Received-SPF: pass (web4.sircon.net: local policy designates 81.27.32.118 as permitted sender) Message-ID: <456133A6.3070903@naggum.no> Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 04:48:38 +0000 From: Erik Naggum Organization: Ungregarious News User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20060607 Netscape/7.3 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en, nb, no, da, sv, de-de, de, fr-fr, fr MIME-Version: 1.0 To: SKEPSIS:; X-Enigmail-Version: 0.93.0.0 OpenPGP: id=C7F58576CC585167; url=http://erik.naggum.no/C7F58576CC585167.key Subject: [Diskusjon] UK poll: 42% think faith is as evil as smallpox X-BeenThere: diskusjon@skepsis.no X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: diskusjon.skepsis.no List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============0743004718==" Sender: diskusjon-bounces@skepsis.no Errors-To: diskusjon-bounces@skepsis.no This is an OpenPGP/MIME signed message (RFC 2440 and 3156) --===============0743004718== Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha1; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="------------enigF0A6C86095EA345D11634626" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit This is an OpenPGP/MIME signed message (RFC 2440 and 3156) --------------enigF0A6C86095EA345D11634626 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit I always urge some degree of caution on polls commissioned by pressure groups - not because any of the pollsters would willingly ask skewed questions, but because if pressure groups didn’t think they were going to get the answers they wanted they wouldn’t pay for or release the poll. It does cheer me up when a pressure group commissions a poll and gets an answer that obviously wasn’t the one they expected to get, especially when they have the guts to publish it anyway. Theos, a new Christian think tank, heralded their launch by commissioning a poll from Communicate Research. They started by taking one of Richard Dawkins’ more confrontational statements and asking if people agreed with it: “Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate”. Smallpox is obviously vastly unpleasant, evil is a harsh word, and as Matthew Parris noted in the Spectator last week, “faith” is a nice word, without the negative connetations of “religion”. Obviously people were going to think that “faith” was nicer than “smallpox”. Rather surprisingly though, 42% of people said they agreed with Dawkins with only 44% disagreeing, much to the amusement of the British Humanist Association and Labour Humanists. The rest of the survey found that 53% of people thought that, on balance, religion was a force for good in society, with 39% of people disagreeing. 58% of people though that Christianity has an important role to play in public life, with 37% disagreeing. On the latter question there was a very obvious age difference, the older respondents were the most likely they were to think that Christianity has a role in public life - 69% of over 65s agreed, with only 24% disagreeing. Amonst the youngest age group, under 25s, only 43% agreed with 52% disagreeing. To Theos’s great credit they reported the first question along with the other results, the Telegraph’s reporting is rather less sound: the question that doesn’t fit with the story is only mentioned in the commentary to try and shoehorn in a trend of young people being less likely to agree with Dawkins that doesn’t actually exist (compare the first and last question. On whether Christianity should have a role in public life there is a strong and consistent trend -amongst every age group the younger you are the more likely you are to disagree with an almost as smooth trend on agreement, with only 35-44s slightly bucking the trend. The difference between under 25s and over 65s agreements is 26 points, a significant difference. On the Dawkins question the figures are up and down with no clear pattern and the difference between youngest and oldest is only 7 points, so not statistically significant). http://www.ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/archives/899 Det hadde vært interessant å se hvor mange skandinaver som også har forstått at religiøs tro er et like stort onde som kopper. Vi har tradisjonelt vært betydelig mindre fortapt i religiøs fiksjon og fantasier enn britene. Erik Naggum -- Member of AAAS ACM AMS APS ASA EMS IEEE IMS MAA NYAS NBF NFF NMF Probability is not about the odds. It is about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive. -- Taleb ID: 2006-324-16916 http://erik.naggum.no/sources-and-resources/ --------------enigF0A6C86095EA345D11634626 Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" Content-Description: OpenPGP digital signature Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="signature.asc" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) iJ8EARECAF8FAkVhM6csGmh0dHA6Ly9lcmlrLm5hZ2d1bS5uby9DN0Y1ODU3NkND NTg1MTY3LnNpZ24rGGh0dHA6Ly9lcmlrLm5hZ2d1bS5uby9DN0Y1ODU3NkNDNTg1 MTY3LmtleQAKCRDH9YV2zFhRZ84PAJ4hcFUGzRSD4rIc81Xttw+ONOSi0QCgifdX NU13UF8r5TaB2iVCBr+cHRM= =W+vk -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --------------enigF0A6C86095EA345D11634626-- --===============0743004718== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline _______________________________________________ Diskusjon mailing list Diskusjon@skepsis.no http://lists.skepsis.no/mailman/listinfo/diskusjon --===============0743004718==--