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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24905 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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Okay? 62% Christian - 46% YEC = 16% Christian nonYEC (very very roughly).

I didn't expect that to be a smaller subset of Americans and I'm still not confident in the calculation, but filter bubbles are salient because they break your intuition.

It's a common failure mode to take poll results literally.

People are using polls to "vote" a certain way based on their feels. For example, during the pandemic, a significant percentage of Democrats said they wanted to jail people for not taking the Covid vaccine and even take away their kids. Was this really how they felt? Would they really want to embark on this reign of terror which would make Hitler blush?

Of course not. The respondents were just "voting" based on their feels. They were scared and angry, and didn't have to face any consequences for their vote.

Unless there is skin in the game, or the poll is a literal vote, then these polls should be entirely discarded.

Where are you getting the numbers? If we go back to the poll Scott cited, it would show 46 % answering "God created humans in present form" and 32 % with "Humans evolved with God guiding", which would probably correspond to YEC and OEC.

Of course, this poll is over 10 years old, and the American society has, to put it mildly, gone through quite a bit of change since then.

More to the point neither one directly states support for YEC claims other than the narrow point about human evolution, so reading either one as "X% support for YEC" is running ahead of the evidence. (Even if we assume these polls directly measure people's literal beliefs, which per jeroboam, they probably don't.) Elsewhere in the thread, results from polls that did directly ask about the age of the Earth have been mentioned that got much lower numbers (30% at most, less if you change the wording of the question a little).

62% from one part of the "Religion in US" wikipedia page (they have other numbers elsewhere), and 46% from the linked post. I don't think the actual calculation is important, as I would've made the same argument if it was 40% or 4%.

But it's an apples to oranges comparison. The Wikipedia page gives current numbers, the poll gives numbers from ten years ago. There's been quite a considerable process of secularization since then.

You're quibbling with the numbers, when the bigger issue is that polls of this sort are complete garbage and should be discarded immediately.

The poll might as well have asked "Are atheists correct about God?". Because that's how people will view the question.

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