I have to take this with a grain of salt (bolding mine)
Harris is a reputable company. It’s going to take more than a raised eyebrow at a description of the poll in an internet article to refute the scientific methodology.
There really isn’t anything unbelievable about the results anyway.
That was sort of a joke but not really scientifically speaking. You have to see the methodology of the survey to know what it means if anything at all. I can design a poll in IMHO right now that will generate all kinds of crazy graphs on any subject that have little bearing on anything. You have to know who was being sampled, how they were sampled, the exact wording of the questions, the restrictions to the answers, and the statistics used to break down such things. There is a whole science based around good surveys and even highly trained people usually screw it up in one way or another. Despite what other people think, the word ‘anti-Christ’ in any survey result is a an infra-red flag that this is just a joke, a hoax, or backlash idiotic propaganda. No self-respecting Doper should pay any attention to these types of polls at all but many did so draw your own conclusions (38% of Dopers believe bullshit polls are real).
I think maybe people who really don’t like Obama might be inclined to say he’s the anti-christ without meaning it literally, or maybe not actually knowing exactly what anti-christ is supposed to mean. They might just think it means he isn’t very christian.
This is a nation where the majority of the population thinks that either humanity was created as-is by God, or is the result of directed evolution by God. I see no reason to think that people that devoted to religious fantasy wouldn’t also decide that Obama or anyone else is the Antichrist. America is a nation mostly composed of people willing to believe anything, no matter how stupid or irrational or baseless it is.
Exactly. Politicians tend to divide people - either they’re the greatest thing ever to happen to a nation, or they’re evil incarnate. Expecting rational answers to a poll (especially one that asks whether he “does many of the same things that Hitler did”) is ridiculous.
And Diogenes, would you not agree that asking “Is Obama a Muslim?” is a leading question, whereas asking “What is Obama’s religion?” is not? If not, why not?
Ya think?
And that is just for a start: http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenumbers/2010/03/polling-on-presidential-pejoratives-.html
No it’s not, because it does not encourage or solicit any specific answer to the question.
What do you think this proves? Harris always uses an incentive program for getting poll responses. It does not provide incentives for specific responses, though, and has a perfectly good reputation for reliable results.
Unless you can actually show something wrong with the scientific methodology then you don’t have a point.
Only America could have invented the Internet.
I think the following point has already been made, but it seems to have flown by:
Rapturists generally believe that ANYONE could be the antichrist. Particularly anyone in a position of power.
And the fact that more Rapturists identify as Republican does not surprise me in the least.
If you do not know what is wrong with self-selecting samples then your pronouncements on polling are not worth anybody’s attention. And did you read any of the rest of the article? Just because a poll does not directly solicit an answer does not mean that the questions are not phrased in such a way as to cause bias.
It’s not a self-selected sample. Don’t use terms if you don’t know what they mean.
You also haven’t demonstrated that the questions were manipulative or leading. Asking “do you believe Barack Obama is a Muslim” is a perfectly straight up question. Nothing leading or biased about it.
Question:
Does “the Anti-Christ” = “the Devil,” Satan?
Or can it mean something else?
In the New Testament, the term is used to refer to heretical Christian sects. In rapturist/ millenialist theologies, the view is variable. I’ve seen it argued both ways – that he’s a man doing the work of Satan, and that he’s Satan himself.
I always have to wonder why either Satan or a human antichrits would go through with the whole charade, knowing they can’t win.
Or why God just doesn’t zap Satan out of existence right now. Why have a war if you’re all powerful?
Saying he read the book and peeked at the ending? 
Same reason he allows sin to come in the first place, I guess (or even why he allowed the Devil to exist at all). Even though I am a Christian, I don’t really know why, my guess is that sin was allowed because he wants someone to have a choice, how would you feel if your SO said that they loved you, but you were the only choice of their preferred gender on the planet? :dubious: Doesn’t install a lot of hope in you, huh? Same here, God has to have competition for people to really show that they’ll do what he asks us, ergo Satan. shrug sounds silly, but I’m not a theologian or God (that’s your job ) so it’s just a hypothesis on my part (which I’m not great at explaining either.)
It is not apparent that you know what it means.
That sounds like a self-selecting sample to me. You see, the respondents select themselves by volunteering to answer the questionnaire by clicking something on a web page. Now, if, as may perhaps be the case, they have no idea before they volunteer what the questionnaire is going to be about (and if no-one drops out once they see what it is about) then that is not quite so bad, but even then it is not going to be anywhere close to a statistically random sample of the population (or of registered Republicans, or whatever group they purport to be investigating).
Well, I never asserted that. The article I linked to does a reasonably good job of explaining why it is in fact the case, though. That sort of question may not be “leading” in the sense that might lead a judge to disallow it in a court of law, but it is of a sort that has been empirically shown to be likely to bias responses in a particular direction. (Questions of that sort do not not necessarily invalidate a poll if they are counterbalanced by others that bias responses in the opposite direction, but that does not appear to have been done in this case.)
Frankly, I am puzzled as to why you feel such a need to defend this crappy poll. Do you really crave further confirmation that most Republicans are idiots that much?
The fact that anybody (beyond florid psychotics), even if it were only 0.5% of the non-schizophrenic population, should think that Obama is the Antichrist, or “wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one world government,” etc., is quite scary enough for me.