Athiests, Agnostics, know more about religion than fundies

[Athena]

I only got one wrong - who cares about 'the great awakening' anyways? Lol!

Signed,

Atheist

[Daenerys]

I only got one wrong - who cares about 'the great awakening' anyways? Lol!

Signed,

Atheist

I got 15/15 but only randomly, I have no idea what that is. Is it an American thing?

[pomology]

I only got one wrong - who cares about 'the great awakening' anyways? Lol!

Signed,

Atheist

lol caring about history is stupid.

[Athena]

I got 15/15 but only randomly, I have no idea what that is. Is it an American thing?

I think so. Maybe that's why I don't know it? TBH though, I don't know a lot about the evangelicals...

[Kaylee]

I got 15/15 but only randomly, I have no idea what that is. Is it an American thing?

Yes. There were actually a couple Great Awakenings. They were all times when there were a bunch of religious revivals and churches and religious groups grew and/or new denominations sprung up.

The first was in the early 1700s (1720-1740 or so) in New England. The main preachers were Jonathan Edwards & George Whitefield - it was a big revival, mostly among Calvinist types and people who were already churchgoers, that got people more emotionally involved in their faith and more interested in personal piety and studying the Bible at home. It also led to more interest in religious freedom and some people credit it with being one of the things leading up to & supporting the American Revolution.

The 2nd was in the early-mid 1800s. The most famous name out of it is Charles Finney who was an Arminian (the opposite of Calvinist), but there were a bunch of preachers at revivalists at the time and a lot of new denominations came out of this time period (Church of Christ, Adventists, LDS) and the Methodists and Baptists both spread and gained a lot of influence through it. It was more focused on the unchurched and more rural and is associated with the "anxious bench" and the type of decisionism we see in revivals now - getting people emotionally worked up until they come up front crying and carrying on to pray for salvation. In society, it lead to a bunch of reform movements including the temperance and abolition movements and the idea of the Social Gospel - the responsibility of Christians to ease suffering and solve societal problems & injustice.

The first 2 are the most historically important, but some historians also recognized a 3rd Great Awakening in the late 1800s with the Holiness & Pentecostal movements coming out of it and an interest in postmillenial theology and the idea that the Second Coming of Christ would happen after Christians had changed the world to prepare it for the coming kingdom. Some also consider the post-WWII era to be a 4th Great Awakening, with the big evangelical crusades and the beginnings of fundamentalism and political activism from religious groups.

[chiccy]

I got 15/15. I don't really profess a religion but I'm not an atheist.

I am constantly surprised by how little fundies know about actual Christian history and theology, to say nothing of the other groups'.

[teddybear]

I got 100% too.

[ShadowyOne]

14/15, all but the last, like many people. My last American History class was quite a while ago! :roll: I thought that as a whole, they were ridiculously easy, but then I am one of those researching atheists, and have a very multicultural circle. I also found the % of responders who got the question right to be interesting - only 39% knew who Job was?

[QAF_Rocks]

:::bragging::: I took the test when it first came out a few years ago and got all 32 questions right.

I didn't know anything about religion when I was growing up as an atheist kid, but the amount of reading/documentary watching I've done since then more than makes up for it. ;)

[Shana]

Someone should tweet the test to smuggler. Lets see what he gets on it.

I took the test and got an 87%

Totally OT, but the name smuggler made me imagine him as the Hamburglar!

[Cran]

I got the Great Awakening wrong and one of the questions about US-law about religion, I feel kinda bad :?

[Markie]

I took the test and got 15/15. I guessed on the Great Awakening. I haven't been to church in years and even when I did go my mind would wander and I would squirm and wonder why the pews couldn't be more comfortable. I do read a lot of historical fiction and have an Honours BA in History from an evil University. As a teacher, I do teach about different concepts/ideas of religions. Not this is what you MUST believe, but this is what many people believe or the author believed.

[2xx1xy1JD]

I took a look at the question-by-question breakdown of responses according to each group.

The main factor leading to high scores for Jews seemed to be knowledge of other religions. I thought it was interesting that more Jews got the Ramadan question than the Job one. Jews also got noticeably higher scores on the Hinduism question, the Buddhist one and the Pakistan one. Surprisingly, more Jews than Protestants knew about Martin Luther. I suspect that the reason is that Jews are more likely than other groups to live in urban, multicultural areas, and to have college education (which may involve learning about Martin Luther in history class, or knowing enough about geography to know something about Pakistan).

I wonder why the survey didn't rank the knowledge of other non-Christian religious groups?

[Miggy]

I didn't know the one about teachers and US law but as I am not American I'm not feeling too bad.

Does this survey actually prove anything we didn't already know? Most religious people (any and all religions) do not study comparative religion. They know a lot about their own religion but very little about anyone elses. Protestant Christians know very little about Catholics, Catholics know very little about Protestants, Sunni Muslims know very little about Shi'ites and Shi'ites know very little about Sunnis and it goes on. All we know is that we are right and everyone else is wrong. Those who don't follow a specific religion are far more likely to have actually learnt about all religions. (I am a Protestant Christian with a B.Arts in History & Religious Studies.)

[Lady]

I got 100% as well. However, I have spent time as a non-believer before settling down as a liberal Christian. I'm also dating an atheist, so I do know quite a bit about religion.

[ChunkyBarbie]

I scored 87%, I am shocked. I trully thought I would score less than 10%. I am constantly amazed at the scripture and biblical knowledge that FJers routinely demonstrate and of which I am without a clue. I guess reading Free Jinger has truly been educational in many ways.

[Zoom]

I got 100% but I will admit I did just read a book on Christian Church History which is what helped me with the great awakening one. The rest I got from a combination of being a nerd and a good solid public school education in one of the most secular countries in the world.

[emmiedahl]

I got 100%. But I have had a weird religious life. My mother was kind of a religion-hopper when I was young, so I was exposed to Buddhism, Native American religions, Wicca and Islam. We are Jewish and some of my relatives are in that gray area I call Conservadox, so I know a lot about Judaism. And I went to a Lutheran school for a few years where most religion and history lessons somehow ended with a note about that perfect human being, Martin Luther.

That said, I think a lot of my general knowledge about Christianity comes from the fact that it is an annoyance I have to deal with on a regular basis. The same reason I know how to rid the house of common pests, or what OTC medication works best for various types of headaches. Understanding your oppressor is the first step to ending the oppression.

[RR88]

:::bragging::: I took the test when it first came out a few years ago and got all 32 questions right.

I didn't know anything about religion when I was growing up as an atheist kid, but the amount of reading/documentary watching I've done since then more than makes up for it. ;)

I took the original test, too, and scored a 30/32. Both of my "wrong" answers had to do with Christianity. I thought that the questions to do with non-Christian religions were fairly basic...then again, I've never met a person who didn't know who Maimonides was, what Ramadan is, or the basic tenets of Buddhism.

[Burris]

:::bragging::: I took the test when it first came out a few years ago and got all 32 questions right.

If I recall correctly, I got them all right as well. A lot of the questions, especially on the shorter test, are fairly easy.

There's something wrong in part of the Christian church, both mainline and fundie - a fierce incuriosity . Lest questions should breed doubt, these are sometimes discouraged. The result is an easily manipulated political force with little in the way of actual information.

Snopes.com has an library of the ludicrous shit some of these people have taken for the truth - and since the authors of Snopes spend a lot of time debunking idiocy coming specifically from the right, they've been tarred as liberally biased. (Yup; the same people who discovered Pepsi uses aborted fetuses have "fact checked" snopes.com and found it to be ultra, super-duper liberal.)