I always urge some degree of caution on polls commissioned by pressure groups - not because any of the pollsters would willingly ask skewed questions, but because if pressure groups didn’t think they were going to get the answers they wanted they wouldn’t pay for or release the poll. It does cheer me up when a pressure group commissions a poll and gets an answer that obviously wasn’t the one they expected to get, especially when they have the guts to publish it anyway.
Theos, a new Christian think tank, heralded their launch by commissioning a poll from Communicate Research. They started by taking one of Richard Dawkins’ more confrontational statements and asking if people agreed with it: “Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate”. Smallpox is obviously vastly unpleasant, evil is a harsh word, and as Matthew Parris noted in the Spectator last week, “faith” is a nice word, without the negative connetations of “religion”. Obviously people were going to think that “faith” was nicer than “smallpox”.
Rather surprisingly though, 42% of people said they agreed with Dawkins with only 44% disagreeing, much to the amusement of the British Humanist Association and Labour Humanists.
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