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1 October 2010updated 27 Sep 2015 2:12am

Religion Quiz: Results are in

Our results suggest believers outshine non-believers.

By Patrick Osgood

On Wednesday I asked New Statesman readers to participate in a truncated verson of a Pew Centrereligious questionnaire. The Pew study suggests that that, in the US, atheists know more about religion than their faithful counterparts.

Thanks to a healthy battery of responses, I can reveal the results. The scores have been pro-rated to those on the original Pew questionnaire, and calculated as a mean average. They are as follows:

chart

Interestingly, the trend is quite the reverse in the UK of that found by Pew for the US. At the NS, believers outscored both atheists and agnostics on average.

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One interesting point was that atheists who declared themselves to be raised under a faith scored consistently better than those who did not.

Now, do bear in mind that these results are completely unscientific, not least because I had 46 reponses. Atheist respondents far outweighed Christians — a window on our readership, perhaps — and as with the American poll, we did not get any Muslim or Hindu participants.

Still, I think we can all be chuffed to have outscored the Americans (though a couple do feature), with consistenly higher scores and a higher overall average of 27.61 scored against the overall US average of 16.

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