A Pew Study on religion has been making some headlines. It finds that atheists know more about religion than theists. Heather Horn has a pretty good round up in the Atlantic on some of the reaction.
I suppose the catty reaction is to suggest that the more you learn about a religion, the less likely you are to believe. But, my guess is that it’s a correlation thing, and not a causation thing. I’d suggest that (with plenty of exceptions), it’s the type of folks who are most likely to think hard about religious issues and study what various religions have to offer as answers are also the type of folks who are most comfortable reconsidering whatever it was their parents taught them and more comfortable making their way in the world without religion.
At a relatively early age, I found it telling that most people followed whatever religion their parents followed. That was a pretty good indication that people didn’t subscribe to a particular religion because they considered the evidence, weighed the options, and picked a winner. I also found notable that most religions tend to indoctrinate kids at an early age as part of their program. I was raised Presbyterian, and even though my folks were never fire breathers about their religion, I still found it difficult to finally admit to myself (let alone to others) that I didn’t believe the stuff I had been taught. There is a huge social pressure to go along to get along. And most people just aren’t that inclined to buck the pressure and really consider closely whether their religion is most likely to be true.
To me, a good bit of religious language seems to reflect this sort of unfocused thinking. The words come together like a salad and don’t convey a lot of meaning. At least not to me. Taking something pretty well at random off the Internet:
“In Him [Christ], you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory.”
If you parse this and diagram it, you could probably turn it into something coherent. But, my guess is that your average listener just lets something like this wash over them. Maybe the average person’s faith is something like Stephen Colbert’s truthiness, a truth a person knows intuitively, “from the gut,” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. But, maybe I’m wrong. That’s just what it looks like from the from the outside. Obviously I can’t crawl inside someone’s mind and know how closely they’ve examined what their parents told them about religion.
I was raised a Christian, became an agnostic, studied many religions, became a Christian through my own deliberation.
I do agree, not enough question why they believe what the believe. I find myself more annoyed with a “generational” Christian whose faith is skin deep than an atheist or agnostic who has looked at religions and couldn’t buy it.
Oh, as for my own reasons for my faith, it was pretty simple. Either Jesus was a liar, and deserved to be killed for starting a religion and claiming to be God, or he was God. Sources outside of the bible have confirmed that a man named Jesus was executed for claiming to be God.
Upon reading what Jesus said, I really can’t find fault with it. I find it to be a very good way to live. Since that information was sound, I choose to believe his claim of being God.
Well, we really only have what people said he said. And, there’s a third option – that he believed what he said but was wrong. But, point taken.
There are all kinds of ways to look at this study. That “the more you learn about a religion, the less likely you are to believe” doesn’t strike me as anywhere among the most fruitful. You did well to mention it only in passing.
“The more you learn about SOME religions, the less likely you are to believe” may be true, but I won’t name names.
My favorite Orthodox Christian blogger had some interesting thoughts on loss of faith: http://fatherstephen.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/treasure-in-a-box/ . Any correspondence between his descriptions of problematic features of some Christian traditions any my unnamed “some religions” ain’t necessarily coincidental.
Thanks for the link. Interesting reading. But, and maybe I’m just thick, it has some of what I regard as word salad:
Other than maybe “it’s magic,” I don’t really get what meaning is supposed to be conveyed by a lot of these phrases. Or maybe that some big words are tossed into odd places in an effort to sound profound. For example, in that last paragraph, does “resurrected,” communicate anything central to the meaning of that paragraph? Or is it just an extra detail, like “brown-eyed”?
Incidentally, I have been reading a book that gives some detail about sub-atomic physics, and I’m fully prepared to acknowledge that our understanding of space and time is inadequate.
I would like to point out that the statement by Jason that history records Jesus being crucified for claiming to be God is either an error or a misstatement on his part. There is no historical record of a Jesus matching the description of the Christian Jesus outside of the New Testament. I would like for him to point out any exception to my statement. There are examples of editing things into the record long after the fact, but no contemporary citations.
Secondly, history records several crucified saviors in different part of the world and different cultural and religious settings. There are even records of Jewish claimants to this position being crucified in or around Jerusalem in or just prior to the first century c.e. (common era). There is no record of a Jesus of Nazareth, or anyone whose story parallels the Gospel accounts being crucified.
When I entered college forty years ago and chose to major in theology, I was counseled by the dean of the department of theology who wanted to ascertain why I was majoring in this topic. I related to him how much I wanted to know and be able to determine the truth of my beliefs and to find and have explained for me the truths of God’s existence.
He looked me in the eye and told me, “If you pursue this course of study you will come to one of these ends: you will only believe that which reinforces what you already feel which will make you an intellectual charlatan, you will study and find the proofs you are seeking which will make you an intellectual lightweight, or you will study and find more questions than answers which will lead to skepticism. So you must come out of it as blind, uninformed, or an agnostic or atheist. I hope you are ready for the challenge.”
If I had listened to his cautions all those years ago I would now, in all likelihood, have a different opinion about such things, but I would have that opinion based, not on intellect and study, but on wishful thinking and the lies of others that are perpetrated and passed down through rote religious training.
Bob, here is a link to the debate on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus
Most of the scholars I’ve seen that go for a non-biblical record of Jesus, by nature, seem to hold the Bible as complete fiction. I find no more reason to distrust the Bible compared to any other historical record from that day.
It goes back to the debate between science and faith. Science is the study of the natural word based on what can be observed. Therefore, it must be assumed when studying anything that God must not exist, or at least must play no active role. Otherwise, the presumption that we can accurately monitor, record, and predict the nature of things is false.
I can’t understand why presuming God does not exist is any different than presuming he does. I see enough reasons to put more doubt in our ability to explain the nature of things and believe that God does exist.
Since the God I worship does not tell me to kill in his name, and does tell me to help those in need, I can life my life believing in him and my faith in him will only serve to have a positive impact on me and those around me. Even if I am wrong, my life on Earth will still be better for having faith. If I’m not wrong, then my life on Earth is only a speck in eternity.
I was in my local bike shop the other day, looking for a particular type and color of bar tape. They didn’t have it. “We can order it for you,” the guy said.
Thanks. Y’know, maybe this new technology has escaped you, but I can order it for myself.
Just like I can look up something on the Wikipedia without advice; Jason, Wikipedia isn’t a good source for what happened yesterday, let alone 2000-year-old questions of fact. If you’re going to express apodictic certainty one minute (“Sources outside the Bible have confirmed…”) don’t ask us to peruse the scribblings in a public chat room to find your evidence for you. It oughta be at your own fingertips. (Confirmation and affirmation are two quite different actions, by the way.)
Look, sorry, it’s not my choice of battleground, but:
Bible scholars analyze the Canonical Gospels[23], Talmud, Gospel according to the Hebrews, Gnostic Gospels, Josephus, Dead Sea Scrolls[24] and other early documents attempting to find the Historical Jesus.
That is, their sources are apologetics written, at the least, a generation later, and not preserved in their current form for hundreds of years after that; Jewish scholarly writings of two centuries later, which have nothing to do with the topic and are merely gleaned for anything suggestive; the fortuitously-preserved and -discovered writings of an obscure cult, none of which was contemporary; and the Jewish historian Josephus, considered the best contemporaneous source we have, by far. And here is what Josephus–who noted John the Baptist, by the way–has to say about Jesus of Nazareth: [this space left intentionally blank]
This is the historical record of Jesus: there isn’t one. This need not inform someone’s faith in negative ways–we are dealing with the Bronze Age, which had nothing comparable to our modern concern with “facts”–but one ought, at least, to recognize the abilities of modern scholarship, and not claim certainty where none exists.
Scored 15 out of 15. Some of the Hindu and Buddhism stuff I knew from college courses. The rest must have come from being awake during the last thirty years while the exploits of the religious were constantly in the news. For instance, I know Ramadan because of discussions of whether we should curtail military activities in Iraq during that time. I know about the status of prayer in schools because every time there’s some heinous crime, someone blames it on that.
I aced the quiz, also. My undergraduate degree was from a liberal arts church-affiliated school, so that helped. And my general disinterest in all things holy and things not profane.
Odd about the correlation between the status of school prayer and heinous crimes. I thought that the occurance of heinous crime was attributable to the failure of Mike Judge to relase the Beavis and Butt-Head Do Christmas special on DVD. Or the exponential decrease in the ability of schoolchidren to locate Iraq on a map (that has all the names of the counties on it). Or the correlation between the number of Tea Party Members that can name more Stooges than the members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
And yet their man mitch says atheists are to blame for violence and war. See where CATO gave him a B, well, a very low B, as governor. It ended by saying, as a bad thing since he would not cut it to balance the budget, that mitch had a soft spot for education. Really.
As for religion, you can keep it–it is the true source of violence, war and hatred in the world over the history of man. The only good it does is as a distraction from reality. Instead of having to face severe loss or bad times, people turn to the mysterious workings of god to explain away tragedy and inhumanity. And they fight and hate in its name.
Atheists probably know more because it is wise to keep your enemies closer and know them well.
Mitch is on record as saying violence and war? Wow. Ain’t God been good to Indiana.
I got 15 out of 15 too, but that shows nothing about my religious beliefs (or lack thereof) — I was an anthropology major and was mostly paying attention, and have thus far mostly fended off senility. The trouble with this stuff is it’s really about religious customs and practices, and the history of religious organizations. What’s that got to do with God? As Lao-tzu observed in the opening phrase of the Tao Te Ching: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
Doughouse,
I didn’t ask you for any such thing. I was explaining my own thoughts on the matter to bring better understanding how someone could come to their own conclusion. I certainly wasn’t trying to convince a bunch of semi-anonymous people on a blog about Christianity, simply how I came to it on my own.
My point in listing the Wikipedia article was to point out that there is still active debate on “historical Jesus”, where Bob said there wasn’t any evidence. He might dispute that evidence, but it does exist. Wikipedia does have references at the bottom that points to sources. Like you pointed out, I wasn’t going to do the work for you.
Off-topic, but are you this angry all of the time, or is it just the way you write on the Internet?
Jason, I have a friend who says that given enough time all internet discussions become high school epistemology debates. So let’s back up:
You said, “Sources outside of the bible have confirmed that a man named Jesus was executed for claiming to be God.”
Bob said, “There is no historical record of a Jesus matching the description of the Christian Jesus outside of the New Testament. I would like for him to point out any exception to my statement.”
To which you replied with the Wiki link to “The Search for Historical Jesus”. So let us point out that that would be a substantive response if, and only if 1) you had claimed your mature Christianity was informed by the fact that people were still looking for an historical Jesus, not your discovery of confirmation, or 2) Bob had demanded proof there was still such a search, or denied the existence of Wikipedia. You haven’t answered his question, or, alternately, acknowledged his suggestion that your language was imprecise at best. Should be easy to do one or the other.
(To be brief–I’ll try anything once–there is no such thing as “history”, as we now understand it, in the Bronze Age. The closest thing we have, contemporary with the supposed Son of God, is Josephus. Despite attempts to make him say what he doesn’t, there’s no Jesus in his works. There’s none in Philo of Alexandria’s. There’s none. It’s not surprising. It’s not conclusive. One can’t prove a negative. One can only object to unwarranted assertions of the contrary.)
This is my take, by the way, on why non-theists have to be better informed about religion than their plerophoric brethren: they have to dodge flying mallets, hurtling evasions, and tangential ad hominems just to get to the arena.
By the way, no: my writing, internet and elsewhere, is just my poor substitute for what in a decent writer is called “style”. In real life I am much, much angrier.
Doughouse,
Point taken. I did a poor job explaining it, but I think I can best explain my view on it as “Since there is a lack of conclusive evidence either way, I choose to believe in theory: A”, where as others, including you I assume, say “I only believe what can be proven to me. Since there is a lack of evidence, I choose not to believe in anything being discussed.” As I said, I find that my life benefits by choosing to believe theory “A”, and I am not harmed if I am wrong. I assume you have also made the a similar conclusion about not believing.
This, literally, made me laugh out loud.
I know, I’m citing Wikipedia as did Jason and will surely be flayed mercilessly for it by Doghouse (whom I’ve got a lot of respect for), but it doesn’t seem like an open & shut case that Josephus never mentioned Jesus. At least, there is ongoing scholoary debate about that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus
Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible and my Mother told me so.
Oh God, please don’t allow me to become too smart.
Amen.
@ Doghouse
1. It’s the iron age, not the bronze age.
2. There was history in the iron age, just not a lot of it. Herodotus (i.e, “The Father of History,” Thucydides, and Livy) come to mind.
3. I’m an atheist, but I see no reason to doubt the historical Jesus. There were dozens of apocalyptic prophets around the near east at this time, and people ended up worshiping one of them; believing that they made him up sort of strains credulity because there’s no need for them to do that.
4. Excluding materials in the bible as evidence for Jesus’s existence strikes me as special pleading, since that’s the most likely place where writings about J. are going to end up. Literacy was very uncommon at this time, and it’s not as if there were newspapers around. There aren’t even many Roman sources (I think there’s one) discussing Pontius Pilate, even though he was the governor of a province.
5. Also, if you study the New Testament (which I did, and which confirmed me in my atheism), you will find lots of inconsistencies between the various sources in the NT, which to my mind supports their authenticity. You see, for example, J. saying that some of the people he was preaching to would still be alive when God’s kingdom was established. Oops…if J. was wrong about that, maybe he was wrong about some other things.
5(a). You also see some obviously made up parts – like the bit about the census and Jesus being born in Bethlehem. Basically all of the biblical sources point to J. as being from Nazareth…he’s usually referred to as J. of N., or the Nazarene, for example. However, there’s an OT passage which says that the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. Oops again. So what you have is this weird passage about a census for which there is no evidence (and Romans did keep track of things like this). And “weird” because this census purportedly required people to return to their birthplace to register for the census – which would have been insane. Millions of people would have been criss-crossing the Roman Empire at this time to get back to where they were born so that they can register for the census. The idea is not only crazy, it’s pointless, as you can conduct censuses without all of this. But what this suggests is that there *was* a historical Jesus of Nazareth, whose particulars were sufficiently well known (and inconvenient) that it caused later writers to try to come up with some reason to explain why the “Nazarene” was born in Bethlehem.
If they were just making this up from whole cloth, they could have just started with him being born in Bethlehem to begin with.
Too much scolastic argument on whether or nor Jesus of Nazereth existed. He may or may not have, but it is somewhat irrelevant to the topic. The actual theme, I think, must center on the existence of God himself. Disprove that hypothesis and Jesus becomes immaterial except as regards Christianity.
I was 16 years old — I’m 50 now — when I came to the conclusion that God could not exist, and I haven’t found any reason to change my mind.
My reasoning lies in the fact that the vast amount of religions, present and past, could not all be true. And there are many that have died from lack of followers. The Norse, the Mayan, the Egyptian, the Greek, to name but a few. Are these dead faiths less viable than current ones, or were they simply conquered and absorbed by the peoples that followed other religions? If the latter, then God must be primarily a god of control and conquest. If the former, only one faith can be the “true religion,” and all others must be stomped out through war.
Man does not really need a god to engage in those evils. Therefore, god is a fiction that has been exploited through the ages by those in power in order to retain control.
Sorry if this seems rambling or incoherent to those used to more of a fact-based debate.
I’m a practicing Catholic who converted at age 23 – and I see a lot of ways in which religion has been good and/ or evil. But on the lighter side of this – I also took the quiz and got a 15/15.. so maybe I also think?
I’m not quite sure where you get this:
Yes, men have used religion for their own gain, time and time again. That does not invalidate that God exists and is just as disgusted as us to see that.
There are many religions that allow for multiple religions worshiping the same God. IIRC, some Hindus accept other religions into their own, Baha’i is a religion that accepts all religions (somewhat like the Universalists), and even Islam says that Jews and Christians (people of the book) worship Allah in their own way and are to be respected (yeah, chew on that one for a while).
The multiplicity of faiths also suggests to me that none of them are right. They can’t all be correct. And, if so many are willing to reject all but one, why not reject one more? Why Jesus and not, say, Thor? Because your folks taught you about one when you were really young and not the other? Or is it something more substantial?
In any event, if 100 previous discussions of this nature are any guide, I don’t think there can be a satisfactory answer to those questions. Usually, you get to the point where someone says “it’s a matter of faith.” Then I shrug my shoulders and move on.
Sorry, Jason, but what believers say and what they do when push comes to shove are often two completely different things.
If you want to split hairs about the essense of individual religions, that’s okay. But it doesn’t change the fact that man is at heart not good, but evil, and those with the least scruples always rise to the top. Manipulation of religion — which is an outgrowth of ignorance and fear — is a great way to do that.
I know I cannot convince you of my beliefs because we begin from different places: You maintain God exists and I say he doesn’t. Neither of us can prove the argument.
Manfred,
Oddly enough, you agree with the idea of “original sin” (or at least the results of that), which many atheists point to as being absurd. It was my understanding that atheists or humanists (I assume they are the same, please correct) went with the base assumption that man was neither good nor evil.
No, and I’m not trying to. I really think it is a good thing for all involved to have some level of understanding with each other. Many people of faith are convinced that atheists can not be moral, since they have no religion on which to base their moral code. Many atheists think that people of faith are ignorant and are just doing what they were programmed to do. I hope that we’re seeing both stereotypes being torn down a little here.
Doug,
That does not mean that one can’t be correct, either. There are thousands of fad diets out there, but they only one (or ones) that result in losing weight is (calories consumed < calories burned).
Worshiping Jesus has a positive effect on my life. Jesus is the only God I know of that offers salvation freely, not by how many various hoops I jump through. Most other religions I know of either require a very rigid series of tasks someone must perform to earn assured salvation, or, they are told to do their best and they’ll find out after they die if they did good enough. Both of those types of things make it very easy for man to manipulate a religion to his own ends. And yes, let’s include Crusades & Inquisition Catholicism into the category where there are tasks for salvation. I’m not familiar enough with the current iteration of Catholicism to comment on it.
I am a fan of Thor, though, especially the “Ultimates” version of him.
But, if you believe in the Trinity, he’s the same God who condemned you in the first place. Offering you salvation freely is sort of playing with house money as far as he’s concerned.
That’s somewhat like saying it is the judge’s fault for following the law & putting someone in jail, rather than the criminal’s fault.
The best way I could explain my feelings on it is to imagine a perfect judge having to decide on a wreckless driving charge for his own daughter. Since he is a perfect judge, and she way guilt of the charge, he fines her the amount required by law, $500. He knows she doesn’t have $500.
So, after fining her $500 and explaining that if she can’t pay, she has to go to jail (yeah, I know this isn’t the way it works, but this is my story here. It is all fiction to you anyhow.).
Then, he takes off his robe, walks over to where she is stilling as her dad. He puts $500 on the table, then walks back to his stand & puts on his robe again. He asks, “Do you have $500 to pay this fine, or are you going to jail”.
She still has the free will to ignore the money on the table & go to jail. However, if she just accepts the mercy her dad gave her, she can avoid it.
The whole exercise to me is that I don’t think that anyone could handle spending eternity with a perfect God without accepting his forgiveness. Have you ever had to work with someone that seemed perfect, never seeming to make a mistake? Isn’t it annoying? Can you imagine that going on forever? I can, and I would hate it, unless I was 100% sure that the perfect person didn’t look down on me for not being perfect.
Wow, replace “way guilt” with “guilty”, and “where she is stilling” with “where she is sitting” Proofreading fail.
Jason: I also enjoyed your use of the term “wreckless driving”. It was pretty punny.
*sigh* I saw that later as well, but I figured I’ve given enough ammunition to those that feel that people of faith have less intelligence. I’d plead the 5th from here on out & stop helping the prosecution.
In the heat of discourse I was once refered to as a ‘Chicago Catholic ‘. Whether that’s valid isn’t the issue.The intent was to put me in my place,identify my culture and downgrade ‘my religion’ pointing out ‘with proof’ I couldn’t be a true Christian.Therefore, everything I maintained religiously and politically would be automatically invalid.My reponse was that I thought he must not have been to Chicago and doesn’t know the history of Christianity.
This may sounds like a fringe type comment,not typical,but so much of this level of comment is widespread in politial chat groups: irrational ..theres just no where to go from that point on.
So ,yes ,I would guess that an atheist might would know about religion than others,but the goal is not ‘to know’, the goal is ‘to be right’.