I happened to look some more at the Pew Forum's recent "U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey," and was relieved to find that one of the groups identified actually "knew less about religion" than some of the Christian groups:
The "nothings in particular" knew slightly less than the white evangelical Protestants, the white Catholics, and the white mainline Protestants. It doesn't really seem fair to say that "no one [among the groups identified by the study] is more ignorant about religion than a Christian."
Christians, in other words, are saved not only by Jesus but also by the nothings in particular!
Um, Ken, are you quite sure that "all the other groups have some sort of cultural cohesion"? The identified Protestant groups are all hodgepodges of variously warring factions. Even among Catholics, some go against the official doctrine "that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ," wanting to have it that the holy comestibles are merely symbols, like a good many of those "mainline Protestants," who are probably even more hodgepodge than the Catholic groups.
ReplyDeleteIncohesive the nothings in particular may be, but they sure provided a sweet pretext for a bit of polemical fun and a nifty pun on "saved."
Thank you for providing (with your comment) the pretext for me to comment on the hodgepodgery of Christian denominations.
Ken, I don't know what happened, but your comment to which I was replying above went AWOL. Here is its text:
ReplyDelete"In what sense is 'nothing in particular' a cohesive group? I can imagine acid trippers, feral adults from the Blue Ridge Mountains, perpetual convicts, and lobotomy patients in this 'group.' Well, maybe not, but all the other groups have some sort of cultural cohesion."
Sincerely sorry about the mix-up.
Ha, I just noticed my odd word "incohesive," which I don't find in Webster's Collegiate. But neither do I find "uncohesive," although some websites for antonyms suggest "nonadhesive" and "fragmented."
The nothings in particular seem to me to have the same credentials with respect to the survey as, for example, white evangelical Christians. That is, with respect to religion, they "don't believe anything." Especially given that even the people who "believe in God" believe in nothing that exists (literally "not anything"), what's the difference?
ReplyDeleteI might write about the survey's highly suspect assumption that by scoring high on their thirty-two questions one thereby demonstrates "knowledge about religion." Since that sort of "knowledge" is superficial, I'm willing to ignore the standing of the nothings in particular in the Pew Forum's table and grant your original contention, pending a more insightful survey on which I'm fairly confident that Christians would fare even worse. Possibly they'd do slightly better than Muslims, however.
Ken, aren't you wondering why I guess that Muslims might do less well than Christians on a "more insightful survey" into "religious knowledge"?
ReplyDeleteThat hypothesis (and I do mean hypothesis in the scientific sense of a yet-untested assumption) comes from knowing a bit about Islam and Islamic education. "Islam" of course means "submission [to God]," which goes hand-in-hand with a very authoritarian way of indoctrinating young people (as described harrowingly in, for example, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's memoir, Infidel). I figure that people indoctrinated largely by rote don't think much about what they believe and never gain much insight into what religion is all about. (Not that much Christian indoctrination isn't similar, but I get the impression that it's more the rule in Islamic cultures.)
Does my hypothesis not seem sound to you now?