Posted on 12/09/2007 8:48:46 AM PST by squireofgothos
Commenting on the results of the survey, Theos Director Paul Woolley said: "These findings provide us with a good snapshot of our national relationship with Christianity. They show that the Christmas story, in its classic formulation is still very much in our cultural blood stream, as indeed is the Christian story as a whole.
"However, when you probe in any depth, you discover that our knowledge and understanding is rather more shaky.”
The poll also found that knowledge of the Christmas story varied with age. The youngest people questioned (aged 18-24) knew the least about the story of the birth of Jesus, with only 7 percent knowing the correct answers to all the questions asked. Middle aged people (aged 55-64) were found to know the most, with 18 percent answering all questions correctly.
"The fact that younger people are the least knowledgeable about the Christmas story may reflect a decline in the telling of Bible stories in schools and the popularity of Nativity plays,” said Woolley.
Biblical literacy also varied from region to region, with those living in the Midlands emerging as the
(Excerpt) Read more at christianpost.com ...
bump for publicity
Christianity is finished in Briton. Actually, Briton is finished.
Thanks for posting a still from my favorite Christmas
Special.
OK, “It’s A Wonderful Life” probably does tie for the #1
“Christmas Favorite” with me.
Wanna guess the percentage in this country who'd pass this test???
Hmmmmm, maybe all these Muslims are in Wales. Yeah, that's it, they're all in Cardiff!! After all the Cardiff Rift runs right through there....
I wonder how many of them know in detail the night flight of Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq?
Not as many as are indifferent to religion in general I'd think.
About the only positive I see is that that INVADING Army from Mexico
and points south...
They aren’t Wahhabists.
YET!
Have you hung out at Heathrow? It is like going to Karachi or Islamabad.
Maybe the Muslim immigrants can’t afford to pay one and half million pounds for a house?
And I wonder how many of them actually put an eye out with a B-B gun?
My daughters do not like the stories like Rudolph, etc. They do love the Nativity Story that was made last year.
Their favorite Christmas activity is going to a church that has built a small replica of the town of Bethlehem. There Roman guards all over the place. There are people dressed in period clothes hosting booths with activities relating to the period (games, brick building, metal work, etc). Then every half hours, actors walk through the town portraying the Christmas story. Mary is on a real donkey. The shepherds are watching real sheep. The 3 wisemen come in riding on camels.
At the end, everyone ends up at a manger. It is just a great event (and it’s actually in California). I love it more than any other Christmas activity that we do. It really makes the Christmas story come alive.
I’m glad my kids are growing up knowing the real meaning of Christmas.
“only 22 percent knew that Jesus, Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt to escape Herod’s massacre of the innocents”
Hmm, that one’s a bit ambiguous though. I mean ‘such an event never happened, but was included by Matthew as part of his narrative linking Jesus with Moses’ is also a correct answer :)
According to whom? Why not throw the rest of it out?
Erm, me.
And, like, historians and theologians and people. The fact that the ‘massacre’ is mentioned in none of the available historical sources, none of the other nativity traditions, and the flight to Egypt is contradicted by the account in Luke’s Gospel (which says the family left Bethlehem and returned to Nazareth) would be fairly big clues.
And I’d rather understand what the author was trying to show me than throw it out.
I have a 4-year-old (Jewish) son dying to see “Rudolph” too - we were looking to find when it will be shown on TV! I admit to liking it too, although Santa is just not very politically correct in that movie, is he? LOL. Great classic claymation though.
So what are the questions? They could have some really tough ones on that test. Most people wouldn’t know anymore than what they can gather by looking at a typical holiday nativity scene.
“I have a 4-year-old (Jewish) son dying to see “Rudolph” too -
we were looking to find when it will be shown on TV!”
Oh dear, I fear it’s already run on CBS (see URL below).
I don’t know if there will be a re-run during this month.
I don’t know if this help you in your locale...but here in Mid-Missouri
I’ve noticed that a couple of the major grocery stores have “Rudolph” on
DVD for $11. (I do plan to buy one). If not available, perhaps amazon
offers a similar deal.
http://www.cbs.com/specials/rudolph/
Emerson remarked that while England is Christian, they never open the Bible to the New Testament.
Rats! Why won’t they play it again? Surely some channel will play rudolph again this season?
Being Jewish I’d secretly like not to buy a Christmas show... LOL! But we love it!
Which begs the question that God posed to Job - who do you think you are?
I’m not trying to quarrel with you, but I don’t folllow your logic. Aren’t there lots of things in the Bible that aren’t mentioned in available historical sources? Which available historical sources mention that Jesus was the son of God, died on the cross, and was resurrected to atone for our sins? John and Mark don’t even mention Jesus’ birth - does that mean he wasn’t even born?
And where does Luke say that they didn’t go to Egypt - he merely says the same thing Matthew does - that they were in Bethelehem and then they were in Nazareth. I am pretty sure that doing all the Lord requires includes listening to what the Lord tells you in dreams, as Joseph did when he went to Egypt.
I really don’t understand those who selectively discard the parts of the Bible that they don’t understand or can’t accept.
folllow=follow
“I really don’t understand those who selectively discard the parts of the Bible that they don’t understand or can’t accept.”
I told you what my understanding of it is. It’s a fairly orthodox understanding as I understand, not particularly contraversial. I understand that the author was telling me something important and not necesarily trying to provide a historical account.
“Which available historical sources mention that Jesus was the son of God, died on the cross, and was resurrected to atone for our sins?”
Lots of historical sources confirm that Jesus was crucified. The other things you mention are matters of faith rather than historical record. Would you not think a massacre of newborn infants by the King might be noteworthy to even one of the historians of the time?
The bible is a historical record, different, perhaps, than Jospehus or Tacitus or Macrobius, but historical none-the-less. I believe God was its author, and that Jesus actually was God, and His resurrection actually did happen. I don’t find it remarkable that like other many crimes Herod committed, killing a few children in Bethlehem did not make it into any other historical record. Indeed, one of the controversial things Jesus said was that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, we must be like children. The outrageousness of this pronouncement is testament to the low place children had in ancient cultures - Tacitus thought Jews were nutty for making child murder a capital crime. So I don’t find it remarkable that he didn’t choose to make a record of that (Herod’s) crime.
But then again, there are many Biblical facts waiting to be re-discovered.
Thank you for a refreshing, and alas rather rare piece of common sense about the scale of the Muslim presence in Britain.
Hey, why not? The connection between Christianity and the commercialized Christmas culture is virtually non-existant. Nothing is left to offend. Santa is a only cartoon now -- who today knows who St. Nicholas was, where/when he lived, or what he did? Religion, and Christ in particular, have been expunged from the Holiday Season. What is left to take exception to? Enjoy the cartoons.
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