 |
| Photo: Handschuh/News |
Source/Credit: The Telegraph | UK
By Jon Swaine, New York | September 28, 2010
US atheists know more about religion than believers, quiz finds
Atheist Americans know more about religion than their faithful compatriots, research has found.
Non-believers and agnostics scored an average of 20.9 out of 32 in a quiz about different faiths, while religious respondents averaged 16.5.
People in the south of the US, which is renowned for its religious fervour, performed worse than those elsewhere.The survey, by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, found that Jews and Mormons did best among the faithful, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 respectively. Hispanic Catholics scored just 11.6 on average.
Fewer than half of the 3,412 adults surveyed could identify Buddhism as the Dalai Lama’s religion, while only 54 per cent correctly said that the Koran was the Islamic holy book.
More than four in five respondents, however, knew that Mother Teresa was a Catholic.
The survey also found that people had surprising gaps in knowledge about their own religions.
Almost half of Catholics surveyed did not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion actually become the body and blood of Christ.
A majority of Protestants, meanwhile, could not identify Martin Luther as the driving force behind the Protestant Reformation.
Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University, who worked on the survey, said: “We know almost nothing about our own religions and even less about the religions of other people.”
Read original post here: US atheists know more about religion than believers, quiz finds
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for your comments. Any comments irrelevant to the post's subject matter, containing abuses, and/or vulgar language will not be approved.