A new survey from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life:
Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions. On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.
You can take a version of the quiz online. I may be of the demographic Pew thinks is lacking but I got a perfect score.
I didn’t realize Beliefnet was back up for sale. GetReligion looks at the Murdoch/Fox era and wonders where it might go next:
This raises an interesting question for people who enjoy reading about religion news and trends. Who is the most logical marriage partner for Beliefnet.com? By this, I mean, who could afford to purchase that unique collection of blogs and faith-driven sites? If there is to be a marriage, and not a funeral, who is a logical partner?
From GetReligion, The Church of the New York Times:
There are two kinds of people in the U.S. zip codes that really matter. There are people get up on Sunday morning and head off to church. Then there are people who arise and settle down to consume a different sacrament — a cup of coffee (or two) and the Sunday New York Times. Yes, there are people who do both. But, even then, which sacred rite comes first? Which rite defines and informs the other?
Is religious certainty a sin? Where’s the dialog and crossover between the “Sunday activities” of church and informed news reading? Here’s Kenneth L Woodward’s article in Commonweal that started the discussion.
In Killing the Buddha, what the Anglican schism over sexuality has to do with the colonial legacy in Africa:
Unsurprisingly, the first thing the British did after they had made significant inroads into the region was to ban all worship of the goddess and to insist that all households be composed of one man, one woman, and their biological children. From that moment on, a priestess or female husband was out of a job. From one angle, then, what the Anglican world is witnessing is not the imposition of some “primitive” mindset upon a “modern” Anglo-American Church, but rather, a redeployment of the modern code of gender and church hierarchy imposed upon West and East Africans at the turn of the century.
From GetReligion, which watches news coverage of religious issues.
Once again, we have the f-word [fundamentalist] used in a news report in a way that does nothing to add factual material to the story… Can we all agree that the subways in Moscow were not attacked by bands of very conservative Protestants who are willing to sign the Fundamentals of the Faith documents of the early 20th century? Note that the usage of the f-word in this story clouds another issue. What do the rebels actually want? Is a “fundamentalist Caucasus Emirate” the same thing as an Islamic republic? What kind? What form of government, rooted in what approach to Sharia?
New-to-me site, though I think I’ve stumbled on it before. Stephen Dotson was over today and recommended it. Below is part of it’s manifesto. Sounds like a useful outreach project. They seem to have a lot of funny taglines.
Killing the Buddha is a religion magazine for people made anxious by churches, people embarrassed to be caught in the “spirituality” section of a bookstore, people both hostile and drawn to talk of God. It is for people who somehow want to be religious, who want to know what it means to know the divine, but for good reasons are not and do not. If the religious have come to own religious discourse it is because they alone have had places where religious language could be spoken and understood. Now there is a forum for the supposedly non-religious to think and talk about what religion is, is not and might be. Killing the Buddha is it.
I’ve mostly ignored Brit Hume’s comment this week but this is an interesting take:
In practice, the admirable principle that nobody should be persecuted for their beliefs often blurs into the more illiberal idea that nobody should ever publicly criticize another religion. Or champion one’s own faith as an alternative. Or say anything whatsoever about religion, outside the privacy of church, synagogue or home.
If you treat your faith like a hothouse flower, too vulnerable to survive in the crass world of public disputation, then you ensure that nobody will take it seriously. The idea that religion is too mysterious, too complicated or too personal to be debated on cable television just ensures that it never gets debated at all.
This doesn’t mean that we need to welcome real bigotry into our public discourse. But what Hume said wasn’t bigoted: Indeed, his claim about the difference between Buddhism and Christianity was perfectly defensible. Christians believe in a personal God who forgives sins. Buddhists, as a rule, do not. And it’s at least plausible that Tiger Woods might welcome the possibility that there’s Someone out there capable of forgiving him, even if Elin Nordegren and his corporate sponsors never do.
Or maybe not. For many people — Woods perhaps included — the fact that Buddhism promotes an ethical life without recourse to Christian concepts like the Fall of Man, divine judgment and damnation is precisely what makes it so appealing. The knee-jerk outrage that greeted Hume’s remarks buried intelligent responses from Buddhists, who made arguments along these lines — explaining their faith, contrasting it with Christianity, and describing how a lost soul like Woods might use Buddhist concepts to climb from darkness into light.
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You may have felt you were ready to listen to me as long as you thought I had anything new to say; but if it turns out to be only religion, well, the world has tried that and you cannot put the clock back.
If anyone is feeling that way I should like to say three things to him. First, as to putting the clock back. Would you think I was joking if I said that you can put a clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is often a very sensible thing to do? But I would rather get away from that whole idea of clocks. We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.
We have all seen this when doing arithmetic. When I have started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start over again, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing progressive about being pigheaded and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think that if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.
""I’ll leave them to their theology. I’m out to save souls. I have more friends among doctors than among ministers."
"Finally I’d like to mention something I’ve noticed about my generation. If they catch a whiff of hypocrisy, they’re outta there. They want to live their lives authentically—in whatever way that may be to them. They dislike people and organizations, be they religious or secular, that say one thing and do another. This is why—at least in part—we see such personal devastation when someone representing the church behaves so badly. It stinks of both inauthenticity and hypocrisy. It’s just yucky."
"We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man."
"One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children…All the thrills of religion and none of the cost."
A photo slideshow/essay from Triple Canopy. On left: Googleplex, on right Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church.
