Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Atheist Know Religion Better Than Believers

New poll out today from the The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life indicating atheist know more about religion than Protestants and Catholics. This does not surprise me. It is not that atheist are more intelligent, they have just read the material with an open mind. Many are like me. We were religious and threw our heart and soul into it and the more we did that the more we saw how hollow it was. As Isaac Asimov said "Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived".

Also 1/3 of Americans say they read from the Bible once a week and are terrified to read other religious books keeping them inbreed. You know Satan is out to get you in those other books.

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

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

Many Americans are devoted readers of Scripture: More than a third (37%) say they read the Bible or other Holy Scriptures at least once a week, not counting worship services. But Americans as a whole are much less inclined to read other books about religion. Nearly half of Americans who are affiliated with a religion (48%) say they “seldom” or “never” read books (other than Scripture) or visit websites about their own religion, and 70% say they seldom or never read books or visit websites about other religions.

2 comments:

  1. I was not called about survey but went to web sight and filled the survey out. I knew all the answers and I am an atheist...I read bible stories as a child in church and Sunday school and quit religion and the church when I was twelve. I learned some of the things in school.
    I do not miss church or religion.
    Thanks for this article.

    ReplyDelete
  2. religion is more than words...

    ReplyDelete