Bible vs. Wordsum

Prepared from the General Social Survey (GSS) Cumulative Datafile 1972-2008

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -Weighted N		BIBLE
		1 WORD OF GOD	2 INSPIRED WORD	3 BOOK OF FABLES	4 OTHER	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	0	58.3 68	23.0 27	17.8 21	.9 1	100.0 117
	1	59.5 147	27.6 68	11.4 28	1.5 4	100.0 246
	2	58.0 277	28.9 138	11.9 57	1.1 5	100.0 477
	3	54.8 426	33.8 263	10.7 83	.7 5	100.0 778
	4	47.3 692	38.9 569	13.1 191	.8 12	100.0 1,465
	5	40.2 956	47.2 1,121	11.6 276	1.0 23	100.0 2,376
	6	32.9 1,078	53.3 1,745	13.0 424	.8 27	100.0 3,275
	7	26.1 626	58.1 1,391	14.7 352	1.1 26	100.0 2,395
	8	19.7 310	60.4 948	19.1 300	.8 12	100.0 1,570
	9	12.8 144	57.3 645	28.9 326	1.0 11	100.0 1,127
	10	9.5 69	55.8 409	33.6 246	1.2 9	100.0 733
	COL TOTAL	32.9 4,794	50.3 7,324	15.8 2,305	.9 136	100.0 14,558

Text for 'BIBLE'

120a. Which of these statements comes closest to describing your feelings about the Bible? 1. The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word. 2. The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, word for word. 3. The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men.

As you see, there’s a very strong correlation between Wordsum score (a ten question vocabulary test) and a respondent’s feelings about the Bible, especially with respect to whether one considers the Bible the actual word of Got to be taken literally, word for word.

Among those who say that the Bible is the inspired word of God, I suspect that about half have a unitarian universalist view of religion (although they probably don’t realize that’s what their view would be called), and the other half believe in the divinity of Jesus but simply have a more nuanced view of the entire Bible.

Comments

[The Undiscovered Jew]

Come on, Sigma.

Where the heck is your "Huckabee proves Evangelicials are drooling, HBD-ignorant, morons" post?

;)

[mike]

Damn, we'd be so much better off without all those dumb Gentiles...

[RandyB]

Like the fundies like to claim "American education is biased against religious belief."

Yeah, ANY real education is biased against superstition, ignorance, and calling every unexplainable event "magic."

[Turambar]

Sounds like we have confirmed that the "Inspired Word of God" people are correct and the "Fables" people are droolers.

With those three choices you'd think Other would be higher.

[May]

What about the presence of confounding variables?

[Wm Tanksley]

I'd say that's an illiterate survey, if that was the actual question asked. To take everything literally would be foolish in a text that contained any metaphors (such as parables), so any Christian answering #1 would have to be thoroughly ignorant (as you've pointed out, this is a huge population). On the other hand, I do believe that the Bible is to be taken seriously and word for word; but only literally when it was written literally.