Mormons are average
Clark of Mormon Metaphysics says below:
My impression is that atheists, Mormons and Jews did best simply because all three groups tend to be well educated. (Someone mentioned stats adjusted for education but I couldn’t see where that was noted although maybe I just missed the obvious)
This is not an unfounded assertion, as it is “common […]
Religious illiteracy is the norm
By now you probably know that:
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 […]
Obnoxious speech and trusting the Other
Update: After watching the videos of what went down at the cultural festival I seem to have unwittingly slandered the Act 17 missionaries. They behaved well and were obviously unjustly arrested. Their YouTube site is testimony to the reality though that they’re pretty shallow and obnoxious in some contexts, but that’s frankly not atypical for […]
The dismal gods
Larry Witham’s Marketplace of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion is a manifestly ill-timed book. He states that “…around 2006 I began to notice a good deal of hoopla in the book market about economic explanations for just about everything-books that were best sellers.” Marketplace of the Gods was obviously written to capitalize on the […]
America the Catholic, t + 40 years
Bryan Caplan points to a quote from Will Durant’s The Lessons of History: In the United States the lower birth rate of the Anglo-Saxons has lessened their economic and political power; and the higher birth rate of Roman Catholic families suggest that by the year 2000 the Roman Catholic Church will be the dominant force […]
Atheists and the legal system
This article at The Jury Expert serves as a nice review of literature. Here’s their summary: Atheists are unique and individual (just like all of us) and we have to attend to the attitudes, beliefs and life experiences that all of us (even atheists) bring to the table as jurors. Conversely, jurors need to be […]
The origins of morality do not matter | Razib Khan
Mothers will makes sacrifices for their children, whether they believe in God, karma, or a mindless evolutionary processIs morality meaningless when its natural foundations are exposed? No, unlike the naked emperor there is a clear substance to the gen…
Only a minority of Iranian Americans are Muslims
According to this survey done by Zogby International. The numbers:
42% Muslim
9% Christian
6% Jews
5% Zoroastrian
7% Bahai
31% “Other” (the pollsters presume this is mostly those with “No religion”)
The sample size was small, only around 400. And it seems really strange that there was a religious option for “Other” but not “No Religion,” but perhaps the pollsters simply […]
The temple that time forget
Aziz points me to a Newsweek article, History in the Remaking, on the Göbekli Tepe temple complex. The piece is a bit breathless:
Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has […]
Methodists are still Baptists who can read
Income by Religions:
Good has a rather unwieldy graph showing religion by income. No surprises, with Jews first and Hindus second in percent with six figure incomes, and Jehovah’s Witnesses and black Protestant churches last. It would be interesting to know whether there are still affluence distinctions mainline white Protestants, such as Episcopalian v. Methodist.
On a […]
The rise of the irreligious Left, the reemergence of Republican religious neutrality (?)
Over at ScienceBlogs I have a post up where I explore the differences by state between the American Religious Identification Survey in 1990 and 2008. I then compare these data to the national election results in 1988 and 2008.
Here is a chart which shows the relationship between % “No Religion” and proportion of votes for […]
After the fact
Daniel Larison has a post up where he criticizes a David Brooks column. Here’s what Larison observes (Brooks’ quote within):David Brooks is right that culture and habits matter, but this one line rang false:There is the influence of the voodoo religion…
The unpredictable darkness | Razib Khan
In complex and non-linear systems, the only thing we know is that our predictions are unreliable. I fear the reliably unpredictable
I fear the predictable unpredictable. Over the past decade there have been many warnings about Global Warming; precise extrapolations of temperature increases and projections of sea level rise. Such prognostication is understandable, they make the threat concrete to a complacent public. But the reality is that these physical processes are non-linear systems subject to wild fluctuations, with “flips” between alternative equilibrium states. Try to turn that into punchy prose!
The unpredictable darkness | Razib Khan
In complex and non-linear systems, the only thing we know is that our predictions are unreliable. I fear the reliably unpredictableI fear the predictable unpredictable. Over the past decade there have been many warnings about Global Warming; precise ex…
The “Jews” of Afghanistan?
Hazaras Hustle to Head of the Class in Afghanistan: For much of this country’s history, the Hazara were typically servants, cleaners, porters and little else, a largely Shiite minority sidelined for generations, and in some instances massacred, by Pash…
Nicholas Wade & Razib Khan on bloggingheads.tv
Here. Or embedded:We talk about The Faith Instinct.
The old old time religion
Ross Douthat, Into The Mystic:But as the Pew chart suggests, there is one sense in which religion was less influential in mid-century American life than it is today, and that’s the realm of personal mystical experience. Slightly more people went to chu…
Why are Mormons the American success story?
I was skimming through a book on Scandinavian migration to Utah the other day, these Scandinavians being converts to Mormonism. The author noted that while most Scandinavian Americans settled in areas where farming was relatively easy, these converts w…