[Buddha-l] How Gallup, Pew & Templeton Pro$elytize in the Guise of "Research"

[JKirkpatrick]

R.H. wrote:

"The Pew Charitable Trusts sponsors respectable scientific
studies using sound methodology and is one of the most reliable
sources of social scientific information on religion in all parts
of the world."

Asserting this claim about any polls purporting to gather data in
South, Southeast and East Asia (Japan excepted), sorry to say--
that they use sound methodology-- don't hold up because the
results are conditioned by what's available in those areas. What
data have been available over the past century have proved to be
quite (often extremely) unreliable. Hence my skepticism about
polls claiming to know what's going on with religion
affiliations/behavior in any of these regions as a whole (India,
China, Vietnam, Indonesia, for ex.). 

JK







 On Behalf Of Richard Hayes
Sent: Saturday, December 26, 2009 10:41 PM
To: Buddhist discussion forum


On Dec 26, 2009, at 4:10 PM, Curt Steinmetz wrote:

> What, one might wonder, is up with that? Well, as it turns out,
it is 
> more or less an open secret that Pew, Gallup and Templeton are
all in 
> the business of promoting Christianity under the guise of
"studying 
> religion".

It's also completely irrelevant, Dr Steinmetz. The Pew Charitable
Trusts sponsors respectable scientific studies using sound
methodology and is one of the most reliable sources of social
scientific information on religion in all parts of the world.
Even if it is true that there are people in the Pew Foundation
who have personal convictions, those convictions do not in any
demonstrable way influence the outcome of the research. It is not
"an open secret" that Pew is in the business of promoting
Christianity; rather, it is a misrepresentation of what the
business of the Pew Charitable Trusts is.

As for the Sir John Templeton Foundation, its mission is very
clear, and the research the foundation sponsors fits well with
the foundation's description of what it does. Its mission
statement is found on its web site.
http://www.templeton.org/about_us/ The Templeton Foundation,
unlike Pew, does not pretend to provide sociological data on
comparative religions, so mentioning it in your diatribe against
the Pew Foundation is pointless. The Templeton Foundation does
provide funds for promoting a particular sort of Christianity,
namely, theologically liberal and non-triumphalist Christianity
that takes science seriously and acknowledges the validity of
religions other than Christianity. The foundation provides an
important counterbalance to the forms of Christianity that are at
war with science, that deny the findings of evolutionary
biologists and geologists, that decry environmental science as a
hoax and that insist that the only path to redemption is through
Jesus Christ. 

Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes
rhayes at unm.edu