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Saturday, 2 October 2010

Religious knowledge

I commented a couple of days ago on the lack of knowledge regarding religion among religious groups in the US. So naturally, as these things tend to go viral (with comments from people as diverse as Naws and Mouse), I thought I would ask a few acquaintances and Beaker Folk a series of religious knowledge questions, and was surprised at some of the answers.

  • A majority of Anglo Catholics said that on the whole they preferred lace, although none said what they preferred it to.
  • 82% of Beaker Folk thought that Cardinal Newman made "Are 'Friends' Electric?"
  • 86% of guitarists in worship bands could recognise between 2 and 4 chords.
  • 49% of Fundamentalist Baptists thought that the minister is always right. The other 51% were organising a vote of no-confidence. 
  • 37% of Beaker Folk knew that Richard Dawkins is married to a Time Lord, but of these 50% thought it was Tom Baker.
  • 18% of Beaker Folk thought that the "Moonies" were an Irish boy-band.
  • 85% of Anglicans recognised Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury. Of these, 72% thought he was "marvellous". The others did not understand what he was talking about.
  • 95% of Anglicans knew that the Pope's vehicle is referred to as the Popemobile.  The other 5% said it was the Batmobile, but that was just a very old joke.
  • 88% of Christians couldn't find the book of Nehemiah if they had a Nehemiah detector and a specially-bound edition containing only the book of Nehemiah.
  • Most liberal Christians weren't sure if they really existed. When pressed as to whether they did or didn't, they generally said that it wasn't so much "either/or" as "both/and".
  • When asked what he was famous for, 1 in 3 Beaker Folk responded that St Francis invented the tea light.

2 comments:

  1. That sounds about average - are they being prepared for confirmation?

    ReplyDelete
  2. 54% of British Anglicans think St Michael is the patron saint of underwear.
    46% of evangelicals think thuribles appeared in the first series of Star Trek.

    ReplyDelete

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