Survey: Atheists, Agnostics Know More About Religion Than Religious | Hacker News Reader

Survey: Atheists, Agnostics Know More About Religion Than Religious

npr.org

19 pointsreneigbor18 comments

This already hit the front page twice yesterday and wound up dead both times.

But while it's not dead, I'll make the point I was planning on making yesterday: people with the minority non-default position on an issue will often know more about an issue than the people with the default position... but this isn't always a good thing.

If you did a survey of 9/11 truthers, I'm sure you'd find they were way better at answering questions about the trivial minutiae of the event ("Which tower was hit first? When did WTC 7 collapse?") than the general public. Holocaust deniers probably know more about the precise location of Auschwitz and the chemistry of Zyklon B than the general public, too.

I'm not saying atheists are wrong (in fact I'm almost certain they're right), I'm just saying they shouldn't get too self-congratulatory about this survey.

That analogy doesn't work all that well, though - a better one might be if scientists were less aware of basic questions of the scientific method than the general public. (After all, they are "practicing the idea of science" in some sense, as opposed to merely "supporting the idea of science".)

I'm not sure how your analogy works. Are "scientists" supposed to be analogous to "religious people"? Because religious people are the majority and hold the default position in current American society, whereas scientists are a small minority, the elite of those who "support the idea of science" whatever that means, perhaps more analogous to priests and ministers.

Not really. The analogy would be if physicists know less about psychology. I'm sure that religious people tend to have more knowledge about their religion than atheists.

When the questions span all religions and include several questions about history, not practice (e.g. Martin Luther), it turns into more or less just a test of general knowledge, which I would just expect better-educated people to win. I got thirteen out of fifteen (above average) and I couldn't give a hoot about religion one way or the other -- I sure as hell haven't done a "deep exploration of my faith" or whatever else.

The article actually outright states that people know less about their own religion. For instance, most protestants didn't know who Martin Luther was.

I have heard another, albeit slightly more controversial, explanation.

Which is that religions discourage most adherents from deep exploration of their faith, because often that leads to rejection of the religion (note: not always rejection of faith).

Being an Atheist that lived, for a short time, with an amazing born-again Christian theology student, havs given me a lot of interesting historical and theological knowledge of the modern religions. It has always interested me how little people know about their religion, and how, in a modern society, they show no interest in finding out these things :(

I haven't ever seen that behavior in any church I've been a part of.

My church suggests the following (these are to be done as you want depending on the season you are at in life):

- Reading the Bible daily

- Praying Psalms daily

- Reading Proverbs daily

- Reading Christian books on any subject that interests you

- Meet with groups to discuss the Bible regularly

- Taking classes at the church to learn more

I believe the pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle (not my church) who is a pretty famous and successful pastor reads a book a day.

I've never met anyone who is serious about following Jesus that doesn't take learning more very seriously. I agree that most people seem to be ignorant of the faith they profess but the people I met who seem to be experiencing something of God and Jesus really have deep understandings of the faith.

I scored a perfect score and so did my wife for the record :)

I would have been embarrassed to score less than that given that the questions were all so easy. What disturbs me is how many professed believers don't know anything about their faith.

I don't think that's true.

Have you ever heard a priest or reverend telling people "Naah, I don't really recommend reading the Bible at all"?

Ever heard a rabbi saying "Nope, reading that Talmud thing is a complete waste of time"?

An imam going "Fuck, the Koran is way too long for you folk to read, why don't you just have a squiz at the Cliff's Notes?"

Religious leaders genuinely and honestly believe that their religions are true, so they certainly don't think that you'll believe it less if you find out more about it. Any religious leader out there would be only too happy to help his followers to learn more about their religion if they were interested.

edit: On the other hand, it could be that many lay-religious folks -- the people who officially belong to their parents' religion but aren't really interested in it -- might deliberately avoid thinking too much about their own religion, because they secretly suspect that if they did then they'd be obliged to abandon it. They have the sort of faith that can only be maintained by not thinking too much about it.

I'm fairly confident it is true, though. While you won't hear such things said, they definitely won't advise you on a "History of Christianity" reading list.

In fact what your talking about is reading the religious book, which is only useful for a small portion of information about a religion. For most religions it's not even a very good briefing a) because it's usually obscure and open to interpretation (which the cleric will do for you) and b) because it often doesn't deal with the practices of the religion.

At their core religious leaders aim to propagate their religion; so they will steer people away from things that might put followers off (note: probably not intentionally).

If you were an adherent and showed an interest then, sure, I doubt they would actively discourage you. But they might direct you at "nicer" material, and they certainly won't encourage interest in the disinterested :)

I don't think this is a fair blanket statement. The fact is that most people don't enjoy reading (or learning) and many are functionally illiterate. Religious leaders aren't going to stop practicing & preaching in order to educate their flocks -- ESPECIALLY in Christianity; many other major religions have a stronger focus on education. I know many people, of different religions, who place a strong emphasis on scholarly research to inform and strengthen their faith.

I'm fairly confident it is true, though. While you won't hear such things said, they definitely won't advise you on a "History of Christianity" reading list.

Try talking to a Jesuit priest. Their knowledge of these sorts of things will astound you, and they'll be only too willing to share it. Rabbis, too, so I hear.

Your average American evangelical preacher? Well, maybe not -- they don't come from the same sort of academic tradition.

The point of the Catholic church was that only the priesthood could really interpret the scripture.

If you are actually involved with a church, you will find that what people really read at "bible studies" and such are a very select few passages from the bible, usually prepackaged into convenient paperbacks and pamphlets so you don't even have to lug a heavy bible around. There's also tons of non-scriptural commentary packaged up as quasi-scripture, usually labeled as "devotions" or something like that. Also, nearly all of the songs and prayers and creeds are not from the Bible at all, it's just something some clergy, or even church poet or musician wrote long ago. In contemporary mega churches it's even worse, you're probably watching powerpoint slides cribbed from a Tony Robbins seminar and singing songs written by Alanis Morrissette, while the pastor delivers his sermon about 401k plans.

I guess you are right that clergy probably won't actively discourage you from reading the bible, but I'm almost certain they will steer you to a devotional book instead. If you actually go off and read the bible then ask a pastor what the deal is with the goat headed UFO in Ezekiel they get pretty uncomfortable.

The Roman Catholic Church refused to deliver mass in vernacular until very recently. This was the entire point.

The message from the RC Church was indeed "Don't read the bible, we'll tell you what it's all about". In fact, Bible ownership was banned by them for a long period of history.

The bible is pretty long and rather heavy going in places - I'd be pretty surprised if most Christians have read it in it's entirety.

I can remember being pretty surprised by what is clearly an account of invasion and what we would now call ethnic cleansing by the Israelites when we read most of the Old Testament in primary school. Looking back our teacher was clearly being subtly contrarian - a fantastic chap and ex Battle of Britain Spitfire pilot (inevitably his nickname amongst the kids was "Hitler").

Did you look at the quiz? It's not an in depth survey of religion. It consists of 15 factoids about the major religions of the world.

I'm not religious, and while I did get 14/15 right, I think it was completely meaningless.

Take the quiz here: http://features.pewforum.org/quiz/us-religious-knowledge/

I took the quiz online and the articles about it have been highly misleading. I consider myself a fairly knowledgeable religious person and I got 26 out of 32 questions right. Here's the thing, though: I got that many right because I took theology and history classes in college, not because I know anything about my faith. The average person isn't ignorant because they don't know who Maimonides, Jonathan Edwards, Vishnu, or Joseph Smith was. This survey appears to test primarily for education level.

Less than half of questions were actually applicable to the practice of religion, the rest were history and sociology questions. I guess, "Americans Don't Know Religious History" wouldn't be much of a headline.

That's what scientists call causation rather than correlation.

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