Atheists Get Top Score on Religious Knowledge Survey

                    
The Pew Forum recently released their U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey results concerning religious knowledge based on religious affiliation. The poll image and the following quote are taken from from: http://pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx

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. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.

           How do you match up? Their sample quiz is available Here

Carl Sagan: The 4th Dimension

Carl Sagan helps us think about something that is imposable to imagine in this fascinating clip.

BBC: Postmodernist Position on Religion

Click here to view original publication from the BBC website. The following article outlines a theoretical lens through which this blog views God and Religion.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism does away with many of the things that religious people regard as essential.

For postmodernists every society is in a state of constant change; there are no absolute values, only relative ones; nor are there any absolute truths.

This promotes the value of individual religious impulses, but weakens the strength of 'religions' which claim to deal with truths that are presented from 'outside', and given as objective realities.

In a postmodern world there are no universal religious or ethical laws, everything is shaped by the cultural context of a particular time and place and community.

In a postmodern world individuals work with their religious impulses, by selecting the bits of various spiritualities that 'speak to them' and create their own internal spiritual world. The 'theology of the pub' becomes as valid as that of the priest.

The inevitable conclusion is that religion is an entirely human-made phenomenon.

Precedents

This is not a very new development. In Japan, many people have adopted both Shinto and Buddhist ideas in their religious life for some time. In parts of India, Buddhism co-exists with local tribal religions. Hinduism, too, is able to incorporate many different ideas.

Ways to God

In a world where there is no objectively existing God "out there", and where the elaborate sociological and psychological theories of religion don't seem to ring true, the idea of regarding religion as the totality of religious experiences has some appeal.

Religion in this theory is created, altered, renewed in various formal interactions between human beings.

Images and ideas of God are manufactured in human activity, and used to give specialness ('holiness'?) to particular relationships or policies which are valued by a particular group.

There is no one 'right' or 'wrong' religion - or sanctifying theory. There are as many as there are groups and interactions, and they merge and join, divide and separate over and over again. Some are grouped together under the brand names of major faiths, and they cohere with varying degrees of consistency. Others, although clearly religious in their particular way, would reject any such label.

Some examples

Some of these interactions are labeled 'religious': rites of passage like weddings and funerals, regular worship services, prayer meetings, meditation sessions, retreats.

Some of these are just the rituals of everyday life. These include cooking and cleaning, and working. (Many established religions had that insight a long time ago - although they required the actions to be carried out with a particular attitude of mind to count as religious.)

Yet others are group actions designed to "bring about the Kingdom of God" on earth. These are often initiatives for social change, or charity work, or fighting for individual human rights.

These dramas remove religion from the exclusive narratives of scriptures, or the lifestyle rules of various faith communities, and bring religion into everyday life.

They enable people from different faiths, or none, to work together in religious acts when they engage in social action - they are working to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth, and they don't worry about who God is, or whether God is.

Sam Harris: The Problem With Atheism

Sam Harris states a great deal of my thoughts on atheism and spirituality in this two part video. Here he makes the key distinction between iron age mythic belief and spirituality as a contemplative practice. These categories  resemble the dichotomy William James makes in his descriptions of religion of the 'sick soul', and religion of the 'healthy minded'.

Sam Harris makes the following key points in the video:
- There is more to life than momentary pleasures
- We have an inability to break from discursive modes of thought
- We must first spend time building up our spiritual practice in order to fairly judge contemplative claims
- Atheists must not simply dismiss all spiritual experience as bad science or bad philosophy
- Atheism seems have a disinterest in such available experiences or equate them with banal pleasures
- Atheists may appear less wise than the religious opponents for their sloppy judgment of such experiences
- The universe is stranger than atheists tend to advocate
- We must convince a myth infatuated world that love and curiosity are sufficient

A World Without Religion?

Would the world be better off without any sort of religious or mystical practice? Many early enlightenment thinkers saw a world without religion as a rationalists utopia. At a point in my early times of agnosticism I shared this Utopian view of the ideal society. I have fraught the existential battle between rationality and mysticism for quite some time now and have come to my current thinking that religion and mysticism do have a valuable social purpose. Although religion has an extremely bloody past that has arguably caused more harm than good, the past does not need to be considered when considering its present social value. This idea of history bearing no weight on the present value of a system comes largely from the interdisciplinary thinker William James.

William James in The varieties of religious experience looked at people who described themselves as having transcendent experiences. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states the following about James's conclusions on the usefulness of religion:

James sets out a central distinction of the book in early chapters on “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness” and “The Sick Soul.” The healthy-minded religious person — Walt Whitman is one of James's main examples — has a deep sense of “the goodness of life,” (V, 79) and a soul of “sky-blue tint” (V, 80). Healthy-mindedness can be involuntary, just natural to someone, but often comes in more willful forms. Liberal Christianity, for example, represents the triumph of a resolute devotion to healthy-mindedness over a morbid “old hell-fire theology” (V, 91).

James makes the distinction between a religion of harm and a religion of 'healthy-mindedness'. Looking at the 'healthy minded' views of Walt Whitman, one will find him to have accepted and adopted all religious texts, myths, and theories, while believing in none. He was a deist who believed the sole is imminent, transcendent (interestingly paradoxical), and immortal. His skeptical open-mindedness tended to the human spirit without belief in a specific theistic religious figure. William James asserted that all religious experience was the same at its core level. This illuminates the fact that it is not religion we should concern ourselves with, but with the core spiritual aspects that are universally shared amongst them.

I see great value in the way certain individuals view spirituality. It is too easy to cast out the idea of spirituality as a whole and dismiss it as irrational fluffy thinking; although, I agree that most religious practice (especially in highly conservative areas) it is just that. Instead, We must look closer at the positive aspects of spirituality found amongst the worlds religions. The great enlightenment value of pure rationality must be taken off the high and mighty throne to make room for other important aspects of human experience. We are thinking-beings just as much as we are feeling-beings. Cultivating rational thinkers is very important, although, this can and should be done alongside the cultivation of passion.

The Purpose of Spiritual Practice

I recently came back from a weekend fitness conference where I had my first official experience in the practice of yoga meditation. Being the open minded skeptic I am, I went into the experience open to new possibilities with my stubborn malarkey detector on high gear constantly brining me back to reality. I found myself constantly struggling between the idea that this practice was just fluffy thinking, and the idea that this practice can actually allow you to live with a heightened sense of well-being.

After completing a surprisingly deep meditation I was convinced that this was real, only to find myself becoming the skeptic a few minutes after I left the workshop. I turned to a person who was in the workshop and asked, "I seem to really feel the effects of the energy in meditation, but I realize I'm probably just deluding myself into feeling something thats not really there..."  the person responded to me with a piece of insight that has stuck with me ever since: "Isn't that the point of religion?"

Ever since that workshop I have realized we can live with both spiritual practice and skepticism. Meditating on a certain type of energy, repeating mantras, praying the rosary, and singing hymns all have a certain healing power that is often overlooked: the power of the mind. The theory behind these practices may not be scientifically valid, but that is not the point. The point is that these practices are powerful tools that allow one to achieve alternate states of mind conducive to living well.