What do loons get out of their looniness?

[elfs]

What's in it for him?
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

Okay, by now, with the Easter season come and gone, most of you have heard the riff about the definition of Christianity:

A cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father will let you live forever if you pretend to eat his flesh, drink his blood, and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that he put there a long time ago as punishment for all humanity because a rib-woman made from a dust-man was convinced by a talking snake to eat fruit from a magical tree.

As deliberately offensive as this accurate assesment may be worded, I have to wonder what believers like this guy get out of their lonely, abuse-filled ritual on public streetcorners. I mean, he just stands there once in a while, holding up this sign and waving at passersby. I mean, does he really think he's going to get anyone who's not already on board with his tribal message to sign up right there and then? I mean, come on: one out of every five self-identified Christian college-age kids thinks Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple in the Bible. What's the point?

Comments

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Americans get an 'F' in Religion (http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2007-03-07-teaching-religion-cover_N.htm), from USA Today.

By the way, I aced the quiz on the left hand side. The only one I missed was "Name the seven sacraments of Catholicism." I could only remember five.

And yes, the Kama Sutra is in fact a sacred text of Hinduism. It is the book that teaches one how to acheive kama, or passion, which is one of the four aims of Hindu life (the others being: success (artha), communal duty (dharma), and liberation from Earthly concerns (moksha)).

[lionman.livejournal.com]

Thanks for citing your source! Very enlightening.

BTW, I scored 86. I missed one of the 7 sacraments (but I'm not Catholic, so I'm not overly worried.) And I missed part of the Ramadan question, as well as all of the Noble truths of Buddhism. So, I get a B, not an F, I guess. :-)

[norincraft.livejournal.com]

This struck me as being a bit overly specific on the Christianity portions and I suspect you would have earned an even higher score if the religions were more evenly balanced in number and details of questions, included a fuller range (Paganism, Shamanism, Yazidi, etc) and normed across the whole US data set. Anyway, a 70 for me.
odd since, I don't even pretend to know much about religion. But I've managed to at least respect others for their religious views.