Long ago, I asked Christians to explain how they read the Bible. At the time, no one wanted to tackle such a complex question in a blog post, so I tried to pry out some answers by including a question on this topic in the Ideological Turing Test. Today, I’m delighted to announce that Christian H. of The Thinking Grounds has stepped up to the plate (you may remember him from my frequent links to his series on the connection between... Read more
I wasn’t planning to post about the the suit American Atheists has filed to prevent a cross-shaped piece of the World Trade Center from being displayed at the eventual memorial. After reading a host of conflicting articles and commentaries, I still don’t think I have a good enough grasp of the facts of the case (or the law) to guess where the merits of the case lie. And (I’ll admit it) I was mostly keeping quiet in an effort not... Read more
Contestants in the Ideological Turing Test adopted a lot of different strategies, but I don’t know if anyone else was using mine. My college friends rib me a lot about my Mass attendance and apologetic readings; when I explain a bit of my theology readings, I often get sarcastic “When are you converting already?” So, when I sat down to write my Christian answers, I decided to give them a preview. Instead of imitating others and inventing a persona, I... Read more
In my last two posts about Jenifer Fulwiler’s controversial piece for the National Catholic Register (“Five Catholic Teachings that Make Sense to Atheists”), I mentioned that, although I thought it was a good approach to discuss the parts of Christian theology that seem most sensible and maybe even plausible to non-Christians, I thought the choice of some examples was misguided. When I try to think of the most intuitively appealing part of Christianity, it isn’t anything like veneration of... Read more
When I posted earlier on the blogfight unleashed by Jenifer Fulwiler’s post “Five Catholic Teachings that Make Sense to Atheists,” I focused on how to gauge the sincerity of a convert’s discarded beliefs. That was an argument about the author, and now I want to focus on the dispute over the logic of her post. Jen wasn’t offering a proof of Catholicism’s claims, she was trying to show that the system held together pretty well. PZ Myers wrote two posts... Read more
Jenifer Fulwiler of Conversion Diary wrote a piece for the National Catholic Register (“5 Catholic Teachings That Make Sense to Atheists“) that has sparked a fusillade of atheist criticism. For the record, although I disagree with a number of her examples, I think her goal of demonstrating that Catholicism is an internally consistent system is a reasonable one, and an important part of cross-religious dialogue. I’ll get back to the substance of that argument tomorrow. For now, I want to... Read more
Best b-day present of the day (from Tristyn): (well, second best after the pumpkin bread my mom mailed me) But, either way, more data breakdowns tomorrow! Read more
Yesterday I revealed true authorship for the Turing Test entries and congratulated the most convincing Christians in the Atheist round. Now it’s time to look at the results of the Christian round. Here’s what the Christian respondents (sample size = 93) made of the responses. Click image for larger view When participants were ranked according to their average score, only two fell into the ‘definitively Christian’ range (i.e. an average score between two and three, where a vote for Atheist was assigned... Read more
The answers are up, and now that we know the truth, it’s time to see how well the contestants did in the Ideological Turing Test. The graph below (sample size 1133) shows what atheists made of the responses in the first round. Click to see bigger If you rank participants according to the percent of respondents who rated them “Lean Atheist” or “Atheist,” the top scorers were: Entry #1 (Kat – Christian) with 94% Entry #6 (Anonymous – Christian) with... Read more
The polls are closed and it’s time for the Big Reveal for this Ideological Turing Test experiment. Below are the bios of all participants, along with links to the answers they wrote. All the way at the bottom is a table to let you look up shamming/sincere by the numbers. The rankings of participants and accompanying charts for the Atheist Round will go up this afternoon. A similar post for the Christian round will follow tomorrow morning. Christians: Anonymous –... Read more
Unequally Yoked
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