Atheists and agnostics know more about various religions than many who actually follow those religions, a Pew study has found, and that has set the world of skeptics on fire:
Although the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life survey questioned only U.S. adults, the findings had atheists crowing from here to New Zealand where the Skeptics in the Pub blog headlined it, "If you want to know about God, ask an atheist.
The results don't seem that surprising to me. The survey was just about religious facts -- who Martin Luther was, what the Golden Rule is -- not about belief in God or faith in anything beyond this world. Sometimes we know as much about the things we don't accept -- having declined to accept after learning about their components and rejecting them -- as we do about those we do accept. An exception is our knowledge of things we come late to that others take for granted, such as the newly minted citizen who knows more about American history than many of those born here.
