Tuesday, March 20, 2007

If you haven't seen this yet (it's about a week old), I'd highly encourage you to check out this fantastic Wonkette post, Jesus-Loving Americans Totally Ignorant of Jesus, Religion. (It's like an Onion article, only real!)

[T]he way people go on about Jesus and how the Terrorist Muslims are coming to take away our precious freedoms guaranteed by Jesus to each American, you’d think they at least knew some goddamned simple bible stories. No. They actually don’t know anything about anything.
The sixteen-point list that is the crux of the post is almost guaranteed to make you chuckle. Here are two of my favorites:
  • 98% of Americans profess belief in a monotheistic God, with 81% claiming to be "Christian." And...
  • Only one in three Americans can name the four Gospels, while less than half can even name one of them.
In other words, at least 40% of the people who self-identify as Christian can't name any of the Gospels. 40%! I love the Christian right.

(Cautionary note: a few of the sources cited in the Wonkette piece are less than ideal; I recognize that, and I wouldn't recommend citing them in an academic article on religious hypocrisy. But I've seen enough polling data on religion to know that the numbers Wonkette's quoting are, at the very worst, not far off base. Should you rely on them as scientifically accurate? No, probably not. But can you rely on them as anecdotally accurate? Absolutely. It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world.)

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