Thanks for the prayers and kind words Mom.

~ nick

Sadly, the stat I mentioned wasn’t a joke. Shocking, no? I think that touches one why some people react strongly to the results of the survey. “All these people that I encounter that seem so sure of themselves and talk a big game, they don’t even know what they’re preaching!” But of course, the Christians we think of are probably not the ones who can’t name the four gospels, they’re more likely to be the ones who also happen to think the earth is the center of the solar system.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/3742/new-poll-gauges-americans-general-knowledge-levels.aspx

I’ll add to this that while I’ve met a lot of atheists and agnostics who know lots of facts about Christianity, there are also several who have deep misunderstandings about current Christian thought and practice (or at least overgeneralize the teachings of a few small camps).

And no, I don’t expect everyone to be an expert on all religions (I’m not. I’d say I know very little about Islam and Judaism), but I think there’s a danger in being unfamiliar with them if you’re advocating one theology over another. I’m sure you’ve been involved with or at least witnessed a theological conversation where one person was dismissive of a position they weren’t familiar with (say Calvinism or sexuality or salvation).

I know a mistake I often made when I was younger (and probably still make) was to think my position was superior in areas that actually were very similar to other positions (thinking that the Christian worldview was radically different from other people’s in ways that it actually wasn’t). I also made lots of misjudgments because I picked out one detail of someone else’s position but didn’t understand how they viewed the world. “Sara thinks it’s ok to drink and drinking is bad. Why would anyone need to drink unless they were self-destructive or trying to escape from something?” There was no concept of there being a good or healthy way to drink (or if there was, I dismissed it as being too risky, toeing the line).

So I think my concern is that it’s way too easy to make lots of intellectual mistakes when you don’t know the lay of the land outside your own property. You don’t know much about your own stream if you only follow it up to your property line. It’s running through your neighbor’s land too.