[Buddha-l] Re: Speaking of tests...

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Thu, 2005-10-13 at 09:59 +0100, Alex Wilding wrote:

> The same motive led me to this test, the result of which was "straddler", in
> other words no real comment, as informative as the first test. But I did
> learn something else, or at least I got a reminder. Time and again I was
> dissatisfied by *all* the four options because the very perspective from
> which the questions appear to have been written is something I would want to
> challenge. 

That was also my experience. There was hardly a single question on the
test that had an answer that spoke to my condition. The test was quite
obviously written by someone whose main interest was to help people
decided whether they were Methodists or Baptists. It clearly did not
occur to the authors of the test that there are a few Hindus and
Buddhists who speak English well enough to take the quiz.

But what would one expect on a site called Belief Net? Nobody regards
belief as important but Christians. Belief is not at all important in
most forms of Hinduism or Buddhism. It is not even important in the many
non-creedal forms of Christianity (Quakerism, Unitarianism,
Universalism, at least one form of Baptism, and several of the low-
church forms of Protestantism that have sprung up in Europe). 

> My own little attitudes were just not being mapped onto the answers,
> and surely I'm not *that* unusual?

My guess would be that most subscribers to buddha-l would report the
same thing. The test reminded me of an analogy I have heard several
Vietnamese Buddhists use. They say that Americans kept wanting to know
whether Vietnamese Buddhists preferred capitalism or communism. This
question, they claim, is like asking a person who does not drink alcohol
whether they prefer wine, beer or whiskey. The beliefnet questionnaire
kept reminding me of that analogy. It kept offering wine, beer or
whiskey but ignoring the possibility that some people drink water. 

> I also note that I am still naive enough to have even entertained the idea
> that a multiple choice quizette on spirituality would rise above the level
> of the daily newspaper horoscope.

I have to confess that I never expect anything on the Internet to be as
useful as the daily horoscope in the newspapers. The horoscope can be
used to line the bottom of a bird cage.

-- 
Richard Hayes