How telling
As some readers of the various god-free blogs might be aware (e.g. over at Planet Atheism) there was a recent poll on Christianity Today, with the question “Atheism is…”. The last time I checked, there was a single answer our of the four available (”the only rational outlook”) that had a total of 97%, from over 80,000 poll submissions.
For some reason, Christianity Today has since removed that particular poll and refer to their prior poll as the “most recent”, which it obviously isn’t. Incidentally, that previous poll has a total of less than 2,000 votes, which should give some kind of indication of the level of readership.
Of course, they’re entitled to remove the poll as they see fit: it’s their web site, but to my mind, this is dishonent for two reasons:
1) if the poll has been gamed, it means that their polling system is fallible, and therefore the prior poll should also be considered suspect and removed as well (and all other polls should be deferred until they have a more secure or fair system); and
2) if the poll was legitimate, the result was presumably due to a huge number of atheists submitting their (otherwise valid) opinions. If such was the case, the fact that the pollees might have been atheist non-regulars is immaterial—if Christianity Today want to consider themselves honest they should have dealt with the result as-is, and this might have given them something to consider.
Is this just yet another example of lying for Jesus? At some basic level, yes, I think it is. At the very least, it’s a classic example of that most vulgar of christian pursuits: cherry-picking.
(/hattip to The Atheist Experience for keeping a recent graphical copy of the poll.)
May 22nd, 2007 at 12:15 am
PZ had a post on this as well and his take was that some enterprising person may have written a script to bombard the poll with results. 80,000+ does seem a bit high to me, even for a poll that was linked to by Sandwalk and other high traffic blogs.
Yeah, I’m thinking that someone was running a little counter-insurgency operation.
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Script bombing aside, Nullifidian still raises a reasonable point. If this poll is vulnerable, then all the previous ones were equally dubious and the website should make clear its polls are far from representative.
Other websites which have been subjected to this sort of thing often close the poll, but at least publish the final figures - at the end of the day it is “just” a fun poll and if it gets bombed, so what? Do the people at CT think their polls are an accurate representation of viewer opinion?