So the latest bit of religious news making it’s way around the web these days is the “fact” that atheists and agnostics know more about religion than religious people do. This is a weird thing to deal with, especially given the fact that October is my month of atheism, of “non belief”, my default religi0us position. Given my experiences so far, I’m not surprised with these results. While the people I’ve met tend to know a lot about their own religions, they often have a skewed or incomplete view of other people’s beliefs. I don’t mean to sound damning, most of the time it wasn’t a big deal, a misunderstanding, or they just hadn’t thought about it very much.
On the other hand it’s a poll, and I’m loathe to treat as anything more than an interesting tidbit. That said, we can perhaps begin to gleam a few interesting things from it, other than atheists are a bunch of smarty pants.
First off, it makes it painfully obvious that Blacks and Hispanics are seeing the back end of the American education system, as their responses on average seem to be lower than any other group polled. I’m curious as to why people aren’t making more noise about that. The poll insists that the numbers remain the same even when “adjusted for levels of education” but then how do we explain their low scores? Is it a cultural thing, is it because their sample sets were so low?
Second, 45% of Catholics think that the bread and wine that symbolize the blood and body of Christ are just that, symbols, and don’t transmute into the actual blood and flesh of their savior. This might make a couple of Cardinals red-faced (teehee) but I find it kind of encouraging. I like to think that most Catholics thought it was just meant to symbolize partaking of the means of salvation, rather than taking it to be the literal blood and body of Christ, as is the Catholic Church’s want. Honestly it just seems a bit more reasonable. I try to be a middle of the road atheist, to not stamp my feet up and down when confronted with super naturalism and miracles, but I can’t help feel a little hopeful that most Catholics don’t think they’re partaking in a wee bit of cannibalism every Sunday.
While most people, a startling 89%, know that a teacher cannot lead a public school class in prayer, few people know that the Bible can be used as an example of literature, or that a public school may conduct a course on comparative religions (23% and 36% respectively). Seeing as prayer in public schools can be a big deal in American politics, this doesn’t surprise me, though it does seem to suggest that because of this lack of school prayer, people may think that schools are completely forbidden to have anything to do with religion, a misunderstanding which may give weight to pro-school prayer crowd in the future.
One commentator on CNN suggested that the reason atheists and agnostics know more about religion is because they are constantly being attacked by religious people, and that they needed to know these things in order to have a basis for arguing their case. I’ve certainly seen a lot of that, but I don’t think we know more because we’re getting bullied all the time. If what this poll is saying is true, I would say atheists and agnostics know more about religion because they have a reason to go looking. We have to search for answers because by and large we didn’t sit through Sunday school or go to a church, synagogue, or mosque. When we ask questions like ‘what does it all mean’ we don’t have a book or pastor to help us, so we tend to look outwards, and to more than one source, since initially they all tend to have the same weight.
I don’t know whether that means we get better answers, in the end. It definitely doesn’t mean we turn out to be better people.
Anyway, check out the poll, you can even take it yourself and see how you do.