says:
Well, not to get to Jesuitical about it… my poor non-Catholic understanding of the doctrine is that it is premised on the idea that individuals are capable of and responsible for choosing between good and evil, and in particular (as you say) it denied any original sin passed down from Adam. However, Pelagians also believed that Jesus’ sacrifice atoned for our (entirely voluntary) sins, so it’s not that redemption is unnecessary, it’s that redemption has the nature of a pardon for voluntary acts. I gather that Augustine’s rejoinder was that we are born in a state of sin, and grace is necessary for salvation. Perhaps I erred in putting the focus on “belief”, but it seemed to me that “belief” must be present before “grace” can have any effect.
It seems to me that the heretical part of Pelagianism is the cutting out of the middle man, i.e. the clergy. As Malcolm Reynolds said, “About 50% of the human race is middle-men and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated.”
September 29, 2010, 5:22 pmReaderY says:
Where’s your evidence of intelligence or self-control in other areas of life?
September 29, 2010, 5:38 pmAlessandra says:
And given that you could have, all very casually, said, “Animal sacrifice.”
They would have bolted out of there faster than they could have said, “This one is a total nut job, run!”
(I have just mentally visualized the scene- you speak, they glance at each other, what?, run! too funny)
I’m happy that you opted for a kinder and less mischievous “defeat your opponents simply by raising the intellectual level where they can’t follow” strategy… :-)
September 29, 2010, 5:46 pmAlessandra says:
Why do you think you “fixed” anything? Are you against pointing these parallels out concerning liberals?
September 29, 2010, 5:50 pmLaura Victoria says:
MDT – I am an American citizen and have been since birth 53 years ago. That’s how I know how far down the country’s slid.
Do you disagree, or do you just prefer xenophobic, sophomoric put-downs?
September 29, 2010, 6:01 pmAnthony says:
Because your statements are at least as true for conservatives? I mean, the Nazis were also anti-homosexual; are you perhaps a Nazi? If not, I suggest that you might leave off Godwinizing this thread.
September 29, 2010, 6:16 pmMDT says:
Laura Victoria,
MDT — I am an American citizen and have been since birth 53 years ago. That’s how I know how far down the country’s slid.
Do you disagree, or do you just prefer xenophobic, sophomoric put-downs?
Good heavens. What you said was that the US is a “declining power” with a “poorly educated populace.” I’m a decade younger than you, and also have been an American citizen all my life. I’ll give you “declining power,” in the sense that there are now a couple of bigger-than-US-sized rising powers. But the populace here is just as “poorly educated” as it was when you were at school.
What I asked, and still want to know, is why you bother reading a Web site run and mainly populated by Americans if Americans are as dumb as you say. Surely there are sites in your adopted country at which you could engage in conversation with your intellectual equals. (Though you might try them on the Pew religious knowledge test first; you might be surprised at the results.)
September 29, 2010, 6:29 pmAlessandra says:
Yes, but you didn’t keep the liberals and added the conservatives. And the Nazis were also pro-homosexuality, there’s even growing suspicion that Hitler was hiding something. As far as I can see, liberals are the one who claim that atheism is morally superior to religion. So while you may object to the Nazi or the Stalin reference, it is pertinent and fun.
A thread that is based on one of the silliest polls on religion ever?
September 29, 2010, 6:33 pmricky says:
Laura Victoria – what country do you live in now? Japan? As far as I know, it’s the only developed country that isn’t facing decline due to an influx of third-world savages.
September 29, 2010, 7:05 pmMichael says:
To some extent these questions seem like testing for science knowledge by asking if the Physics Building is closer to the Drag than the Chemistry building at UT Austin. That or they’re subtly invidious. Catholic teaching is controlled by the magisterium which has, as Soros might put it, a reflexive response to the population and history. I would imagine transubstantiation polled better in 300 than after the synthesis of urea; so though that might be part of the regression of belief it probably isn’t top of mind for a ‘believer.’ I would have preferred a question like, ‘Did one of the Apostles/ random neutral person in a Gospel ask, ‘Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Religions are potentially experienced as a book club with ritual poetry and group response, and the knowledge of what it is might look to that experience.
September 29, 2010, 7:24 pmgasman says:
So this proves that Mormons are not Christian. So many of the christmas carols they would be singing are written by jews that they cannot possibly be christian.
September 29, 2010, 7:41 pmMDT says:
ricky,
Laura Victoria — what country do you live in now? Japan? As far as I know, it’s the only developed country that isn’t facing decline due to an influx of third-world savages.
Come now, ricky, you mustn’t say that. LV is herself a refugee from a land of “savages,” and it’s hardly polite to remind her of it. Although as you and I are savages ourselves, she’ll probably take no notice.
September 29, 2010, 7:52 pmDoc Merlin says:
The study is much worse than you think it is. The questions don’t test if Atheists know more than any given person about their OWN religion, but rather about “religion.” Its defined very loosely. I wouldn’t expect the average christian to know much about hinduism for example (which the test does ask about) but I would expect atheists to.
September 29, 2010, 9:48 pmcustard says:
Err, didn’t Jesus refer to himself as the Son of Man?
September 29, 2010, 9:48 pmmattski says:
Certainly. It’s a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.
Well, a wise man—apparently—once said something to this effect:
Debrah, don’t forget to smile!
September 29, 2010, 9:57 pmmattski says:
Scientists say free will probably doesn’t exist, but hesitate to tell people.
September 29, 2010, 10:04 pmmattski says:
We’d all be much better off if we were bigoted, confused and unable to express ourselves in a coherent fashion!
Alessandra, there’s a difference between “debate” and “proselytizing”.
Proselytizing is an attempt to convert someone to a religion. Debate is a much broader thing. Democracy does depend on people trying to persuade each other. The best results are obtained when reason is the means of persuasion. Reason is the process of using our powers of observation to get as close to truth as we can, and failing that, to reach consensus.
But assuming possession of an ultimate truth—the essence of proselytizing—is antithetical to reasoned debate.
September 29, 2010, 10:21 pmAnatid says:
Yeah, people get annoyed when you tell them that free will is probably a comfortable illusion …
I though that was a satire piece you linked but the article it links to looks really solid. Nice. Thanks for the pointer.
Have you seen any of the recent predictive neuroscience studies coming out? Basically, we stick your head in a scanner, and can predict more accurately than you can what you’ll do next.
September 29, 2010, 10:22 pmAJ says:
I think that the survey misses the key point about religion: it fills a psychological need that people have — the need to be able to deal with the uncertainty of death. The details (dogma, doctrine) play second fiddle to the inertia that established religion provides to a palatable solution. Further, people like order and they like to believe in cosmic justice. In a way, the maleability of religion enables one to sculpt it into whatever you need. Does religion make us more survivability as a species….keeping us from going down other paths looking for meaning, from excesses, from despair? Or is religion something that holds us back…infantilizing our otherwise scientific view of the universe, preventing us from making that next evolutionary step?
September 29, 2010, 10:53 pmleo marvin says:
On some people that’s hardly a challenge, even without the scanner.
September 29, 2010, 11:00 pmMDT says:
custard,
Err, didn’t Jesus refer to himself as the Son of Man?
Um, that was my point. I didn’t know that. I knew more about Buddhism and Hinduism and Shinto at that point than I did about Christianity. We learned all about the Religions of the World with this one exception.
September 29, 2010, 11:13 pmMark Field says:
Stewart Baker?
September 29, 2010, 11:45 pmJohn Regan says:
It is a scriptural thing. Because Jesus handed his disciples bread and told them it was his body, and because this was confirmed by earlier statements to the same effect, it is believed that this is the sole method of “communing”. You eat the body. It looks like bread but it isn’t. The power to turn the bread into the body was given to the disciples who passed that power on to the bishops and priests, who remain to this day the only ones who have it.
It is not “incoherent” if properly understood. It is fair to say that it IS contrary to observation of the senses, though.
September 29, 2010, 11:49 pmAlessandra says:
Am I mistaken or did you just proclaim an ultimate truth?
too funny – I’m being lectured on reason and religion…
And ideological activism is an attempt to convert people to someone’s
ideologyreligion with another name.The Perez Hilton contingent of society does seem to think so.
That was exactly Stalin’s (and Bormann’s) rationale. If only you had included Animal Farm in your meager reading list… Let’s just say that human beings’ “powers of observation” are scary…
The Holy Grail of rationality (or justice or wisdom or kindness) eludes people who are religious or atheists in an indiscriminate basis.
September 30, 2010, 3:23 amMark Horning says:
No, no, they are clearly pagans given the huge number of lights and sacrificial trees they put up every winter solstice. (actually they have a wonderful Christmas light display at the Mesa Temple every year.
September 30, 2010, 3:38 amAlessandra says:
But then, how to justify the multi-million dollar research grants, the bloated salaries, and the 5-star hotel academic conferences three time a year?
September 30, 2010, 5:23 ammattski says:
I think that’s right. So, much mainstream religion is a more of a security blanket than a course of study. But even within “dogmatic” religions there are serious folk who think deeply about the issues and as a result don’t come off in a dogmatic way.
Clearly both. Personally, I think non-dogmatic (and non-theistic) teachings like Buddhism and other forms of spirituality offer a pretty good way forward.
(Think of it this way, just sitting on a cushion for 30 minutes a day can have a significant impact on one’s demeanor. The only thing being studied is one’s mind and the crazy shit it obsessively churns out.)
September 30, 2010, 7:11 ammattski says:
Umm, you’re mistaken.
I agree it’s funny, in the sense that I should know better.
I thought it was Jefferson’s rationale. And Washington’s and Madison’s and Lincoln’s. If you’ll excuse me, why don’t you provide a citation for your idiotic remark or withdraw it. You sound like a complete fool.
Yes, many dogmatic religious beliefs are damaged by reason. So many dogmatic religious folk have a problem with reason. Nothing to be proud of, and a damn shame.
September 30, 2010, 7:21 amJaimeInTexas says:
Debrah:
First, let me say that I am sad about someone you know and care for was facing such grim prospect. I disagree with what he said.
Some of the most gentle and giving people I know are folks who have gone or are going through very difficult times. They are not “People who don’t do very much in this life”.
For my definition of heaven, I can only use analogy, and I think that I am fithful to what the Bible teaches about heaven. If you are married you will be able to understand it best.
Heaven is like the marriage bed, both husband and wife sharing it. When both are in harmony and in relationship the marriage bed is one of great pleasure and assurance of well being. But, when the couple are in agner with each other, both may lay in bed but there is no even the desire for skins to touch the other. There may be a few inches of actual separation between the bodies, not enough of a gulf in one sense, and yet, it feels like the other are miles away. When in relationship distance seems not to matter for there is always the expectation of reunion and communion. When out of relationship, the slightest movement towards the other is like trying to move against the proverbial unmovable object.
God is omnipresent. The question of where or of what is heaven is secondary to the question of: are you in relationship with God.
The work of God, Jesus stated, is to believe in whom God sent.
So, heaven is to be in relationshipo with the one God sent as the Redeemer of a people fallen away of the relationship.
So, heaven is here and now and yet in the future. Now, in struggle and in a hope of a future reunion. Then, in an actual and final reunion.
September 30, 2010, 9:44 amJaimeInTexas says:
Morning star is not a synonym for Satan.
Read the context when the title is used and you will, hopefully, see its meaning. Satan being called “morning star” and “son of the dawn” in Isaiah 14, among other issues, is referring to Satan’s FORMER position of honor:
12 How you have fallen from heaven,
O morning star, son of the dawn!
You have been cast down to the earth,
you who once laid low the nations!
13 You said in your heart,
September 30, 2010, 10:03 am“I will ascend to heaven;
I will raise my throne
above the stars of God;
I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly,
on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain.
JaimeInTexas says:
biblegateway.com search results for “son of man”
biblegateway.com search results for “son of god”
September 30, 2010, 10:14 amcustard says:
Ah, sorry i missed your point. I thought you were suggesting that the author of the crossword knew bugger all. Apparently my comprehension skills are at an all time low! Thanks for the clarification.
September 30, 2010, 2:23 pmleo marvin says:
Stalin, Bormann, Jefferson, Lincoln. Shmalin, Shmormann, Shmefferson, Shmincoln. All atheist Jews with liberal homosexual agendas. And Madison was short — no doubt a closet thespian.
September 30, 2010, 2:47 pmTed says:
Your definition of liberals tends to get smaller and smaller every thread. What happens when your definition, if it doesn’t already, fails to encompass anyone or anything real? Will you still screech against the hypothetical “liberal” culture? Nevermind, I already know the answer to that.
September 30, 2010, 3:35 pmMDT says:
custard,
I thought you were suggesting that the author of the crossword knew bugger all.
Nah. I knew bugger all.
September 30, 2010, 4:51 pmAlessandra says:
So that explains it! The bloated ego, the senile notion they knew it all…
See, it’s always the same, the minute you give them a chance, what do the atheist Jews with a liberal homosexuality agenda do? Pick on the little people. Where is the short people anti-defamation league when you need them?
September 30, 2010, 5:44 pmTheories on the Religious Expertise of Atheists (The Atlantic Wire) | The Ultimate News Source says:
[...] Religious Ignorance Rational? Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy comes at the poll from a different angle. Political ignorance makes sense, [...]
October 1, 2010, 3:53 amarch1 says:
While is sobering to reflect on the aggregate intellectual effort that has been squandered debating such matters over the centuries, some may find it perversely consoling that this cannot persist indefinitely. Think about it: Evidence that a sizeable fraction of Earth’s dominant intelligent species believes in transsubstatiation now permeates a spherical volume of around 4M cubic light years which is growing at 3%/yr. The sterilization ray can’t be long in coming.
October 1, 2010, 8:18 pmarch1 says:
arch1,
October 1, 2010, 11:00 pmI think I get it that you don’t much respect ideas such as transsubstatiation that are not based on evidence and are arguably not even coherent, and that you were trying to make this point in what you thought was a humorous way. But did you consider the appropriateness, in a discussion of religion, of invoking a scenario involving mass murder in order to make your point (which BTW was off-topic in any case)?