Atheist Thought Experiments Debunked #4

                                                          +AJPM+                      

                  "Atheists know more about religion than religious people do"

THE ANGEL POSSENTI:

If you're as sick as I am with atheists claiming they know more about religions than religious people and wish you can nail them with their obvious lie before they expose how ignorant they actually are, then look no further.

I've looked into where exactly this myth came from and the best source I can find is from a Pew Center Poll conducted in 2010. Out of all the various conclusions, the one people ran with for the most part was atheists knew more about religion than religious people.

But what if, as is so often the case, atheists have everything wrong, or at best are missing the point?

The point is overall atheists didn't score that much better than everyone else. It also turns out the study used a flawed methodology.

First off, every religious group used in the study would have failed the test if it were graded on a 100 point scale. Atheists did score 20.9 but that was out of 32, which means overall they do not know that much more about religion.

Second, for some reason, Protestants and Catholics were divided by race but no one else was. This is even more baffling considering Pew later admitted they couldn't find a racial difference in scores in a follow up study on their own data.

Third, the questions used were so obscure and so distant from in-depth spiritual knowledge that you'd have to watch Jeopardy on a frequent basis to get all the answers right.

Don't believe me? Without Googling or using Wikipedia, answer these two questions straight from the quiz:

1. Jonathan Edwards participated in what religious movement in America?
2. True or false: A public school teacher is allowed to read from the Bible as an example of literature.

I picked theses two questions especially because according to the study, these were the ones atheists were most likely to get wrong.

My point is this: if you're going to make the case atheists know more, shouldn't you have made a quiz that has more in-depth knowledge about religion? In fact, I've done that with atheists, and I can attest every single time, atheists have failed to show they know more than I do.

But maybe I'm not being fair, so here's a link to a quiz. If any atheist can score higher than 97 (my score) then we'll talk.

Until then, I will maintain my stand that atheists are idiots.


Sources
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2010/10/flawed_pew_poll_on_religious_k.html