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Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life.

On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly,

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.

Censorship was extremely rigorous in 18th-century France during the reign of Louis XV

remained within a small circle of friends who shared an interest in subversive writings

Voltaire asked his friend, the writer Nicolas-Claude Thiriot, to provide him with a handwritten copy of priest Jean Meslier’s dangerous philosophical will

A growing number of “nones” live in our midst: those who say they have no religious affiliation at all. An October Pew Research Center poll revealed that they now account for 20 percent of the population, up from 16 percent in 2008.

We think of atheism and religious apathy as uniquely modern spiritual options, ideas that Voltaire and Hume devised in a coffee house one rainy afternoon sometime in the 18th century. Before the Enlightenment, legend has it, peasants hurried to church every week and princes bowed and scraped before priests.

it is safe to say that we frequently overestimate medieval piety. Ordinary people often skipped church and had a feeble grasp of basic Christian dogma. Many priests barely understood the Latin they chanted — and many parishes lacked any priest at all. Bishops complained about towns that used their cathedrals mainly as indoor markets or granaries

For the first time since researchers began tracking the religious identity of Americans, fewer than half said they were Protestants, a steep decline from 40 years ago when Protestant churches claimed the loyalty of more than two-thirds of the population.

it was not just liberal mainline Protestants, like Methodists or Episcopalians, who abandoned their faith, but also more conservative evangelical and “born again” Protestants. The losses were among white Protestants

When they leave, instead of switching churches, they join the growing ranks who do not identify with any religion. Nearly one in five Americans say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.”

Sacks makes three points: that “new” atheists lack the gravitas of old ones, that religion is the only reliable source of morality, so that without faith the world would crumble, and that a plurality of faiths is a bulwark against religious “fundamentalists,” whom he sees as not religious at all.

it’s simply not true that we haven’t grappled with those “real issues.” It’s just that they don’t upset most of us as much as Sacks thinks they should

Holocaust? Really? And did the Christian ethic prevent that? Indeed, much of the Holocaust was the inevitable working-out of a Christian animus against Jews, a reflection of the eternal Jewish status as killers of Christ.

In July 2014, four months after Putin annexed Crimea, only 10 percent of Republicans held a favorable opinion of Russia’s president, according to an Economist/YouGov poll. Today, that figure is 37 percent.

A recent poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that, while 65 percent of Americans support a congressional inquiry into Russian election interference, a narrow majority (51 percent ) of Republicans oppose it.

82 percent of Hillary Clinton voters want to maintain sanctions imposed on Moscow in response to its meddling, while only 16 percent of Trump voters do.

Stewart and his writers do two things that make them unique on popular television. First, they cover — and yes, I would say “cover,” not just satirize or mock — a wide range of religions. If you watched only The Daily Show, you would nonetheless learn, in time, about Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and a whole spectrum of smaller faiths, a category that I would argue includes atheism. And second, they pay attention to points of theology that more traditional news and talk shows skip over. Using chunks of time that would be unthinkable on a network newscast — six minutes for a segment on Mormonism! — The Daily Show teaches the finer points of belief, mining them for humor but at the same time serving a real educational function. 

The Daily Show approaches American religion in the spirit of tolerance, but not with the wimpy, eager-to-please hand-wringing that characterizes so much liberal dialogue in this country. Rather, religions are shown to be strange and possibly cringe-inducing: our job is to take an honest look, then tolerate them anyway. It’s a call to rigorous citizenship.

There is no apparent ideology, either religious or skeptical, animating Stewart’s treatment of religion. More than anything, he and his writers have the scrupulosity of objective journalists. They win laughs without deforming, or even exaggerating, the religion’s actual beliefs. This is an extraordinary feat. Most religious humor, especially on television or in the movies, depends on stereotypes, which are by definition crude and reductive. Stewart’s writers, by contrast, find humor in the specifics of each faith.

Many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of “spirituality” or “mysticism” to be synonymous with mental illness, conscious fraud, or self-deception. I have argued elsewhere that this is a problem—because millions of people have had experiences for which “spiritual” and “mystical” seem the only terms available.

Osama bin Laden’s favorite philosopher. Qutb spent most of 1949 in Greeley, Colorado, and found, to his horror and satisfaction, that his American hosts were squandering their lives on gossip, trivial entertainments, and lawn maintenance.  From this Dark Night of Suburbia, he concluded that western civilization was so spiritually barren that it must be destroyed.

There is something degraded and degrading about many of our habits of attention.

Only 20 years ago, nearly 90 percent of all Icelanders were religious believers. Today, less than 50 percent are.

, internationally, those younger than 34 tended to be more religious than older citizens -- especially in Africa and the Middle East, where eight out of 10 people consider themselves to be religious.

In the United States, a 2014 Gallup poll found that 28 percent of Americans between 18 and 29 said they believed that God created "humans in present form within the last 10,000 years."

rance is in theory a nondiscriminatory society where the state upholds strict religious neutrality and people are free to believe, or not, in any God they wish. It is a nation, in its self image, that through education dissolves differences of faith and ethnicity in a shared commitment to the rights and responsibilities of French citizenship.

This model, known as laïcité, often inadequately translated as secularism, is embraced by a majority of French people. They or their forebears became French in this way. No politician here would utter the words “In God we trust.” The Roman Catholic Church was removed more than a century ago from French public life. The country’s lay model supplants any deity.

Mr. Cadène, 39, runs the Laïcité Observatory as its “general rapporteur,” a weighty title for a young man

First, that atheist materialism is too weak a base upon which to ground Western liberalism in a world where it’s increasingly beset, and the biblical tradition from which the liberal West emerged offers a surer foundation for her values.

Second, that despite the sense of liberation from punitive religion that atheism once offered her, in the longer run she found “life without any spiritual solace unendurable.”

I have no criticisms to offer myself. Some sort of religious attitude is essentially demanded, in my view, by what we know about the universe and the human place within it, but every sincere searcher is likely to follow their own idiosyncratic path