Eideard

Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion.

Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life.

On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons…“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.

That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

No surprise to me. I’ve been an atheist since I was 13 years old, a philosophical materialist since 18.

Still does.

Brits and Europeans have a clearer image of Blair than do Americans
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Tony Blair is preparing to launch a “faith offensive” across the United States over the next year, after building up relationships with a network of influential religious leaders and faith organisations.

With Afghanistan and Iraq casting a shadow over his popularity at home in Britain, Blair’s focus has increasingly shifted across the Atlantic, to where the nexus of faith and power is immutable and he is feted like a rock star.

According to the annual accounts of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, a UK-based charity that promotes cohesion between the major faiths, the foundation is to develop a US arm that will pursue a host of faith-based projects. The accounts show that his foundation has an impressive – and, in at least one case, controversial – set of faith contacts. Sitting on some £4.5m in funds as of April last year, mostly gathered through donations, it is now well placed to make its voice heard.

The foundation’s advisory council of religious leaders includes Rick Warren, powerful founder of the California-based Saddleback church. It attracts congregations of nearly 20,000 and is reportedly one of the largest in the US. Warren, who has addressed the UN and the World Economic Forum in Davos, has been named one of the “15 world leaders who matter most” and one of the “100 most influential people in the world”…

Mostly, the opinion of fools..

That Blair, a charismatic politician driven by faith, should be at home across the Atlantic is no surprise to political analysts. “He comes across as confident and persuasive,” said Professor Shawn Bowler, of the University of California at Riverside. “He does not talk like a modern robo-candidate in the way so many US political figures do.” Unlike in the UK, Blair’s religious fervour is seen as a strength. “Blair is very open about his faith and that plays a lot better in the US than in Britain,” Bowler said…

RTFA. I would expect him to rake in the gold from True Believers. Belief is stronger than reality for neurotic nutballs. Patting a bowed head is easier than feeding a starving child.

Perhaps he’ll invite George W. Bush to aid him in his New World Crusade.

Bristol Palin, poster child for abstinence-only results
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

After more than a decade of declining teenage pregnancy, the pregnancy rate among girls ages 15 to 19 increased 3 percent from 2005 to 2006 — a turnaround likely to intensify the debate over federal financing for abstinence-only sex education.

The teenage abortion rate also crept up for the first time in more than a decade, rising 1 percent from 2005 to 2006, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit research group…

While teenage pregnancy rates for whites remain far lower than for Blacks and Hispanics, the pregnancy rates increased for all three groups…

The Guttmacher analysis examined federal data on teenage sex, births and abortion, along with the institute’s own abortion statistics…

“This new study makes it crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work,” said Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

The Clinton administration began financing abstinence-only programs as part of welfare reform, but such programs got a large boost in the Bush administration.

The Obama administration has moved away from abstinence-only programs, creating a new teenage-pregnancy initiative in which most financing will go to programs that have been shown to prevent pregnancy, with some experimental approaches…

There are continuing efforts to reinstate financing for abstinence-only education as part of the health-reform legislation.

A definition of insanity includes repeating something over and over and expecting a different result.

Hopefully, a majority of this ill-educated nation will eventually come to an age of reason.

At left, Jesus appears eager and willing to do more laundry. At right, woman
shows us her iron while Jesus proudly looks on.

“I didn’t panic,” [Mary Jo] Coady told the Herald. “I was carrying the laundry, looked down at the iron and there was the image of Jesus. I picked it up and asked my daughters to take a look at it to make sure I wasn’t crazy.”…

My faith was down, but seeing this made me think, wow, Jesus is there.”

To me, it looks more like René Descartes. But I’m probably just in denial.

Former President George W. Bush made his debut as a motivational speaker Monday night, telling a Fort Worth, Texas crowd it’s futile to waste energy chasing popularity.

“It’s so simple in life to chase popularity, but popularity is fleeting, it’s not real,” Bush said at a “Get Motivated!” business seminar, a multi-city event its organizers describe as an “energizing, action-packed, star-studded, fun-filled, spectacular stage show.”

The president himself saw wild popularity swings during his eight years in the White House, garnering nearly a 90 percent approval rating in the months following the attacks on September 11, 2001 and exiting office with only the support of 31 percent of Americans, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll….

“Every single day, I was honored to be your president by bringing honor and dignity to the office,” he said. Bush also added later that his faith played a large role in guiding his decisions: “From a personal perspective, I don’t see how you can be president without relying upon an almighty.”

An almighty what? I’m so tired of self-proclaimed “motivational speakers”. I wish Chris Farley would come back.

Pope Benedict XVI attacked the Godless character of modern culture as he celebrated mass in a Roman basilica to mark the opening of a synod of Catholic bishops.

In a sombre homily in which he suggested that Christianity in Europe could become extinct like some Christian communities in history, the pope told more than 250 bishops from around the world that societies which rebelled against God in the past had faced His “punishment“.

“If we look at history we are forced to notice the frequent coldness and rebellion of incoherent Christians. Because of this, God, while never shirking in his promise of salvation, often had to turn
towards punishment,” he said.

Let’s hear it for Fire and Brimstone! Dude’s gonna get him some Southern Baptists.

“When men proclaim themselves absolute owners of themselves and the only masters of creation, are they really going to be able to construct a society where freedom, justice and peace reign?

I don’t see anyone else available offering to hand it over. I’m ready and willing to fight for those goals, alone and in concert with my fellow human beings.

Benedict however tempered his speech by saying “if in certain regions, faith weakens to the point of fading away, there will always be other people ready to receive it,” adding “evil and death never have the final word.”

Who is there this side of ignorance and superstition who believes that death has no dominion? Live with it, folks. Literally.

Sophomore biology class in Orange Park, Florida

David Campbell switched on the overhead projector and wrote “Evolution” in the rectangle of light on the screen.

He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as fact. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gymnasium.

“If I do this wrong,” Mr. Campbell remembers thinking on that humid spring morning, “I’ll lose him.”

In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state’s public schools to teach evolution, calling it “the organizing principle of life science.” Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years.
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There are times when the great events of the day are glimpsed through a prism of small, personal rituals and routines that offer new insights, almost a kind of truth.

And so it seemed for some Christians contemplating the convulsions within the hierarchy of the Anglican Church over the vexed question of allowing the appointment of women bishops.

Finally, 16 years after permitting the ordination of women priests, the General Synod of the Church of England took the first step this past week toward the consecration of female bishops, following the practices prevalent in the United States, Australia and Canada.

But far from being feted as a progressive step forward, the moment seemed drowned out by the minority voices of clerics and lay worshipers opposed to the elevation of women to the bishopric.

There was talk – increasingly common in the worldwide Anglican Communion – of schism, of rebel clerics abandoning their ministry within the Church of England to march toward the Church of Rome, reversing the historic split within Christendom inspired by Henry VIII in the 16th century…

But there is also a contest over the purity of faith and, as in the Roman Catholic Church, the protection of stern moral doctrine against flexible approaches to belief, behavior and worship.

As usual, the defenders of the faith are those who believe nothing changes and nothing should change. Or, even worse, ordinary human beings should have little or nothing to say about how their lives change.

Learning and knowledge play no part in the equation that dances in the heads of True Believers.

GLADSTONE, Oregon: A 16-year-old boy who, along with his parents, believed in faith healing has died as a result of an inflammation in his urinary system that is treatable.

The boy, identified by authorities as Neil Beagley, was suffering from an inflammation in a tube leading from his bladder – the urethra – that made him unable to urinate, according to Dr. Clifford Nelson, a deputy state medical examiner.

Beagley filled up with urine, and that eventually ruined his bladder and kidneys and resulted in heart failure, said Nelson, who called it “an absolutely horrible way to die.”

Police said relatives and church members told them the teenager refused treatment for the illness, as he was entitled to do under Oregon law. State law allows minors 14 and older to make such decisions.

Ain’t nothing like being One of the Chosen.

Thanks, K B

When forming attitudes about embryonic stem cell research, people are influenced by a number of things. But understanding science plays a negligible role for many people.

“More knowledge is good – everybody is on the same page about that. But will that knowledge necessarily help build support for the science?” says Dietram Scheufele. “The data show that no, it doesn’t. It does for some groups, but definitely not for others.”

Along with Dominique Brossard and Shirley Ho, Scheufele used national public opinion research to analyze how public attitudes are formed about controversial scientific issues such as nanotechnology and stem cells. What they have found again and again is that knowledge is much less important than other factors, such as religious values or deference to scientific authority.

“Highly religious audiences are different from less religious audiences. They are looking for different things, bringing different things to the table,” explains Scheufele. “It is not about providing religious audiences with more scientific information. In fact, many of them are already highly informed about stem cell research, so more information makes little difference in terms of influencing public support. And that’s not good or bad. That’s just what the data show.”

On the other hand, a value system held by a much smaller portion of the American public works in just the opposite direction. The attitudes of individuals who are deferential to science – who tend to trust scientists and their work – are influenced by their level of scientific understanding.

I’m only surprised by how polite the authors managed to be.