What is Digg?303 Comments
- mrmcphee, on 10/12/2007, -11/+221News flash: Many Americans are religious out of habit and/or tradition and carry no significant passion for what they're actually subscribing to.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -13/+94"Are Americans Ignorant About Religion?"
Um
YES. - SwissCamel, on 10/12/2007, -11/+70Amen.
- HP844182, on 10/12/2007, -4/+54"The funniest thing is that a lot say that America was found on the Christian belief, and America is one nation under God etc. When in reality the first 3 American presidents were atheists."
They were Deists. There is a difference. - Pile, on 10/12/2007, -19/+66"By the same token, most of the replies on this site come from the perspective of people who have dismissed religion in principle without ever researching or investigating any of them."
Now that is a total crock dude. The fact is, most atheists know more about religion than theists. If you don't believe me, go to any atheist forum on the internet... any one of them... and you'll find people that have incredible depth of knowledge about religion, history, culture and the bible. In fact, most atheists were previously religious people. The more you know about religion; the more you study it with an *open mind*, the more obvious it becomes that it's mythology and fantasy and has no consistency, absolute moral foundation, or legitimacy. - dtfinch, on 10/12/2007, -12/+55Sunnis rest their foreheads on a mat when they pray, and believe that Shias aren't true muslims, but rather infidels to be killed.
Shias rest their foreheads on a piece of clay instead, and believe that Sunnis aren't true muslims, but rather infidels to be killed.
And a bunch of other little irreconcilable differences. - hackwrench, on 10/12/2007, -10/+48To call most Americans "spiritual" is akin to calling an infected wound "lively".
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -11/+44Most Americans honestly believe that the rest of the world is exactly how it looks on the news.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -9/+42There are plenty of uneducated idiots that will accept anything their preacher tells them without thought or question. There are also plenty of idiots that'd like to think they're educated because they can bash "religion". It's no big secret that organized religion is a surefire way to create an idiot mob. What each man believes is between him and God, and that's all there is to it. The people out there trying to ignore thousands of years of history because it could be associated with "religion" are just as bad as the idiots that think Moses spoke to the Israelites in King James English.
- Vic333, on 10/12/2007, -0/+30"There is no religious difference between Shias and Sunnis."
There are quite a few religious differences between the two. They have different laws and customs and have fundamentally different beliefs about the succession of Muhammad. There are political differences as well, but to say there are no religous differences is plain wrong. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -53/+82Welcome to religion.
If people were actually knowledgeable about the history of their holy books, and the history of the different interpretations and versions, they would be unable to remain religious, because at the end of the trail there is no truth.
Religion has it in it's own interest to keep their parishioners ignorant to the reality of their faith.
Arguing ethics based on holy scripture, as the article suggests, is what starts religious feuds. I feel the professor is more likely a closet atheist who knows that religious knowledge will weaken faith, not strengthen it. That being said, I hope all religious people start to learn the truth, and question their faith.
http://flushaholybook.com - crimsoncircle, on 10/12/2007, -3/+31No, that is generalisation. I'm an Atheist but I'm smart enough to know that being a Muslim does not make you a terrorist. I also do not dismiss people's beliefs as stupid or ignorant. You can believe what you like as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, but because I question it, I consider it stupid? No.
- diggless, on 10/12/2007, -8/+36why stop at religion?
I say as the following question:
Are Americans Ignorant About (fill in the blank)?
the answer will almost certainly be yes. - anidal, on 10/12/2007, -38/+66"If people were actually knowledgeable about the history of their holy books, and the history of the different interpretations and versions, they would be unable to remain religious, because at the end of the trail there is no truth."
One of the challenges written in the Qur'an is asking anyone to produce another version of it. Challenge still stands. Until that happens, I'll hold off flushing my holy book.
"Religion has it in it's own interest to keep their parishioners ignorant to the reality of their faith."
Direct contradiction with Islamic teaching:
"The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr." (Hadith)
"Thinking deep for one hour (with sincerity) is better than 70 years of (mechanical) worship." (Hadith)
"The best form of worship is the pursuit of knowledge." (Hadith)
"To listen to the words of the learned and to instill unto others the lessons of science is better than religious exercises." (Hadith)
"Are those who have knowledge and those who have no knowledge alike? Only the men of understanding are mindful. " (Quran, 39:9)
Islam doesn't discourage learning. I've studied science ranging from astronomy to evolution, and think I'm a better muslim for it. - david76, on 10/12/2007, -9/+33When the tree of knowledge in your religion contains forbidden fruit, you're bound to have ignorant followers.
- Forever-Zero, on 10/12/2007, -7/+30I will never understand religion.
It is beyond me how someone can devote their life to praising something that has little to no proof of having ever occurred. People kill each other over religion, cause wars, torture each other, all in the name of something that they believe in because they saw it written in a book supposedly containing true stories. What proof is there about any of this?
I do not deny the existence of a God, but I sure as hell am not going to start living my life by some random book until I get at least a little proof that what it says contains some truth. To believe the world was created in seven days? There are piles of evidence to prove otherwise. Yet there are some people who have enough faith to go, "Scientific evidence? Screw you! The bible is right! Why you ask? Because so many people say it's right!"
In my opinion, religion is not to be taken literally, and more to be used as a moral guide to live your life by. Taking the rules from something like the bible and using them to make yourself a better person is good, reading every word of the bible and preaching it to others because you need to convert the heathen masses is bad. - Bleeblaow, on 10/12/2007, -0/+21"Gee, a socialist/communist professor says the public is stupid about religion.
Digg me down, I could care less. But, if I am wrong about my religious faith,
after I pass on, no big deal...but...if YOU are wrong about being an atheist,
then, I hope you love warm places"
Read
The
*****
Article
Had you done so, you would know that the point was people are uneducated about religion and its history, not about whether or not your religion of choice is the right one. - ICSU, on 10/12/2007, -2/+22"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful."
- obrysii, on 10/12/2007, -13/+32Religion can go hand-in-hand with science. Religious belief is entirely compatible. It's religious organizations that are not.
- iomegaboy, on 10/12/2007, -40/+59By the same token, most of the replies on this site come from the perspective of people who have dismissed religion in principle without ever researching or investigating any of them.
- hiPpymIck, on 10/12/2007, -5/+23"heaven preserve us from people who think they are right"
- SLSSNAKE, on 10/12/2007, -15/+31"Christians and Muslims never post links!
Ever notice that? A good 30-40% of Agnostic/Atheist posts supply links to factual information. Wacko fundies just report on whatever delusion they happen to be having that moment."
You got some links to back up that data? - Narishma, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16"Anyone who believes in God "just in case" surely could not be going to Heaven"
Not to mention that even if there is a god, you have to be lucky for it to be the one you believe in, instead of one of the other thousands of gods humanity has invented. - goffy59, on 10/12/2007, -4/+19Its not that I'm ignorant about religion. Religion contradicts science. And science has a lot more "truth" then religion. So I stand by something that actually went through years of research, not years of brainwash and convincing. I was talking to this kid on how I felt, I said nothing aggressive or anything that would insult his Christianity. He told me his Pasteur said that people like myself will say what I'm saying only to confuse and twist the truth. I have evidence enough that religion isn't right for me, because I question everything. I basically felt disturbed that a kid would say something like that. How can you try to confuse someone or twist truth just by explaining how you feel. I didn't even get into what I really believe. I told him everyone is different and everyone has something that's right for them. I told him religion isn't right for me. Then we started talking about dinosaurs. He didn't believe in those either. I can go on, but this conversation I had with him was disturbing enough.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+17"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?" - Mr. George W. Bush
- lonlaz, on 10/12/2007, -8/+22I created a digg account just to throw in my two bits, because I'm tired of seeing the same religion conversations on digg. I can testify that most people who comment on Digg don't understand religion, and just boil it down to their on ignorance, and what they know (xtians vs athiests vs. other judeo xtian faiths.. pick a side). Religion is a subject that has too many facets, and all of them tied up complicatedly in human history and affairs.
If there were no such things as Religion, countries and people would find other reasons to war over resources. When you say god or God, you may be talking about something so different than another person that it needs a new word.
There are fanatics, and laid back people in every religion, and guess which ones you hear about the most. There are religions prone to fanaticism, and ones not, and guess which ones you hear the most about.
Athiesim resembles a religion, as it fufils the need religions do in giving someone an idea on where they stand with the world, and it doesn't answer what you do about it next (that would probably be called a philosophy). And those who are Athiests have the tendancy to 'preach' to others, or at least the more fanatical do. - tqup, on 10/12/2007, -6/+19I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
Stephen Roberts - lonnieh, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16The rest of the world honestly believes that the America is exactly how it looks on the news.
- jedikd, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14ah, nothing says true faith like having Religion as a insurance policy.
Anyone who believes in God "just in case" surely could not be going to Heaven - Aquashark, on 10/12/2007, -6/+19Q: are americans ignorant about anything?
A: look at who's president. - InfinitySnatch, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15Book of Mormon is Bible fanfiction.
- Rice, on 10/12/2007, -6/+19No.
- zeusabj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12The best advice here? Get a copy of the Bible, Book of Mormon, Quran, etc. and READ it for yourself! So many people today are used to being spoon-fed their belief systems that they've forgotten how to think for themselves. If you subscribe to a particular religious doctrine, get a copy of your holy book and READ it!
- RevRyan, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15In my opinion, we are doing our country a huge disservice by not having some form of education about world religions built into a public education. If I had learned in high school all, or at least some, of the information I learned while getting my bachelor's and masters degrees, it would have saved me a lot of headache and heartache. Of course, the largest hazard to having such a program is people's inability to separate their personal religious beliefs from what is taught in class. I am Baptist in Southern US, so I see plenty ignorance and closed-mindedness. If only we could find a way to objectively educate folks on religious heritage and practices, we could take our country light years in social evolution with the rest of the world. By not talking about or becoming educated about the subject at all, we are surely only harming ourselves.
Just my 2 cents,
Rev. Ryan - teamgwho, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11My shrink is Jewish. We were talking about how I am now an aetheist, not agnostic, and I wasn't sure how to break it to my family. This very topic came up, about how ignorant americans were about religion.
His statement (which I've discussed with others, almost all of whom agree is accurate) is that American Christians and Catholics are woefully ignorant about their religion. American Muslims are generally well informed about their religion. American Jews are also extremely well informed about their religious teachings. Catholics and Christians outside the US, maybe they do, maybe they don't know much, but American catholics and Christian know jack ***** about Christianity and Catholicism.
and upon reflection, he's absolutely right.
when Georgia Representative Lynn Westmoreland sponsors a bill to require the display of the Ten Commandments in the House of Reps and the Senate but can't name more then half himself? Seriously, welcome to Christianity dude. here's a video of stephen colbert nailing him.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/17/ten_commandments_con.html
to be fair though, most americans don't know jack ***** about jack ***** unfortunately, so it's rather par for the course if you ask me.
//braces for the digg down - Pile, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11"Sunnis wanted a democratic leader (through voting) to be chosen after the death of the prophet while the Shias wanted Ali (closest relative of the prophet) to take leadership."
You don't think that's a pretty big difference? Who is going to run the church? You do realize this distinction is also the reasoning behind the existence of many christian sects as well? Those that believe the pope is a prophet, and then the sects break down even more over the issue of whether or not the pope is fallible or infallible. There are entire religions that are based around the issue of whether or not the pope can have an error in judgment. - Afreyt, on 10/12/2007, -10/+20Someone telling me that I haven't researched all the different varieties of crap in the world is not insulting me.
The only good reason to study religion is to understand how to manipulate and defend yourself from its followers. - subxero37, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10@Gizza: the first three presidents, IIRC, were not athiest. To answer many of the above posts, only two of them (Washington and Jefferson) were deists.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Presidential_religious_affiliations and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deist -- essentially, they had a god, but most likely not the Christian god. - beckerist, on 10/12/2007, -12/+21This is a "pro-American" statement, therefore likely to be thumbed down, but I pose a question to the entire Digg nation: Who ISN'T at least somewhat ignorant about those religions they aren't a part of? Tibetans don't know Mormonism. Mormons don't "know" (at least on the level which is required to be "not ignorant") Buddhism...
The story should be "Are people ignorant about religions they don't believe in?" the answer is YES! This should have nothing to do with us Americans, other than we are a gigantic collective of multiple religions (and non-religions), and therefore don't understand ALL religion... - pp51doodoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Pascal's Wager. What a joke.
- jhuebel, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12This is one of the most insightful comments regarding Americans and religion that I've seen. It's true that most Americans are what could be termed "Sunday Christians". They go through the motions, but aren't truly fervent in their religious beliefs.
- whiledo, on 03/25/2009, -1/+10While I agree with the statement that most Americans (and probably people of other countries - I just don't have enough firsthand experience to claim that) are ignorant about the history of religion. However, I find that this professor might just be a little
"[H]e discovered that few of his students could name the authors of the Christian Gospels. Fewer could name a single Hindu Scripture. Almost no one could name the first five books of the Hebrew Bible."
The first sentence I get (well, not sure if he means who they are named for or who actually wrote them). But the second and third are a bit of a stretch. Personally, I've studied religion in my spare time, reading about a variety of other religions and what they are rooted in. Unfortunately, it's not something I use in daily life so I tend to have forgotten most of the details. I probably could have come up with "Bhagavad Gita", but maybe not. And I assume he's going for either "Genesis/Exodus/Leviticus/Numbers/Deuteronomy", "Pentateuch" or "Torah." But even as someone who has "learned" all three of those answers, I'd be hard pressed to come up with it on the spot.
The thing that gets me is that most Christians (I "single" them out because they make up the vast majority of the population) have no idea that what is in their Bible came about as a process of bureaucracy and politics and could have been vastly different. They also ignorantly think that the gospels are really named after the apostles that wrote them, and they wrote them from firsthand knowledge. This really is a matter of "ignorance." If you talked to a lot of Christians, they would never have even considered that this might not be true and there might be actual history involved. - Vic333, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Most people are ingnorant of customs they are born into. Religion is just one of them. If you didn't work for it, you don't appreciate it.
- SmokedL, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9"Very much so. Diggers criticize Americans as stupid, lazy obese people lead around like sheep by the media. And how do they come up with this idea of us? By watching media broadcasts about America. ***** ignorant hypocrites."
Uh, well partly. News stories and studies on education levels and such certainly do provide information about the state of the average American.
However, it's places where you actually interact with Americans, such as digg, that give you any real personal sense about it.
It's how so many of those average Americans you interact with, or whose opinions you read, believe;
*That atheists are without ethics and morals.
*That the bible must be the basis of a system of ethics, or it cannot have validity.
*That Saddam had WMDs.
*That Saddam was involved in 9/11.
*That "The freedom agenda" is anything but the last in a line of lies to motivate a war that is obviously geopolitically and financially motivated.
*That Israel has never done anything wrong, while any and all who fight them are terrorists.
*That all Muslims are dangerous fanatics.
*That anyone that does not believe in a right-wing ideology is a communist.
*That the democrats are left wing in any sort of absolute sense(Compared to most of the industrialized world, the democrats are right-wing, not far-right, but certainly not left.).
*That electing a man who believes that god is on his side, and that he knows what god wants, could possibly be a good idea.
*That the US leadership always has benevolent motivations for what they do.
*That Armageddon will occur soon.
*That the US health care system is better than those in other countries. (If you are rich you can get excellent care. If not, almost all other industrialized countries crush your system. The statistics speak for themselves.)
Belief in these absurdities, and the plethora of similar ones, is not anywhere near the same levels outside of the US. Study after study confirms this, and places such as digg truly brings home to you just how indoctrinated many Americans are.
Feel free to get mad at me. But please, read some non US sources of news for a time. Compare what they report, and how they report it, to US news. Compare the actual amount of corroborating evidence presented, and the quality of that evidence. Look elsewhere for corroboration for the stories presented. Do this with any source of information before believing what it tells you. Examine your preconceptions. Think. Google it.
If you actually do that, I think you'll find that you will be angry at the people that are pushing these lies down your throat rather than at me.
You want a real kick-start to finding how much you are being lied to? Google the US vetoes in the UN over the last 50 years or so. It should put any delusions you may have about the benevolent nature of US foreign policy to rest.
Why do I bother telling you this when I know it will probably only anger you? Well, contrary to what you are apt to believe, the US is doing an immense amount of harm in the world. About the only thing ordinary people can do about it is to try to open the eyes of Americans to these realities. It's not much, but it's better than nothing. For instance, do you know how many Iraqi civilians have died in the war? There is only one serious study on it that I am aware of. It was conducted by a US university. Google it. Then try to believe in "The Freedom Agenda". - InfinitySnatch, on 10/12/2007, -7/+15"The funniest thing is that a lot say that America was found on the Christian belief, and America is one nation under God etc. When in reality the first 3 American presidents were atheists."
No, they were Deists, retard. Looks like you are too ignorant about religion to know the difference.
Is this irony? - CodedChaos, on 10/12/2007, -9/+171 Corinthians 1:18-19
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate." - Sublime059, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Hell yeah they are... but they are are fan-*****-tastic at perverting it.
- stonewaljacksn, on 10/12/2007, -5/+12foxifiednutjob
please, every single comment reinforces my view of you as ignorant. all you do is bash the superficial Bible stories because you are ignorant about everything else.
Since you are smart enough to use words like anthropomorphic, you should also be smart enough to know that the human MIND is responsible for turning inhuman things into anthropomorphic figures. So who's to say that God is nothing more than a personification of some inhuman collective force in the universe? You ever think of it that way? Why are you so incapable of thinking abstractly? Why do you immediately brush off religion without thinking about it?
Lemme guess...wars, greed, manipulation, blah blah blah...that's what you want to spit back at me right? These aren't the things that I'm talking about. I'm talking from a philosophical standpoint as an agnostic. People like you disgrace people like us who dont follow a certain religion because you are blatantly ignorant and even worse, you are ignorant and filled with hate.
Yea I bet you were thinking Im an evangelical just because I dont agree with you. That's how most atheists think on this site at least... - seether166, on 10/12/2007, -5/+12I'd rather burn in hell for eternity than think as blindly as I perceive you do.
- spyd3rweb, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
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