Originally posted by TheB1ueSoldier
Research groups, focus groups, and magazines such as Focus On The Family and Southern Baptist Convention's Council on the Family claim that Christian
households only experience a 1% divorce rate at most.
Of course they do. But I really can't bash them for saying it unless you want to cite one of their surveys. If its above board - random sampling,
objective definition of "Christian Household," etc., and explains what those terms means then it shouldn't matter. It probably isn't though -
since a random sample so large that it has no material confidence interval would require a huge sampling size.
Originally posted by TheB1ueSoldier
They even have the slogan "a family that prays together, stays together." So I wasn't kidding about the propaganda and unsupported "facts" that
Christian interest groups throw at us. And in light of this new poll, its confirmed that in fact Atheists and Christians do not have a large enough
difference in divorce rates for Christian interest groups to be saying this. That is why its anti-propaganda.
I would say its just another form of propaganda, its anti-christian and pro-atheist propaganda. It is
not confirmed that atheists have a lower
divorce rate than Christians, for quite a few logical and statistical reasons:
1) On the logic side, as I previously described, your comparing self-classifying data with objective event based data. Combining these two events -
self-identified Christians with objective data like divorces among the sample - captures huge swaths of people who may or may not fit any reasonable
definition of Christian. Same goes for Atheists.
2) Again on the logic side, you are not comparing apples to apples. You are trying to segregate the denominations of Christianity and compare that
with the overall ideology of Atheism. If you were being truthful, you'd compare all denominations combine to represent Christianity as a whole. When
you do, you get a group average of 25%, within the confidence interval between Christianity and Atheism. As such, there
is no material difference
in divorce rates among Christians and Atheists.
3) On the statistics side, since Atheists are such a small percent of the population, the random sample required to be statistically significant is
small. This brings in other problems that tests of statistical significance cannot help us with. If I have a small population such that I only need a
few random people sampled to collect their data, I run a higher chance of collecting data that fall outside the normal distribution curve for whatever
I am collecting. Unless these surveys include a difference of means test for the Atheist group showing that there is no statistically significant
difference in between objective demographics in the sample group and the estimated demographics of the population, we have no way of knowing how
accurate this is.
Originally posted by TheB1ueSoldier
Well who are you to tell who is or is not Christian? Everyone has their own opinion on what constitutes a Christian. The Catholic Church has stated
many times that it is the one true church for Christians. Some protestants claim that the pope is actually an agent of the devil and that Catholics
are condemned to hell. Other protestants believe that if you cannot speak in tongues then you will not go to heaven because you haven't been
spiritually reborn (its true my old church preached this). Ultimately, you CANT judge each Christian to see if they follow your specific rules of
Christianity, because everyone has different rules. The only reliable way is to ask people if they consider themselves to be following a Christian
life and if they indeed are a Christian.
You completely missed the point. Due to an amalgamation of cultural and and social factors, people in generally identify themselves as Christian
even when they do not meet any reasonable standard for the classification. It is a phenomena in statistics called the
social desirability
response, where respondents will almost always answer questions in ways that they believe you want to hear and which are in line with cultural
norms.
You are attempting to infer with statistics that it is the
ideological nature of Christianity that Christians claim somehow saves them from
things like divorce or prison, and then you are using data from people who in all likelihood do not possess the type of ideology you are railing
against. It doesn't really matter if they claim they are Christian and yet don't believe in the divinity of Christ or the tenets of his message. If
they claim themselves as Christian and yet don't really have a Christian ideology, how can you conclude that their Christianity did not save them
from divorce or prison (when they did not really have such an ideology to begin with)?
Originally posted by ALightinDarkness
Actually, non-denominational refers to Evangelical Christians, not the kind of Christians who stay home on sundays and fap on the internet all day.
Evangelicals hold a very fundamentalist Christian view and tend to grow along the bible belt.
No, it doesn't, because the denomination is self-identifying. And those who do not go to church or participate in the Christian community would
logically call themselves non-denominational. If they meant evangelical, they would have added that.
Originally posted by TheB1ueSoldier
Agreed, but that does not mean you can throw all the evidence out the window. Face it, the only reason you say this is because the statistics didn't
match up to what you wanted. If it were 75% Atheist and .02% Christian you'd have a lot less to quarrel with.
Quite wrong. You really need to stop assuming everyone that who disagrees with you is out to get you. It doesn't matter what the data conclude when
the data are not compiled in a manner in which you can draw these conclusions from. Your playing with statistics, I've pointed out what your doing,
and now your mad about it.
[edit on 8-7-2008 by ALightinDarkness]
thread !!! 
Freethoughtpedia LOL 
