Religious People Score Embarrassingly Low on Knowledge of Their Holy Texts; Atheists Excel 3

I remember reading about this study when it came out, in 2010, but I’d never seen this illuminating CNN interview with the chief authors. Tip of the hat to reddit.

Also, per the screenshot below, I somehow managed to be the 666th viewer of that YouTube video. Cross yourself!

CNN_ Do agnostics know more than believers? - YouTube

3 thoughts on “Religious People Score Embarrassingly Low on Knowledge of Their Holy Texts; Atheists Excel

  1. cognitive dissident May 7,2013 11:15 am

    Thanks for posting that clip; it brought back some fond memories of taking the quiz and discussing the results. As the old adage goes, reading the Bible is the quickest way to becoming an atheist.

  2. Thomas May 8,2013 3:04 pm

    After I watched the video, I feel like this title is misleading. This pretty much says that most Christians don’t know about other religions (which is, in itself problematic). However, it does not say that people of faith don’t know about “their holy texts”. It says they don’t know about other peoples’ faith. With that said… people of faith should know about other peoples’ faiths so they don’t act like jerks.

  3. cognitive dissident May 8,2013 5:07 pm

    The study makes it clear that many religious adherents don’t know much about their own religions:

    More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. About half of Protestants (53%) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity. Roughly four-in-ten Jews (43%) do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish.

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