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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