Reviews of the new hit movie “Gravity” note that it’s an unusually fine science fiction film. What they don’t mention is that the main character represents an increasingly common theme in American religion: The spiritual “none of the above.”

TL;DR - screwy methods produce good headlines

This article refers a lot to statistics and percentages. There are a few things to keep in mind though.

  1. “I don’t trust any statistics that I did not fudge myself” is a truism
  2. The results of statistics depend heavily on how the questions are asked.

The current default, especially in the US, is religiosity on an almost fanatical level. The “nones” are considered the exception. To be religious is considered the norm.

From such a starting point, it is very, VERY hard to actually come up with questions that do not influence the results towards religiosity. You can massage data into anyone believing anything if you just ask often enough in different ways.

Combine that with an article author that writes mainly for regligionnews.com and you have a predictably skewed outcome. This is not due to maliciousness, bias or ineptitude of the author or the statisticians! It is rather because the methods and tools employed are skewed by the presumption of what social norms are.

P.S.: I haven’t seen it yet and this article has not managed to turn me off it yet. It’s on my to-view-list.