Head in the Cloud by William Poundstone

Author:William Poundstone [Poundstone, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science / Popular Culture, Psychology / Social Psychology, Business & Economics / Industries / Computers & Information Technology
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-07-19T04:00:00+00:00

Recent Pew polls have found that believers in “God or a universal spirit” are an overwhelming majority, constituting about 92 percent of Americans. That finding is typical. Not so typical was that the Pew researchers asked people how certain they were of God’s existence. As we’ve seen, a survey that asks about doubt tends to find it. In this case, only 69 percent (of all respondents, believers and not) were “absolutely certain.” The remainder picked the options “fairly certain,” “not too certain,” “not at all certain,” and “don’t know” to describe their states of belief. The expressions of agnosticism accounted for about 23 percent of the public, a figure that dwarfs the 2 percent who said at the outset that they didn’t know whether God exists and the 6 percent who said they didn’t believe in God. Agnosticism is largely a matter of asking a follow-up question.

You may wonder why American kids score so poorly on math tests, but there’s no mystery about their ignorance of religion. It’s barely taught in our public schools. Paradoxically, public-school children are usually given some exposure to Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and the extinct faiths of the ancient Mediterranean as part of their history or social studies curriculum. But most American public schools shy away from teaching Christianity and Judaism. These are left to be taught at home, in Sunday school, and in Hebrew school, places where there is little incentive to discuss other religions.

It is, then, a simple thing to demonstrate ignorance in religious matters. Tougher to say is whether it matters. Is it important for a Mormon to know about Hinduism? Must a Catholic know about her own church’s doctrine of transubstantiation if she’s perfectly happy not knowing? “No matter what the results,” said the 2010 Pew survey report, “we would not give the public an ‘A,’ an ‘F’ or any other grade because we have no objective way of determining how much the public should know about religion.”

Though there is literature offering evidence that the faithful are happier than nonbelievers, I did not find any correlations between religious knowledge and self-reported happiness. Nor were there correlations between religion and income or relationship status.

But there are other reasons for acquiring religious knowledge. Prothero (who served as an adviser for the Pew survey) makes two distinct cases: first, that religious literacy is essential to overall cultural literacy. Many of our political controversies, from abortion to stem-cell research, are framed as religious disputes. So are many of the globe’s conflicts. Everyone, nonbelievers included, will be at a loss to understand the news without some grounding in religion. Draw a blank at “Adam and Eve,” “Mecca,” or “Zen-like” and you will have trouble following presidential speeches, talk-show chatter, and bottled-tea ads.

These are fair points. The question is how much you really need to know just to keep up with the news and literate conversation. I suspect the answer is “more than has sometimes been demonstrated in religious-literacy surveys but not very much more.”

Prothero’s second thesis is

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.