Bloggasm

As an outspoken atheist, I consistently find myself entering online Religion vs. Atheism debates. After responding to the flimsy stock-arguments of Christians, I’ll inevitably do an informal poll on how many of the Christians in the debate have read the Bible from cover to cover. Growing up in the US, I’ve met no small number of Christians, very few of which have actually bothered to read a substantial amount of their own religious text. I find it silly that such a large group of people can claim to devote their lives to God, to praise him as their savior, and to spend every waking moment trying to gain passage to Heaven, and yet very few of them can even bother to read a book a few thousand pages long. It’s like a lawyer spending thousands of dollars and years in law school while never managing to actually read the Constitution.

A recent Newsweek article confirmed my belief that few Christians know even basic information about their own faith: The Gospel of Prothero:

In spite of the fact that more than 90 percent of Americans say they believe in God, only a tiny portion of them knows a thing about religion. When he began teaching college 17 years ago, Prothero writes, he discovered that few of his students could name the authors of the Christian Gospels. Fewer could name a single Hindu Scripture. Almost no one could name the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Prothero, who went to Yale in the early 1980s and speaks of his all-night bull sessions on politics and religion with reverence, realized that to re-create that climate in his classroom, his students first had to know something. And so he made it his job to (1) figure out what they didn’t know and (2) teach it to them. He began giving religious literacy quizzes to his students, and, subsequently, to everyone he knew. Almost everybody failed.

Many of these are the same Christians who attack science on a daily basis, trying to comb through scientific facts they don’t understand to take statements out of context and push their own religious views into our political system and our schools. Does anyone remember the Colbert interview where the congressman couldn’t even name the ten commandments? Or the Daily Show interview with the guy from Raptureletters.com who couldn’t cite the Bible passage that predict the rapture?

And these are the people who control our government, following the words of an imaginary deity who they can’t even find the energy to worship properly.

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Related posts: Evolution Sunday: I’m not impressed, Prominent columnist at the Washington Times calls for senators to be hanged, Interview with Rantingprofs