All posts by Wintery Knight

https://winteryknight.com/
News

Survey: Americans don’t know much about religion

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Fox News story that was sent to me by Jerry, Wes, Timmy, and Mary.

Excerpt:

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.

Forty-five percent of Roman Catholics who participated in the study didn’t know that, according to church teaching, the bread and wine used in Holy Communion is not just a symbol, but becomes the body and blood of Christ.

More than half of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the person who inspired the Protestant Reformation. And about four in 10 Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the greatest rabbis and intellectuals in history, was Jewish.

The survey released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life aimed to test a broad range of religious knowledge, including understanding of the Bible, core teachings of different faiths and major figures in religious history. The U.S. is one of the most religious countries in the developed world, especially compared to largely secular Western Europe, but faith leaders and educators have long lamented that Americans still know relatively little about religion.

Respondents to the survey were asked 32 questions with a range of difficulty, including whether they could name the Islamic holy book and the first book of the Bible, or say what century the Mormon religion was founded. On average, participants in the survey answered correctly overall for half of the survey questions.

Atheists and agnostics scored highest, with an average of 21 correct answers, while Jews and Mormons followed with about 20 accurate responses. Protestants overall averaged 16 correct answers, while Catholics followed with a score of about 15.

[…]On questions about Christianity, Mormons scored the highest, with an average of about eight correct answers out of 12, followed by white evangelicals, with an average of just over seven correct answers. Jews, along with atheists and agnostics, knew the most about other faiths, such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism. Less than half of Americans know that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist, and less than four in 10 know that Vishnu and Shiva are part of Hinduism.

Gaaaaahhhh!!! How can you be a member of any religion if you don’t know the basic claims of all the religions so you can evaluate them to see if any are true? How can you make a good choice unless you choose the one that is logically consistent and empirically validated by the external world?

Comparative religions

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Podcasts

Jennifer Roback Morse discusses the rise of single, childless women

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Cloning her would solve the marriage problem
She's more pro-male than most males

In 366 metropolitan areas, single and childless women aged 22-30 are out-earning men by 8%. Is this a victory for feminism?

The MP3 file is here.

Topics:

  • the differences in pay between men and women are due to women’s choice to subordinate career choices to the task of having and raising children
  • the same changes that are funneling women into careers are making it harder for women to marry, stay married and to have children
  • more women than men are graduating from higher education because women dominate higher education – almost all teachers are women
  • education is run by women for women and they do not respect the needs and learning styles of men
  • this means that there are fewer and fewer educated, high-earning men available for women to marry
  • but women are unhappy with this because they want a man who they can look up to, and who can take care of them
  • women need to realize that when there are no men left for women to marry, women are less happy
  • in fact, women are delaying marriage more and more, because they are focused on education and career – not families and children
  • relationships are subordinated to education and career, so the only kind of relationship that is left is hook-up sex
  • this is also fueling the trend of more women of all classes and education levels who are having children without men
  • the take-away message from this new statistic is that there is no wage-gape based on discrimination

There NEVER WAS any wage-gap based on discrimination. Women used to make sensible choices regarding work to have more time for families. One women eschewed marriage and children, in accordance with the teachings of third-wave feminism, the wage gap disappeared.

This podcast is Dr. Morse at her best. Do not miss this podcast, especially if you are a man. If you are even thinking about getting married, then you need to marry someone who can discuss these issues intelligently, like Dr. Morse can. Frankly, when I listen to Dr. Morse it makes me want to go out and get married right away. If any woman can understand men and marriage like this, then there must be others who can do it. And being married to someone who understands men and marriage would make me very happy indeed. Hooking-up and co-habitating is not the right way for women to prepare for marriage. But learning to study and speak about these issues like Dr. Morse is excellent preparation for marriage.

News

NSF spends 2 million to create Darwin indoctrination lesson plans

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The NSF is, of course, the National Science Foundation. And the 2 million, of course, came from the pockets of taxpayers.

Here’s the post at Evolution News.

Excerpt:

The goal of the Evolution Readiness Project is to get “young children” to “believe in” evolution. According to the National Science Foundation’s website, they’ve spent $1,990,459 of taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation (NSF) dollars to bankroll this project. Welcome back to school.

The agenda of the project is further clarified in the NSF Grant Award Abstract which states that it aims “to support a learning progression leading to an appreciation of the theory of evolution and evidence that supports it.” That’s fine, but why only the evidence that supports evolution?

Only the evidence in favor of Darwinism? What about the evidence against Darwinism?

The project justifies its dogmatic approach by promoting the myth that there is no scientific dissent from the consensus view on natural selection:

Yet, essentially there is universal agreement among scientists that evolution by natural selection is the fundamental model that explains the extraordinary complexity and interdependence of the living world. Moreover, evolution by natural selection is a quintessential scientific theory, explaining an extraordinary collection of data, including much that Darwin himself was unaware of, with a small collection of powerful ideas.

Of course, it is not true that “essentially there is universal agreement among scientists” about evolution by natural selection. Over 850 Ph.D. scientists have now signed a statement expressing their skepticism of modern evolutionary theory’s “claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life,” and urge that “[c]areful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

The rest of the article lists a stack of non-Christian, non-theistic scientists who doubt the efficacy of Darwinian mechanisms to explain macro-evolution.

Darwinism is “hide the decline” applied to the history of life.