Battleground Analysis
Congratulations!
You have been awarded the TPM medal of distinction! This is our second highest award for outstanding service on the intellectual battleground.
The fact that you progressed through this activity without being hit and biting only one bullet suggests that your beliefs about God are internally consistent and well thought out.
A direct hit would have occurred had you answered in a way that implied a logical contradiction. The bitten bullet occurred because you responded in a way that required that you held a view that most people would have found strange, incredible or unpalatable. However, because you bit only one bullet and avoided direct hits completely you still qualify for our second highest award. A good achievement!
just one point:
I’m an atheist, and answered thruthfully to my conscience.
So being sincere makes you believe in God?
Like Mangetout says, the test is flawed
I can’t imagine why I would care if a view, sincerely held after long consideration, was unpalatable or strange to those who follow some conventional ‘recieved teaching’ (i.e. “most people”, above). A test of hypocrisy that goes out of its way to point out my degree of ‘nonconformity’ loses great credibility in my eyes.
There should be a huge distinction between a popularity poll and an assessment of matters of deep personal significance (I won’t say ‘faith’ because my spirituality would be incorrectly considered atheism by many). I suppose that my view of received teachings would count as another “Bite the Bullet” for me, since I absolutely reject some definitions implicit in the questions, and I am disappointed that they don’t even recognize those implicit assumptions.
Evolutionary theory maybe false in some matters of detail, but it is essentially true.
Please Select... True False
I selected false, because I rejected the initial clause, that evolutionary may be false in some matters of detail. This lead to a subsequent hit, because it interpreted my response as a rejection of evolution.
Many of the questions were worded in such a way that the correct answer would have been “Question unanswerable as phrased”. But it lets you decline to answer and go onwards to other questions, which is nice.
Zero hits, zero bullets. TPM Medal of Honor Winner. Not to be immodest, but the site was correct when it said that I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about such things; I’d better be internally consistent by now.
I had no problem answering the 4 questions from that logic test correctly, and I wholeheartedly disagree with some of the logic put forth in the “religious hypocrisy” test.
As an agnostic/Philosophical Wiccan answering honestly, I got 0 hits, 0 bullets. Not believing in a single, omnipotent, omniscient deity clears a lot of the questions, as others have noted here.
I also agree that some of the questions are either poorly formulated or intellectually dishonest. They play around too much with the meanings of “rational”, “justifiable”, and “foolish” a bit too much, in my opinion. Also, as Mangetout pointed out, some of the questions simply do not fit well in a true-false format.
There are certainly ways to have internally consistent beliefs and still get rated as “inconsistent” by the test.
(The bullet, which I object to, was stating that believing evolution is essentialy “true” in the absence of “direct evidence” (direct as defined by whom?) is comparable to the belief in intelligent life on Mars in the absence of direct evidence for or against (again, direct as defined by whom?)
Thanks for the links, which I will explore with the rest of my very, very quiet day-in-between-weekend-and-holiday day at the office.
Yep, flawed test. That said, I took two hits, though I would argue with the first one (I can’t remember now what the second one was).
If the Loch Ness monster exists, there is a finite space in which it can exist (Loch Ness, obviously). We have the tools to search Loch Ness pretty thoroughly. If Loch Ness has been searched many times and no monster has been found, it’s pretty reasonable to think it’s not there. God, on the other hand, is a different case, since we don’t have the tools to do an exhaustive search, or even the criteria by which that search would happen. In addition, I happen to think that the world is set up so that we can’t prove that one either way, thus giving us a fair chance at choosing freely what we want to do. So there.
(Pepperlandgirl, as a Mormon, I had to answer some of those omnipotence questions with ‘no’ (since they didn’t have a ‘well, it’s like this…’ button). Technically, I suppose God could decide that wrong was right, but then–as the Book of Mormon says in several places–he would cease to be God. By his own rules, he can’t do certain things, because that’s how he’s set things up to be fair.)
