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Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Dubious stats

This is getting some buzz:


But surely there’s something fishy about an alleged 13% drop in one year. It’s not as if archeologists discovered the tomb of Jesus in the interim, and found his skeletal remains. Nothing has happened since last year to cause a loss of faith in the Resurrection. No disconfirmatory evidence has been unearthed.

So the report raises more questions than it answers. Was the same group of respondents asked the same question both times?

Are these people who believed in the Resurrection a year ago? Are these people who simply came about of the closet? Is this just part of the radical chic Obama fad?

1 comment:

  1. I agree that there's something fishy about that statistic. Even if the impact of atheistic literature is just now manifesting, a drop of 13% is itself hard to swallow. Maybe there are more immigrants, or more conversions out of Christianity to other religions (not necessarily to atheism).

    I'd like to know what they mean by "adults" in the survey and whether the age range changed;
    whether they phoned people with cell phones only, landlines only, or both;
    whether the percentages of the kinds of calls changed;
    whether a different segments of the population was called;
    whether the conversations (or samples of the conversations) were recorded to prevent an unbeliever from skewing the results.


    Speaking of doubts, I read a great article by C. Michael Patton titled:
    The Miserable Christian Doubt
    http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2013/04/the-miserable-christian-doubt/

    It was so good, it inspired me to post my own blog on the subject:
    Dealing with Christian Doubts
    http://gospelcrumbs.blogspot.com/2013/04/dealing-with-christian-doubts.html

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