Are you smarter than an atheist?

[inverarity]

I have not posted a lot about atheism, because I'm not a "movement atheist," which is to say, I'm pretty unapologetic and can even be militant about my lack of belief, but I don't join atheist groups or go around mocking religious people (unless they annoy me). The reason I don't participate much in online atheism is that a lot of online atheists are also libertarians, which I consider the atheist version of creationism. The reason I don't mock religious people is, well, I'm not an asshole, and I do have friends and family who are religious. I don't think they're stupid for believing - just wrong.

However, one of those smug atheist truisms which I have generally found to be true no matter how smug it may be is that atheists tend to know more about religion than religious people. It's no surprise that most Christians have never read the Bible (even those who believe in Biblical inerrancy - I mean, holy shit, if I believed a book was the literal, absolutely true Word of God I would read every single word repeatedly like my immortal soul depended on it, ya know?), and that many American Christians have completely wrong ideas about what the U.S. Constitution actually says about religion, what you can and can't teach in school, etc.

So test your knowledge with the Christian Science Monitor's Are you smarter than an atheist? poll.

This atheist scored 30 out of 32. (I missed one I should really have gotten right, and missed another because I just didn't remember.)

(There is a shorter version conducted by the Pew Forum here which includes a report on average results nationwide, by religious affiliation or lack thereof.)

Hat tip to joreth for posting about this and pointing out legitimate issues with how the CSM is likely to use the results.

Comments

[swissmarg]

I took this quiz a while ago (it's been up for a while) and I think I got 31/32. I don't remember which one I flubbed. But the point I wanted to make is the same as what shinygobonkers said: it's more about cultural awareness, history, and - in the end - educational background than about religion. So, in my opinion the reason that atheists and Jews scored high is because my impression is that more highly educated people tend to be atheists/agnostics, and American Jews tend to be more highly educated than many other ethnic groups. And also why the commenters here are scoring so high. (The education point.) Can't really explain why the Mormons scored so high, unless it's that they have a slight edge on the questions pertaining directly to their religion, because many schools do teach something about world religions such as Islam and Buddhism, but not so much about Mormonism. In which case the quiz itself is skewed unfairly in their favor.