Sunday 31 October 2010

Permission To Speak Freely

You may have heard of Anne Jackson, the writer of Mad Church Disease, and now Permission To Speak Freely. On her website she asks "What is one thing you feel you can't say in church" and this is one of the responses.


This and the other confessions provided an interesting reality-check. You can read more on Anne's website or see a couple of slideshows on her facebook page.

ps. if you're interested in her book, she has 7 excerpts online - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7.

Thursday 14 October 2010

Atheists Know More Than Christians

Perhaps you heard about this survey in America. A phonepoll group did a survey asking questions about religion. From 32 questions, Atheists averaged 20.9, Protestants 16 and Catholics 14.7.

It's tempting (if you consider your self a protestant) to wipe your brow in relief and say "Whew! Just passed! At least we beat the Catholics." But that's not the comparison i'm looking at.

The survey is about religion - and Christians know the least!

OK, so the questions were on all religions, but why are Christians the most ignorant when it comes to understanding our neighbours of different beliefs. These are the same neighbours we are called to love. Have we become so insular that we understand only those in the same little niche as ours. (See Black Box Theory). Remember, this was a test about religion - Christians should be way up the top of the class. Or at least as high as atheists. That would be less embarrassing ;)

Anyway, you can do a sample from the test yourself. I got 14/15 and my friend 13/15. You'll probably do quite well. Maybe the selected 15 are the easiest from the original poll, or it maybe it's just that we're not American ;)

More about the poll here and here. In the second of these articles it says that only 57% of Protestants could name the 4 Gospels. That's probably a whole separate blog post just there!

[Full report on the survey here]

Friday 1 October 2010

How To Speak Christianese

The other day i wrote about talking in code, and then today i found this great spoof infomercial for learning 'Christianese'.