The Atheist Atrocities Fallacy – Hitler, Stalin & Pol Pot

[whatthehey]

35. Often claimed but absolutely false

http://www.gallup.com/poll/27682/onethird-americans-believe-bible-literally-true.aspx

One third of the US believes the Bible is literally true word for word. None of them, we can assume, are atheists.

So either one in three of our friends and neighbors, and by mathematical certainty then more than 1/3 of Christians, are gibbering madmen, or it's not the tiny portion who are literalists as DU believers often claim.

I'm going with the latter. People tend to make claims based on extrapolating the opinions of themselves and their peer group, but this is almost never true because nobody has a peer group representative of the entire nation. Large random samples that do represent the nation tell a far bleaker story than the mostly well-educated, almost entirely left of center and heavily trending to white middle class affluence group that posts here and seeks similar company. Nothing wrong with those groups; I'm in every one of them and my social group is heavily biased this way too, but I realize we are not America.