Do Atheists Know More About Christianity Than Christians?

[swag]

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Do-Atheists-Know-More-About-Christianity-Than-Christians-5192

By Heather Horn

A new Pew survey is pretty much guaranteed to ruffle the feathers of the faithful. In a survey of religious knowledge, Americans did fairly poorly, displaying little knowledge of world religions. More provocatively, Americans did not even know much about their own religions. A shocking forty-five percent of Catholics incorrectly answered a question about Catholicism and Communion, for example. To make matters worse, it seems that those who scored highest on this survey were, in fact, atheists and agnostics. The next-highest scoring groups were Jews and Mormons.

•'Well This Is Awkward,' observes Truthdig's Ear to the Ground blog, noting that "Mormons and Jews also scored well, and, like Atheists, know more about Christianity than Christians."

•Atheist Effect Holds True When You Control for Other Factors, Too "Atheists and agnostics score particularly well on knowing something about world religions," notes Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, although he also points to their high scores with knowledge of Christianity. "The effect remains even after controlling for education," he adds.

•The Lesson? "People believe in what they believe for social reasons and not because they actually know anything about what they believe," concludes blogger Half Sigma. "And the same applies to belief in global warming."

. . . more at the link

[Jim__]

1. It's not clear to me what the basis of that first bullet is.

Do you know where there is a complete breakdown of the survey and its responses by group. Accordong to the NY Times:

On questions about the Bible and Christianity, the groups that answered the most right were Mormons and white evangelical Protestants.

I haven't been able to find the over-all result for questions about Christianity and how the correct answers breakdown by group.

(Edited to add): OK. I see the breakdown in the survey, but there is no way to weight the averages because they don't give us the counts for each group.

[swag]

3. Here ya go.

http://www.pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx

[Jim__]

5. Thanks for the link - but I don't trust those averages.

If I average all the individual Christian groups (I get 6 groups) I get their average of 6.2 That's (most likely) only accurate if all these subgroups have equal numbers of people in them. IOW, they appear to be averaging by group rather than by individual which can lead to misleading results.

[verges]

2. That's not exactly what the survey says....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_rel_religious_literacy_poll

snip--"Respondents to the survey were asked 32 questions with a range of difficulty, including whether they could name the Islamic holy book and the first book of the Bible, or say what century the Mormon religion was founded. On average, participants in the survey answered correctly overall for half of the survey questions.

Atheists and agnostics scored highest, with an average of 21 correct answers, while Jews and Mormons followed with about 20 accurate responses. Protestants overall averaged 16 correct answers, while Catholics followed with a score of about 15.

Not surprisingly, those who said they attended worship at least once a week and considered religion important in their lives often performed better on the overall survey. However, level of education was the best predictor of religious knowledge. The top-performing groups on the survey still came out ahead even when controlling for how much schooling they had completed.

On questions about Christianity, Mormons scored the highest, with an average of about eight correct answers out of 12, followed by white evangelicals, with an average of just over seven correct answers. Jews, along with atheists and agnostics, knew the most about other faiths, such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism. Less than half of Americans know that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist, and less than four in 10 know that Vishnu and Shiva are part of Hinduism."

[Dr.Phool]

4. I used to debate believers on an inerrancy forum.

You really had to know your shit to debunk theirs. And use their holy book to do it.