Tag: Agnosticism

two women at a bus stop

~ Jeremy ~ Leave a comment

A poem. By me.

“two women at a bus stop”

Strangers. One, to the other. 
“I love the guy who paid my debt.” 
“You wha?” 
“I love the guy who paid my debt.” 
“You love the guy who paid your debt?” 
“Yes?”
“Okay.” 
Cars whoosh. Tires tread. Engines combust. 
“I want to introduce you to the guy who paid my debt.” 
“You what?” 
“I want to introduce you go the guy who paid my debt.” 
“Okay.” 
“He’s right here.” 
The woman held out her open palm. 
The other looked at her empty hand.
“He lives here.” Her eyes pointing to her hand. “He’s my friend. I want him to be your friend.” 
“Um.” 
Cars whoosh. Tires tread. Engines Combust. 
“You have debt, too, you know?” 
“What?”
“You have debt, too. I have the bill right here.” 
In her other hand, she holds a line-itemed bill with a number in the billions. 
It’s addressed to “everyone, anywhere, at any time.” 
“I don’t owe anything.” 
“Yes you do.” 
“No I don’t.” 
“It says it right here.” 
“What is the bill for?” 
“Our ancestors ate a meal. They didn’t pay. With interest, inflation and tax, you must pay this bill.” 
“No. No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. It says right here. You must pay, too.” 
“Who is billing for this debt?” 
“My friend who paid the debt.” 
Cars whoosh. Tires tread. Engines combust. 

CNN, NYT: Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans

~ Jeremy ~ 3 Comments

Of course CNN and the New York Times are going to report that non-believers score higher on basic religion knowledge than believers … they’re soooo biased. Left-wingers say the darndest things.

The NYT wrote:

Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion.

Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life.

On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.

The boring and best part of the article comes from this finding here:

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.

Regular LCW reader Xina (Thanks!) hooked me up with this CNN blog post this morning, which said:

The single strongest factor predicting how well a person does on the religious knowledge quiz is education – the more years of schooling a person has, the more they are likely to know about religion, regardless of how religious they consider themselves to be, Pew found.

“The No. 1 predictor without question is simply educational attainment,” Smith said.

The think tank also asked a handful of general knowledge questions – such as who wrote “Moby-Dick” and who’s the vice president of the United States – and found a link between religious knowledge and general knowledge.

It’s been shown in other sources that non-religious people often know more about religion than believers. I know many believers who know a lot about their own faith, but tend to show very limited knowledge of other belief systems.

I retired faith, because of two main reasons: I learned about the history or Christianity and other religions and I read and thought about the bible’s message.

What do you know about the history of the religion you were taught? How much time do you devote to learning about it from sources apart from the pulpit?

From the articles I posted above, you can take 10 questions of the test. They’re kind of softball questions, I think. I wish they’d publish the entire test so we could have a little test around here.

***UPDATE***

Regular reader and neuroscientist Luis V pointed out in the comments that the entire quiz is here. Although it appears the entire world is taking the quiz, so it’s slow as evolution (honk).

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