This is too much! It's too good, I have to share it.

The Wall Street Journal has filed a comprehensive report on What Americans Believe, based on a new Gallup poll. Firstly, the WSJ claims that Atheism leads to an increase in weirder beliefs:

"The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won't create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that's not a conclusion to take on faith -- it's what the empirical data tell us."

Surely they're kidding: it's Christians who are gullible and superstitious, right?

"…[the study] shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

ROFLMAO!

But wait, there's more:

"The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?"

Great! So who's more likely to believe in the supernatural?

"While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did."

OK, so agnostics/atheists are four times more likely than regular churchgoers to believe in leprechauns, ghosts, and the 'powers' of Colin Fry? But what about liberal milk-sop left wing Christians like Barrack Obama and the like, surely they're more sophisticated than the common or garden atheist?

"While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead."

Great, so Sarah Palin is statistically two and a half times more likely to be rational than Barrack Obama. They're gonna love that at Democrat HQ.

"This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener," skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely."

Yeah well, that would explain Danyl. So university graduates are more likely to be superstitious than born again Christians?

"Surprisingly, while increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs, higher education doesn't. Two years ago two professors published another study in Skeptical Inquirer showing that, while less than one-quarter of college freshmen surveyed expressed a general belief in such superstitions as ghosts, psychic healing, haunted houses, demonic possession, clairvoyance and witches, the figure jumped to 31% of college seniors and 34% of graduate students."

ROFLMAO all over again! Come in Peter, I'm sure you have an opinion on this as a declared atheist and humanist!

"We can't even count on self-described atheists to be strict rationalists. According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's monumental "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey" that was issued in June, 21% of self-proclaimed atheists believe in either a personal God or an impersonal force. Ten percent of atheists pray at least weekly and 12% believe in heaven."

I told you this was too much. Ten percent of atheists pray at least once a week???

Scott me up Beamie, as the light of Christianity goes out in the West, its apparent there's a decrease in intelligent life down here.