It makes me wonder how many people know what literal means.
Well, one needn’t believe the bible to be completely literally true to believe that God created man in his present form.
It is a Gallup poll, and the clip on CBS radio from them was read by the father of a kid in my daughter’s old class in NJ, so I know it is believable. 
Here is the link to the Gallup poll site about the report. The denominator is everyone. I’d love to see a breakdown by religion, but I doubt that a statistically significant numbers of Jews and Moslems replied.
i don’t think it can be demonstrated that those who believe in this falshood do act better toward all others. Maybe to some of those who believe in the same falsehood, but I think that about covers it.
Ta for the link, Voyager. I’d actually say that the question as posed in the poll isn’t really all that clear. You could take it to mean the message is literal or the words. I’m not sure how many people said thought one way or the other, but I think the actual proportion of Biblical literalists is smaller than 31%, because of the phrasing. Phew.
I’m sure most Christians – Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant – would call that heresy (that of indifferentism, in RCC terminology). Christianity is not about good behavior for its own sake (that would be Judaism); Christianity is about personal spiritual salvation, i.e., getting into Heaven, which most churches believe depends far more on faith than on works. (The RCC no longer strictly believes only baptized and believing Christians can get into Heaven, but that’s post-Vatican-II thinking, AFAIK, and it’s still a long way from saying the content of one’s faith doesn’t matter in and of itself.)
I dunno. A little over 25% of Americans self-identify as evangelical, and I suspect 99+% of them would be biblical literalists. And when you consider that 30% of all Catholics* are Young Earth Creationists even though the Church explicitly disavows that belief, and I think the number is quite believable.
*about 25% of Americans are Catholic
Really? Two of the choices were: “Actual word of God, to be taken literally”, and “Inspired by word of God”. Wouldn’t someone who believes that the message is literal, but not the words, choose the latter as his answer? To me, “Actual word of God, to be taken literally” seems pretty clear.
if you look at the Gallup link the words below the 31% bar are “Actual word of God, to be taken literally.” I don’t think you can get much clearer than that.
I don’t quite know what a “literal message” is, or why almost 50% of the public would or could distinguish between a literal and an inspired message. In GD we’d probably figure out a way, but I doubt if most respondents would.
ETA: Missed it by that much.
“Actual word of God, to be taken literally”; the message of the Bible must be taken as is. That could be taken to mean, for example, that homosexuals = bad, or that you love your neighbour as yourself. Not necessarily as “there was a great flood”.
“Inspired by word of God”; the message of the Bible may not be exact. It may say love thy neighbour, but who’s a neighbour is very much up to debate.
And i’d point out that the very fact that* I* find the question unclear means that it can be done. Anecdote is not data and all that, but i’m living proof that the question may be misunderstood.
John Mace; leave me in my comfortably illusion, damn you! 
I think you have to account for the fact that a lot of people will answer “sure, the Bible is true” without really knowing much about it, without having read much of it and quite often, without even being aware of the problems that a literalist interpretation engenders. Don’t assume that all of the respondents have careful, studied opinions or have ever even given the matter more than ten seconds of thought.
No doubt true, but I still don’t find the 30% figure to be out of line. I suspect there are a lot of people who have read the Bible, are well aware of the contradictions contained there, but who still think it is literally true. Don’t ask me how they hold on to that belief…
Well, maybe what I said wasn’t literally true.
I rather suspect they have listened to their preachers talk about it (there was an unsurprising correlation with church attendance) and have read the carefully selected passages which remove or merge the contradictory material, and which create a more coherent story. That’s the kind of story I got in Hebrew School when I was in elementary school, and my Temple was far being a bunch of literalists. Kids get taught the simplified story, and unless they both have reason to actually read the Bible and logically analyze it, that’s as far as they go.
Same.
“Should we literally follow the ten commandments?”
“Sure! Murder is bad!”
If you asked them which part is taken literally, I douby they would go down chapter and verse through the entire Bible.
“Do you believe in the entire family tree as detailed in Matthew and the Begats?”
“Well, I always thought that there might be a chance that Zerubbabel’s dad wasn’t really Shealtiel. His maw was known as quite the hussy around the tents.”
Indeed. They’d just answer “all of it. What part of it being God’s word don’t you understand?”
I think you people are forgetting that half the population of the US has an IQ of 100 or less - assuming it’s been normed recently.
I am a theist, but still get attacked by Christian literalists. I usually reply that when looking at the Contents page of the Bible I see nothing in the Bible written by God. That I realize all the authors were inspired by God, just as my writings, and everyone else’s are also inspired by God. This does not mean that all the Bible is useless, or bad. Like any book it contains some great stuff and some not so great stuff. Read it all the way through and you will see what I mean.
Years ago I wrote an article about “Christian Criticism of Near Death Experiences” which is my thing. It has been pretty shocking to most Christians. If you wish to read it look here.
There would, I presume, be no point in running through, for the 114th time, an explanation of the idea that God can motivate people to do things, including being fallible human beings writing things, which can be studied by the collection of tools together called Biblical criticism, which Diogenes, not a Christian, has dealt with at greater length and far more scholarship that I am capable of, numerous times here already.
Hint: it’s called Christianity, not Bibleanity, for a fairly good reason. You probably could figure it out with that much help.
Nitpick, John: while I like your general argument, all Lutherans identify as being “evangelicals” and ELCA (note the name is an acronym for Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) at least are among the most liberal of denominations. I’m not totally sure about Missouri Synod, but I don’t think they’re dogmatic literalists, though they’re very conservative about Scripture. So your 99+% number has got to be off by some indeterminate amount.
But the general position you take is one I can agree with, aside from that.
Well, that’s interesting, because that’s not what most non-Evangelical catechisms teach. You fail to realize, I gather, that literalism is a fairly new phenomenon and is not related to the teachings of most of the Christian sects. You can try insisting to the Pope that he needs to take the Bible literally, and he’ll point you to a couple thousand years of theology that say no such thing.