Wednesday, September 29, 2010

An abbreviated quiz on religion

here.  If you score 8, I think you outperform. 

I got 15 out of 15.  My elders at church would probably give me grief if I missed any of the questions.  From the looks of it, getting 0 or 1 is just as special as getting 15, as a monkey could probably get 3 or 4, given the multiple choice format.

Here's performance by religious affiliation:



UPDATE: Ross Douthat comments on the high scores of atheists and agnostics:
I wonder how the data would have looked if Pew had created a generic “nonbeliever” category and compared that group to Protestants and Catholics. Instead, they created two categories: Self-described atheists/agnostics, and people who described their religion as “nothing in particular.” The first group was 3 percent of the sample; the second group was a much larger 12 percent. And while the atheist/agnostics had the highest religious literacy, the larger “nothing in particular” camp was among the least literate overall.

This makes a great deal of sense. The very act of declaring yourself an “atheist,” after all, suggests a particularly high level of interest in religious detail and debate — higher than many self-described Methodists or cradle Catholics who have a vague belief in God and show up at church on holidays, and also higher than the many nonbelievers who are merely indifferent to religion. Another way of putting it is that self-described atheists are the religious converts of the irreligious world. Like someone who leaps from Lutheranism to Catholicism, or Christianity to Islam, they’ve made an intellectual decision about their faith — or the lack thereof, that is. And so it isn’t surprising that they’d be more knowledgeable about the subject than the much larger populations of part-time churchgoers and “nothing in particular” nonpractitioners alike.
I think atheists are much more highly educated. But hey, so are George Bush, Al Gore and John Kerry ...

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