Are Your Smarter Than An Atheist?
Are you? Take the quiz and let us know roughly how you did in the poll.
I managed to get a 28 but I was trying to answer too fast so missed two that I shouldn’t have. I was surprised by the scores that the Pew Forum reported. I’m interested in seeing what happens with this poll – not that I think it will be scientific or conclusive of anything at all. Just interested.
If you took the quiz and voted in the poll, thanks for contributing… if not, why not, let us know in the comments.
myatheistlife 
27 for me. You’ve won this round š
In hindsight there was a couple I should’ve gotten correct and one I did get correct only by guessing. A pretty easy quiz though overall.
Yes, I too was surprised that it was that easy. I’m not sure what that means I should think about others, or what it says that I do think about the average Joe?
I found it kind of frightening actually.
31 for me. Didn’t know who Maimonides was. Sounded like a Greek name to me. It was between Jewish and Hindu, but I went for the latter because I thought I would have heard of him is he were Jewish. Wrong.
Rubbish quiz though. I think multiple choice tests in general are mostly meaningless. Having grown up around religion, most of that is what I consider common knowledge, but either way it’s no indicator of intelligence.
I don’t think the idea was to consider intelligence as much as it was to assess knowledge. The kind of knowledge that you would have if you were interested or rather involved in religious matters. I missed the Maimonides question also. Consider that if you think the questions are about what should be common knowledge what does this say about Joe Average? I think the results are a bit frightening.
Everyone needs a good car analogy: This quiz makes it sound like the moral majority having a vote is like having to ride in a limo where the driver is not sure where the brake pedal is. I know that is a stretch, work with me.
That’s true, and I’ll go with you on the analogy.
Still, that test looks for facts, not understanding of concepts or ideas. You could have a general understanding of Hindu concepts without remembering the name of Vishnu, for example. Or you could just know about Vishnu from Apu on the Simpsons, and be none the wiser about any meaning.
Again, I agree. And such would mean that all people should score fairly evenly. That there is a divergence by religion is meaningful even if it is difficult to determine what the meaning is. To simply say that depending on your religious background, your level of knowledge about religion will be different is meaningful. In this case it indicates that religious folk are less informed or perhaps less concerned with other religions. I took from it that the fundamentalist groups were the least informed and I think this aligns with other facts regarding religion and fundamentalism.
yeah that one got me two, Never heard of Maimonides, and I don’t think its in the bible either
PS The typo in your title is kind of ironic.
Someone that appreciates the humor. š
Like you, I took it too fast and missed two that were ridiculous; my two other misses were bad guesses.
Yeah, it’s surprising, at least to me, that a country with such religiosity would have such bad scores. Scary even. Thanks for posting
Frankly, it’s not so surprising to me. The US is predominantly Christian, and many of the questions were on other religions. They don’t study other religions! I’d wager they get around the same number of answers correct because those questions deal with Christianity–and probably not the LDS questions.
Odd, I didn’t think of it that way. Thanks for the insight.
That’s one of the wonders of metacognition: we all think differently, so we can give each other the benefits of our own insights.
29 for me, I can’t see how anybody would get less than 20 on that thing
Exactly. That’s why I posted about it. I wanted to get the opinion of others because I thought it was scary that scores were reported so low.
Thanks for commenting
Very interesting quiz. Most of it was surface level material. But really, Maimonides? What percentage of the population actually studies medieval Jewish theology? Got 29 out of the 32 right though. Great link/post.
Tafacory, thanks for stopping by to comment. So far all the comments seem to indicate that it was not such a difficult poll, just as you say. I’m still kind of baffled about the scores that were reported.
It’s telling me I got all 32 correct. But I got three wrong. So I got 29.