[techweenie]

I found this (no, not on Lew Rockwell) and tidied it up a bit:

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A shocking new book proves Americans are simultaneously the most “religious” and the most religiously ignorant people in the developed world. Overwhelming majorities of Our Fellow Citizens don’t know anything about the Bible, the teachings of Jesus or even the 10 Commandments they want posted everywhere. (Could Christians want those ancient laws displayed at every government building so they can learn one or two?)

Here’s a shameful list of things Americans don’t know about their claimed religion.

By every single measure except “formal education,” Americans are dramatically stupider than they were a few generations ago, while they wouldn’t even be able to communicate with normal people of the 19th Century. The calamitous decline of the American brain means your fellow citizens are culturally, linguistically, mathematically, technically, politically and civically illiterate.

But the way people go on about Jesus and how the Terrorist Muslims are coming to take away our precious freedoms guaranteed by Jesus to each American, you’d think they at least knew some simple bible stories. No. They actually don’t know anything about anything.

* 81% of Americans claim to be “Christian.” Recent surveys show only 58% to 80% of Americans are “certain” there’s a God.
* 75% of adults believe the famed Benjamin Franklin saying “God helps those who help themselves” is one of the Ten Commandments.
* 10% believe Joan of Arc was the wife of Noah from the Book of Genesis.
* The decline of religious literacy in America began with the “Second Great Awakening” of the 1800s — a rejection of the Founding Fathers’ Age of Reason and theological knowledge in favor of “personal relationship with God.”
* 50% of high school seniors believe Sodom and Gomorrah were married.
* 17% agree that Ramadan is the “Jewish day of atonement.”
* Most believe Saint Paul led the Israelites from their enslavement in Egypt.
* Only one in three Americans can name the four Gospels, while less than half can even name one of them.
* A majority couldn’t identify the preacher of the “Sermon on the Mount.”
* Religious fundamentalists say all this Christian ignorance is because public schools don’t teach the Bible, but people don’t know anything public schools do teach, either.

These are all factoids from a new book: "Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- and Doesn't."