Jonah Goldberg links to a Mollie Ziegler Hemmingway Wall Street Journal essay, "Look Who's Irrational Now," and provides these excerpts:
"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new
study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional
Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the
efficacy of palm
readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows
that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant
denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be
much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than
evangelical Christians.
The Gallup Organization, under contract
to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a
series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future?
Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places
be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures
like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?
The
answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the
paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong
belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship
more than once a week did.
Keep reading. . .
Even among Christians, there were
disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of
Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former denomination, expressed strong
beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the
Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former denomination, did. In fact, the
more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was
to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with
people who are dead.
This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book
"The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener," skeptic and science writer
Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among
the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in
pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study
published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious
college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal
beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least
likely. [Read more...]