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

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for that, it made my day!

I think there are two reasons. One, I think Jewish tradition is centered on biblical literacy, the coming of age requires the memorizing of a chapter of the bible, and the ability to discuss it and argue a point.

The second is the enormous crossover between Jews and Atheists. There's an entire movement of humanist Jews, and atheism outside the most Orthodox branches is pretty welcome. So since we have an environment where people are allowed to question, we're pretty comfortable loving scripture as however we choose to define it.

So, whether it's the Word of God or just our history, it's a lower pressure environment.

Christianity could gain a lot from atheists. Once you welcome them in, they tend to provide critical thinking skills often lacking in a homogenous environment, and they tend to be very educated and interesting.