Monday, January 11, 2016

And another thing

Still thinking about that bad piece of data manipulation I saw last week. (See previous post)

As I pointed out, it took a percentage of people who answered certain questions, averaged it (whatever that meant), and multiplied by the entire world Muslim population. It concluded 345 million Muslims believe in honor killings for apostasy. Besides using regional statistics to make assumptions about a world population, the global number includes babies. You can't ask a baby to do a poll, so the poll does not include them. Babies also can't form those types of beliefs.

According to the video, there are 345 million jihadis sneaking in through our borders via the refugee program. Even using most of the bad math they did, you have to cut that in half, unless you care about an infant or old and infirmed jihadi, which you shouldn't.

Let's use their math and look closer to home and abuse some numbers. The US is 70% Christian, that's 225 million. 23% say Jesus WILL return by 2050 and 18% say "probably". That's 92 million people in the US who aren't worried about their grandchildren's future and have no reason to recycle or clean up their local watershed or read a book.

It's hard to get numbers on things like, "do Christians believe in stoning", but we know some do, because they write books and preach about it. The Barna Group, a highly respected polling organization that polls questions like that, says 50% of adult Christians believe the Bible is accurate in all its teachings. That's 160 million who accept Exodus 21:20.

Why aren't we worried about this? Because we know we have a rule of law in this country and if people start stoning their neighbors or taking slaves, we'll stop it.

Much the same way that the entire world is working together to stop a 100,000 or so rag-tag military that is currently breaking universal rules of moral and ethical behavior. We've dropped a lot of bombs on that area, and sent a lot of weapons and a lot of soldiers. They can see where those things come from, but don't have the broad perspective that we have, or at least should have if we are watching our news and checking our facts. 

We also know that people answer poll questions in a certain way, but actually mean something else. It's easier with US Christians, because we also know they don't know their Bibles, so the question is flawed from the beginning.

The Pew poll tried to get at some of this by not only saying "apostasy", but asking about whether the law should apply just to Muslims, or just to Muslims within the majority Muslim country or majority area. (None of this is mentioned in the video, FYI, use the link) If you could design the poll properly, I suspect you would find that very few people get up every morning and want to kill everyone who doesn't believe like they do. The ones who do, aren't going to answer your poll honestly anyway and they aren't wondering around at the mall to be asked in the first place, so getting that number is almost impossible.

The Pew poll was not able to follow-up and clarify that cutting off someone's hands for stealing should only be done by an official government agency after due process and only for repeat offenders. Sure, we know some people are taking this law into their own hands, but we have some guys in Oregon right now who think they are above the US law. There's always going to be some of those. We (the USA) have a lot of people who still believe in the death penalty, something I consider particularly barbaric. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, something we can actually do something about by participating in our local government.

Really, we have much better ways to spend our time than with videos like this.

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