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Showing posts from June, 2008

U.S. Religious Landscape Survey - Part 1

According to USA Today, the recent the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey indicates that most Americans have abanded traditional doctrine in favor of vague, fuzzy, "pick one from column A and one from column B" spirituality. However, as I looked through the detailed results of the survey, I found that the notion of "traditional doctrine" in the survey is very biased toward the doctrines of Catholicism and evangelical Christianity. Many of the "traditional doctrines" that Americans are rejecting are not doctrines of Judaism at all -- certainly not doctrines of the liberal movements of Judaism, but in many cases not even the doctrines of Orthodox Judaism! I am also concerned that the answers the survey received Jews may be skewed against traditional religion of any kind because of the way Jews classify ourselves. In this post, I'll focus on the classification issue; I will get into the details of the survey and