The last time I quoted Steve Prothero from a Newsweek piece, it was unflattering:
"The hard-core atheist," Prothero writes, "once a stock figure in American life, has gone the way of the freak show."This time he sounds a little better:
Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University and author of "Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- And Doesn't," served as an advisor on the survey. "I think in general the survey confirms what I argued in the book, which is that we know almost nothing about our own religions and even less about the religions of other people," he said.But Alan Cooperman, of Pew Forum, nails it:
"[Atheists and agnostics] are people who thought a lot about religion," he said. "They're not indifferent. They care about it."And that's why we don't buy it anymore.
