God forbid we use science

[kandrathe]

And who is the Barna Group? Interesting question, with an answer that obviously shows how they got their results.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Barna

These numbers are, dollars to donuts, deflated in order to show what Mr. Barna wants to show: that those who "really" believe are a small minority of faithful, engaged in a David-vs-Goliath struggle with the giant of secular society. Evangelical isn't just an objective category for him and his company, nor is it a matter of self-identification. It is a goal to be attained. Hardly an objective source on who is and isn't Evangelical, I'd say.

Their definition of evangelical is a remarkably thorough affair, excluding anyone with so much as a scrap of religious moderation left in their bodies.

http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=...TopicID=17

So, perhaps the group of people this describes is only 9%. That alone is enough to give me the heebie-jeebies, because a tenth of the electorate is definitely non-trivial. If 9% of the voting public were fundamentalist Muslim, I'll give you 2000-1 odds you wouldn't be so dismissive. But the group of people who believe much or most of that definition, who go to those churches, listen to those preachers, and self-identify as being "Evangelical," is much larger. It is them who I am talking about. Depending on when you poll them, and how you phrase the question, that's anywhere from about 15% through to about 40%.

(Monstrous? Preposterous? I'm not the one who claimed a number that's 1/18th of even this maddeningly conservative estimate (in both senses) matched their personal experience.)

-Jester

And, so... ...your numbers might be... ...somewhat inflated to show whatever that pollster wanted to show? So, actually to be accurate, how you phrase the question and how you poll the results could be anywhere from .5% to 40% as we've seen. Which is a good example of "How to lie with statistics". And, for the record, my personal experience is that I don't really hang out at Bob Jones, or Liberty U, but I do see mostly the mainstream Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims. Remember also that I live in the only Midwest State that is immune to Republican landslides. So, yes, 1 in 200 hard core "Religious Right Wingers" is about par for those in my area. If 7-9% were Muslims it wouldn't bother me at all, so long as their imam was not exhorting them to violent Jihad against the infidels. But, then, it would equally bother me if some Evangelical pastor, or even the Pope himself was exhorting people to shoot abortion doctors. In any case, I think it is worthy of keeping them in the FBI watch list and using all the powers of the Patriot Act to surveillance the be-jesus (or maybe the be-mohammed) out of them.