Quote:These are among the key findings of the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, a nationwide poll conducted from May 19 through June 6, 2010, among 3,412 Americans age 18 and older, on landlines and cell phones, in English and Spanish. Jews, Mormons and atheists/agnostics were oversampled to allow analysis of these relatively small groups
OK. I see that they oversampled atheists/agnostics to compensate for the small population size - good, but it says nothing about Jews. The population size for Jews would have been around 58.
The results are possibly valid for atheists depending on the oversampling, but 6.7 and 6.2 are very close.
Then we'd have to allow for the fact that most Atheists in the USA came from a Christian background, so their knowledge of the Bible would be fairly similar.
Also, if you look at the questions themselves, they are not all about Christianity. It's probably fair to say that somebody immersed in a Christian culture wouldn't know as much about other religions.
Other questions are pretty generic- for example:
What the Public Knows About Religion
At least two-thirds know…
Public school teachers cannot lead class
in prayer 89%
Atheist is someone who does not believe
in God 85
Mother Teresa was Catholic 82
Moses was the Bible figure who led
the exodus from Egypt 72
Jesus was born in Bethlehem 71
Constitution says government shall neither
establish nor interfere with religion 68
Most people in Pakistan are Muslim 68
So on the whole, I don't think this survey shows conclusively that Atheists and Agnostics know more about the Christian religion than the average Christian. If you look at the elements in the full report, the emphasis of the survey is not fully on Christianity.
It's gratifying to see that they used the generally accepted definition of Atheist (well from a monotheistic perspective at least):
Quote:Atheism and Agnosticism
Is an atheist someone who does NOT believe in God, believes in God, or is unsure whether God exists?