
Pew Forum survey: Atheists and agnostics outperform the rest in religion test - ez77
http://www.pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx
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jeromec
Interesting results. I think atheists/Jewish people perform best because these
are the two groups most likely to encounter defensive conversations on the
subject of religion? I know I learned a lot more about other religions and the
concept of religion in general after becoming atheist, probably incentivised
by increased likelihood of debate.

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lotharbot
The link provided by ascuttlefish is only to a portion of the test. The full
list of questions can be found at [0].

Overall, I found the survey questions to be unsatisfying. Most of them are
what I would categorize as religious trivia rather than true religious
content. The questions were along the lines of "what is an atheist", "what
religion was Mother Teresa", or "what's the name of Islam's holy book". These
are the sort of questions I would expect any college-educated person to nail,
regardless of religious affiliation.

Only two of the questions required any religion-specific depth of
understanding: the questions on Catholic communion and on salvation by faith
alone. There were no deep or doctrinally interesting questions about Islam,
Hinduism, Judaism, or Buddhism. The test is presented as "questions about the
core teachings [and other stuff] of major world religions" but there's really
very little here about core teachings.

Atheists, Agnostics, and Jews performed very well on the "religion and public
life" and "world religions" questions, by about 2.5 points over any Christian
subgroup. Mormons and white evangelicals scored highest on the "Christianity
and the Bible" sections, by about a point over Atheists/agnostics and Jews
[1]. The headline is technically correct, but I've seen people draw some far-
reaching and mistaken conclusions from it.

[0] PDF file:
[http://pewforum.org/uploadedFiles/Topics/Belief_and_Practice...](http://pewforum.org/uploadedFiles/Topics/Belief_and_Practices/religious-
knowledge-topline.pdf) \- note that demographic and general knowledge
questions are interspersed with religious questions.

[1] [http://pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-
Religiou...](http://pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-
Knowledge-Survey.aspx)

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ascuttlefish
Take the quiz here: <http://features.pewforum.org/quiz/us-religious-
knowledge/>

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jeromec
I got 12 out of 15 correct, trying not to take too long figuring out the
answers.

~~~
ascuttlefish
I got 14. The last one was a stumper!

~~~
jeromec
Wow, nice! I got #15 wrong too, along with 4, and 6.

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nhebb
I got 93%, but I really don't see the value of this survey. It was a set of
meta religious questions more than religious questions. If you choose Religion
as a Jeopardy topic, these are the kind of questions I would expect.

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chubs
Does HN _really_ have to go down the same path as reddit and digg? I was
hoping it wouldn't happen. I've found that reddit/digg have become, whats the
word, an echo chamber for those with left-wing views. I'm here for the tech
news, not that stuff.

~~~
jeromec
With due respect, HN is not meant to be a source of tech news. From the site
guidelines:

 _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity_

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

Regardless of one's religious views, this article appears to be exemplary of
"intellectual curiosity" since that is what's needed to venture outside of,
and learn more about religions other than one's own.

