A report in the Los Angeles Times has set some tongues wagging:

Atheists, agnostics most knowledgeable about religion, survey says
Report says nonbelievers know more, on average, about religion than most faithful. Jews and Mormons also score high on the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey.

Apparently, this is some kind of surprise. I’m not sure how, unless a lot of people really don’t know any professed atheists or agnostics.

If you want to know about God, you might want to talk to an atheist.

Heresy? Perhaps. But a survey that measured Americans’ knowledge of religion found that atheists and agnostics knew more, on average, than followers of most major faiths. In fact, the gaps in knowledge among some of the faithful may give new meaning to the term “blind faith.”

A majority of Protestants, for instance, couldn’t identify Martin Luther as the driving force behind the Protestant Reformation

The cynic in me wonders how many of them thought the question was about Martin Luther King.

Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University and author of “Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — And Doesn’t,” served as an advisor on the survey. “I think in general the survey confirms what I argued in the book, which is that we know almost nothing about our own religions and even less about the religions of other people,” he said.

He said he found it significant that Mormons, who are not considered Christians by many fundamentalists, showed greater knowledge of the Bible than evangelical Christians.

[Going for the cheap laughs] That’s because most Mormons can read.

The Rev. Adam Hamilton, a Methodist minister from Leawood, Kan., and the author of “When Christians Get it Wrong,” said the survey’s results may reflect a reluctance by many people to dig deeply into their own beliefs and especially into those of others.

“I think that what happens for many Christians is, they accept their particular faith, they accept it to be true and they stop examining it. Consequently, because it’s already accepted to be true, they don’t examine other people’s faiths. . . . That, I think, is not healthy for a person of any faith,” he said.

I think it’s rather that people who are brought up in a faith rarely examine it at all — your parents tell you it’s true, the religious leaders tell you it’s true, and there’s rarely any advantage to be had from opposing or questioning authority early in life. By the time you’re ready to start examining things for yourself, your religious faith is “part of you”, not something external to you. It’s such a deeply rooted part of your view of the world that most people never even consider the possibility of questioning it.

For comparison purposes, the survey also asked some questions about general knowledge, which yielded the scariest finding: 4% of Americans believe that Stephen King, not Herman Melville, wrote “Moby Dick.”

I have to assume that the writer of this article hasn’t seen very many surveys of this type: in any large number of people you can usually find 5-10% who believe in far more amazing things than mis-attributed works of popular fiction.

H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.