Mitchell Landsberg of the LA Times, recently wrote an article for Fox13News that explores a Pew research study on knowledge of religion, with a breakdown of different groups. According to the study, agnostics and atheists knew more about religion than any other group. This reminds me of Omar Khayyám’s poem, from the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, that Hitchens also includes in his book The Portable Atheist:
The Koran! well, come put me to the test-
Lovely old book in hideous error drest-
Believe me, I can quote the Koran too,
The unbeliever knows his Koran best.
For those keen to the fact that atheists and agnostics are typically more educated, and that this education itself might cause the discrepancy, the Fox article explains the following:
Atheists and agnostics also tend to be relatively well educated, and the survey found, not surprisingly, that the most knowledgeable people were also the best educated. However, it said that atheists and agnostics also outperformed believers who had a similar level of education.
The possible implications to this are obvious. Religious people seem to accept their religion as true, without investigating it. Even amongst average evangelicals, atheists and agnostics answered more of the questions correctly.
You can take a quiz on some of the questions yourself to see how you stand up here.
See also: Religious Literacy: Americans Don’t Know Much About Religion
[...] Show Notes http://anamericanatheist.org/2010/10/07/answers-in-genesis-publishes-cutting-edge-research/ http://anamericanatheist.org/2010/09/30/hipster-christianity/ http://anamericanatheist.org/2010/09/28/atheists-and-agnostics-most-knowledgable-about-religion/ [...]