Fewer than one in four Americans (24%) now believe the Bible is "the actual word of God, and is to be taken literally, word for word," similar to the 26% who view it as "a book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man." This is the first time in Gallup's four-decade trend that biblical literalism has not surpassed biblical skepticism. Meanwhile, about half of Americans -- a proportion largely unchanged over the years -- fall in the middle, saying the Bible is the inspired word of God but that not all of it should be taken literally.
From the mid-1970s through 1984, close to 40% of Americans considered the Bible the literal word of God, but this has been declining ever since, along with a shrinking percentage of self-identified Christians in the U.S. Meanwhile, the percentage defining the Bible as mere stories has doubled, with much of that change occurring in the past three years.
Okay that's progress, but there are still WAY to many Americans buying into this superstitious nonsense.
Our gullibility makes us easy marks for frauds and charlatans, and that gullibility is fed into and nourished by these primitive books of fairy tales.
You would think in the days of Google, where computers are built into our mobile phones, and information about EVERYTHING is only a button click away, that we would stop clinging to stories of miracles and ancient demigods.
And yet here we are, still pathetically unable to shake off the shackles of ignorance and the desperate need to believe in the impossible.
Source http://ift.tt/2qz2PMV
