Play in the Mini-Ideological Turing Test

UPDATE: I’ve closed the survey, since you all have provided over 100 responses!

Thanks for your suggestions of questions for the mini-Ideological Turing Test that I’ll be running at UPenn this week.  Now, I could use your help answering them!

Just a reminder, an Ideological Turing Test is modeled on a conventional Turing Test, but, instead of checking whether programmers can make a computer that can pass for human, we’re checking whether you understand an ideological opponent well enough to pass for someone on their side.

So, in a religious Ideological Turing Test, there are questions for Christians and non-Christians (or any other pertinent division), and everyone answers the questions that pertain to their own side honestly, and to the other side as they expect a true (non-)believer would.  (e.g. an atheist would answer all questions for an atheist honestly, and then would answer the questions for Christians as they think a typical Christian would).

If you’d like to participate, please enter your answers here.

This year, you don’t have to answer all of the prompts to play — I’m just asking that you answer an equal number of honest question and faked questions, so I’ll have plenty of impostors and True Scotsmen to work with.

Here are the questions people can answer:

For Christians:

• What sin (if any) lies at the root of all other sin? And why?
• Why, in a world of many splintered sects, should *your* tradition be trusted?
• What is an element of your tradition that is underappreciated by your fellow believers?

For Non-Christians:

• Name a book that shaped your moral sensibilities (and talk a little about how) Fiction is fair game
• What role does ritual have in your life? What role would you like it to have?
• What’s a question you’re currently uncertain about, where you’d like to “flip to the back of the book” and find the answer now?

(My heuristic for choosing questions was: questions where I am interested/curious about the answer, rather than ones that rely on shibboleths)

So go ye forth and answer some of the prompts!  And recruit friends to do likewise!

I’ll be showing selected responses during my talk at UPenn this week (the first time I’ll have run one of these with live audience participation), and I’ll run all of the answers here for you to guess about in April (while I’m in New Zealand).