"blujuju" <blujuju at hotmail.com> wrote in message news:aj75f1$190u0n$1 at ID-
> : YOU tell US what you "think" it is: less than 1%, or 10%?
> :
> : I mean, by their definition of "atheist", Thomas Jefferson was an
atheist,
> : even though he wrote in his own hand "I am a real Christian".
> : http://christianparty.net/tj.htm> :
> : Which do you think it is, blu? Are men like Thomas Jefferson who didn't
> : blong to an organized church all "atheists", as American Atheist
> claims--or
> : do you believe the DIRECT word from a Christian like Mr. Jefferson
> himself?
>> I think, John, that you've totally missed my point. Did you happen to
notice
> that /every/ page cited a different statistic? Every one of them, John.
That
> one site had two different ones, for Pete's sake. I thought that would be
> the dead give-away at what I was trying to point out to you.
>> You give that christianparty.net site constant hommage for your source
> material. Perhaps they're a little biased? As is the american atheist
site?
> As are /all/ of them? You betcha.
>> Here's where I'm going to pull out that ol' buggaboo, *thinking*, again,
> John. You, in your religious fever, didn't pay attention to the data
> supplied.. you just set out to debunk it. You didn't see the tree for the
> forest. I'll bet you blindly accepted christianparty.net's statistic, and
> probably didn't even read my comments on the links supplied. If so, that
was
> your mistake, John. I gave you the answer.. I just didn't lable it as
such.
>> To spell it out plainly for you, John, *think* for yourself.
>> To answer your questions, I don't believe /any/ of them. They've all got
an
> agenda.
> I think the actual percentage (of atheists in the US) is somewhere around
> 10%. Based on personal experience only.
> I'm well aware that Thomas Jefferson wasn't an atheist. Why the red
herring?
>> blu
>>
None of the polls or surveys report that atheists are more than 4% of the
population. Even the once-credible Gallup Poll reports that 96% of
Americans pray, and unless you think atheists pray, that doesn't leave but
4% who are atheists.
Not that Gallup is the final authority on anything, though. The following
is an example of an incredibly biased Gallup Poll.
John Knight
http://christianparty.net/gallupsexdifference.htm
POLL RELEASES
February 21, 2001
Americans See Women as Emotional and Affectionate, Men As More Aggressive
Gender specific stereotypes persist in recent Gallup poll
by Frank Newport
GALLUP NEWS SERVICE
PRINCETON, NJ - A recent Gallup poll shows that Americans have little
difficulty
associating specific personality characteristics with one gender or the
other--despite
the existence of at least some social pressures in today's society to view
men and
women equally. The poll gave Americans the opportunity to associate
particular
characteristics with either men or women, and the results show that even
today
Americans are likely to say that the words "emotional," "affectionate,"
"talkative,"
"patient" and "creative" describe women, while associating characteristics
such as
"aggressive" and "courageous" with men. Neither sex is most likely to be
described by
the terms "intelligent," "easy-going," and "ambitious."
Here is the basic summary of the results based on responses to the following
question: I
would like to ask about some specific characteristics of men and women. For
each one I
read, please tell me whether you think it is generally more true of men or
more true of
women.
======================================
To put it simply, this is not a true statement. In fact, it's a blatantly
false concept even before you know Gallup's own poll results, or the polling
methodology, or Gallup's agenda. With no further investigation, it just
makes no sense that both sexes would agree on which sex is the most
"intelligent", "easy going", or "ambitious", particularly when Gallup has
already admitted "that Americans have little difficulty associating specific
personality characteristics with one gender or the other". But Gallup's
very own poll results show the statement "Neither sex is most likely to be
described by the terms "intelligent," "easy-going," and "ambitious" to be
patently false.
Why would Gallup make a patently false statement which their own poll
results readily disputes? Do they hope that nobody will read any further
than the first paragraph? Or that the American education system has by now
been sufficiently dumbed down that most Americans can't read a poll anyway?
Or that just this part of their report will be quoted by mediots who will
gladly ignore the actual facts?
In any event, the fact is that Gallup's own data shows that men are 1.4
times more likely than women to believe that men are more ambitious, 1.2
times more likely to believe that men are more easy-going, and twice as
likely to believe that men are more intelligent. Conversely, women are just
as biased towards their own sex, being 1.1 times more likely to believe that
women are more easy-going, 1.3 times more likely that women are more
ambitious, and 1.5 times more likely to believe that women are more
intelligent.
Is "intelligence" the "controversial" issue that Gallup hoped to avoid? Is
political correctness so rampant that they would avoid at all costs the
perception that they're accusing men that they're "sexist" because they were
twice as likely as women to believe that men are more intelligent than
women? Or that women are "sexist" because they're 40% more likely to
believe that women are more intelligent );
This is the most significant of all the "gender differences", yet Gallup
hoped to bury that fact. Why? There's a serious disconnect between their
responsibility to accurately report the news and their destructive agenda.
To be precise, we need to understand where American women get their
information from that so many of them believe that women are more
intelligent than men, and why Gallup assists so greatly in the propagation
of that myth.
There isn't a single shred of statistical evidence to support this belief,
so where does it come from? Every single standardized test, from coast to
coast, country to country, race to race, and sex to sex, shows that men are
significantly more intelligent than women. The brain size and brain cell
count studies all show that men have a proportionately larger brain than
women, which is consistent with the differences in intelligence and test
scores and incomes and earning capacity. When charted by race and sex,
there is a linear relationship between GRE scores and brain size (r-squared
= .89). The measured differences in sports events like the Olympics show a
Gaussian Distribution [read: a "bell curve"] that is identical to that for
test scores, brain size, and incomes. Yet more than a quarter of men and
almost a half of women still believe that women are more intelligent than
men.
These aren't the only categories in which the sexes had a significant
difference of opinion about their own sex which Gallup failed to adequately
report. Men were 1.2 times more likely to believe that men are more
aggressive, but women were 1.4 times more likely to believe that women were
more aggressive. Men and women agreed with how emotional and talkative
women are (90% and 78%, respectively), but men were twice as likely to
believe that men were more emotional and 1.1 times as likely to believe that
men were more talkative, than women. Men were 1.4 times more likely to
believe that men were more courageous, but women were 1.6 times more likely
to believe their own sex was. Same with patient: 1.5 times versus 1.1
times. And creative: 3.9 vs. 1.4. Men and women don't even agree on which
sex is the most affectionate, with women being twice as likely as men to
believe that men are more affectionate, and 10% less likely to believe that
women are.
With this obvious built-in bias in the way Gallup reports their data, it's
hard to imagine that the pollsters were objective in the way they collected
the data. But even if we accept that they were, this is a shocking sex
difference. Why would women be half as likely as men to know or understand
or accept the facts about the sex differences in intelligence? Or maybe
more importantly, why would forty percent of both men and women believe that
men and women are of equal intelligence?
======================================
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Survey Methods
The results below are based on telephone interviews with a randomly selected
national
sample of 1,026 adults, 18 years and older, conducted December 2-4, 2000,
For results
based on this sample, one can say with 95 percent confidence that the
maximum error
attributable to sampling and other random effects is plus or minus 3
percentage points.
In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties
in conducting
surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion
polls.
