Religious Knowledge

I came across a very interesting . . . . and somewhat humorous article today on Yahoo's website. Here's the Link:

Survey: American's don't know much about religion

If you don't read the entire article (it's not very long), here's the main idea, presented in the first paragraph:

"A new survey of Americans' knowledge of religion found that atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons outperformed Protestants and Roman Catholics in answering questions about major religions, while many respondents could not correctly give the most basic tenets of their own faiths."

How crazy is that? On average, Mormons and Jews know more about their own religion and other peoples' religion than do Protestants and Roman Catholics!? Before I actually read the article, I mentioned to Ashley, "The Mormons probably did really well." Why? Well, for one, what other religion sends their teenage sons and daughters to early morning seminary, typically at 6 AM, every school day for their high school career to learn about the doctrines and principles of their religion? None. What other church asks that young men and young women ages 19-25 sacrifice 1 1/2 to 2 years of their lives to teach others about their religion? None that I'm aware of. What other religion spends 3 hours every Sunday meeting together to discuss principles of their religion (and not bashing on other religions)? None that I know of, not for 3 hours. What other religion places such a strong emphasis on education, knowing the doctrines of the faith, and testing that knowledge by asking God about it? As far as I know, only the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints suggests asking God if those principles it teaches are true or not. And what other religion teaches understanding and tolerance for other faiths and religions? Unfortunately, not all. While in Texas, I knew of many churches that taught hateful and untrue sermons, aimed at defacing other religions. It doesn't surprise me that Mormons did well on the poll.

On a technical note, this study was only conducted on 3,412 subjects. According to the US Census Bureau, there were approximately 307,006,500 people in the United States in July 2009 (http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=uspopulation&met=population&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=us+population). This religion study had a sample size equivalent to 0.0011% of the population of the United States - in my opinion, hardly an appropriate sample size to project assumptions across the United States. By the way, it doesn't mention where the subjects were geographically, or their age, or anything else except for their level of education. Anyways, an interesting article and some interesting thoughts.