Here’s a clever trick: take a Christian Bible. Conceal the cover behind the cover of the Muslim Koran. Then do person-in-the-street interviews where you read off the worst passages from the book and get people’s reactions.
They’re both pretty awful, aren’t they?
Sprechen Ich kein Deutch. But the verses quoted are straight out of the babble, as anybody who has read it cover to cover knows. Too many Xians only read approved snippets, and think that the babble isn’t anywhere near as bloody and dogmatic as it is. Atheist tend to know better.
*smirk*
beautiful demnstration of how Xians depend on the clergy to pre-cherry-pick the book of fantasy [ie babble] to teach the “good parts” of that horrific novel. Too bad that they had to do it based on the “racism” of their interviewees being ant-Muslim. They might have done the same questioning by disguising the book as a soon-to-be-released novel and saying the questions were a “random sample survey”.
that last sentence is just an insignificant “quibble”. The actual point was made in an effective (I think) way.
One of the responses was significant: “Its a really old book, so what can one do about it?”
That is a pretty clever trick. I have to say I might borrow/steal that myself.
How often have we seen the same experiment play out, right here in the comments? Tha average Xian doesn’t know half of what’s in that book. Most only know the cherry-picked bits they’ve been fed.
That was lovely.
I know these things are always edited but good for the people who made the cut!
(Do Germans always talk that quickly? I could hardly keep up with the sub-titles.)
Is there any “orthodox” text where identical results would not be forthcoming?
If you follow the video back to YouTube, the description is in English and Dutch. The about page for the “Dit Is Normaal” channel reads “Iedere week reizen wij af naar een stad in Nederland om diens inwoners de meest uitdagende, interessante, vreemde vragen te stellen!” It might sound a lot like German, but it sure doesn’t look like it.
re: language mix-up
ごめんなさい
Um… I don’t think that was German — maybe Dutch.
Okay #7 – Dutch for sure.
Sounded German to somebody who studied German circa 1970, and had to pass reading scientific German (2nd year).
Dutch they are.
I really liked the reactions of the interviewees. All of them acknowledged their mistake and learned from it.
Obviously, folk in de Nieuwe Wereld don’t hear enough Dutch spoken. One giveaway is that ‘no’ sounds like ‘nay’ rather than ‘nine’.
I have to say, I’m really impressed at those people’s responses to the reveal. I don’t think the experiment would have ended so pleasantly here in the U.S.
Also I’m surprised I could tell that wasn’t German, since I don’t speak German or Dutch at all, and have very little experience with hearing spoken Dutch. Something about the vowels tipped me off, maybe.
I’d like to see them take some of the flowery, lovey-dovey verses from The Koran and see how many claim they’re from The Bible.
Somehow I don’t think that people here would be as thoughtful during the reveal.
I don’t think that would play out the same way over here. There are far too many christians who are fully aware of the bible’s stance on homosexuals and women in positions of authority. They’d likely recognize, and fully support, those reprehensible verses.
Yup, its Dutch, not Deutsch.
I have once tried to find some objective comparison between Koran and Bible with regard to violence. If I remember correctly, Koran had slightly more violence as a percentage of the overall text, but Bible had more violence overall because it is a bigger book.
What I do remember correctly is that Koran does not endorse suicide bombings, but bible contains a passage that could be interpreted as such (Samsons death).
The word ‘Dutch’ is an anglicization of ‘Deutsche’, ie German; Dutch people being mistaken for German. . As a speaker of a little German, it was obviously Dutch to me (or more like double Dutch, that is! :0))
@ chigau #5:
“Do Germans always talk that quickly? I could hardly keep up with the sub-titles.”
As others have remarked this is Dutch, not German. I am Dutch, and this speed of talking seems perfectly normal to me. I’ve never realised that my language is perceived by some to be a fast language (I tend to think of French or Italian as such), so thank you for that wonderful insight into my own culture.
That being said I know people who talk noticably slower than this, but I also know a few who talk quite a lot faster. It may even be a regional thing: this was filmed in The Hague (I believe, based on the surroundings), one of my country’s largest cities. It may well be that the speed of talking is different in different parts of the country, because there’s quite a bit of regional variation in spoken Dutch.
Yes, it’s Dutch. In the Netherlands. The Hague, to be precise.
Finally I have something to post on Facebook whenever some idiot post quotes that prove Islam is evul.
It was amazing how quickly some of them started to try and rationalise it once they knew.
RE Christians don’t know their own bible,
Since this is the Netherlands (and not filmed in the more strongly christian part sometimes called the bible belt) most of the interviewees probably weren’t christian, or only culturally christians (eg only going to church when there is a wedding or a funeral).
Interesting video nevertheless. Kudos to the makers.
That’s not an entirely accurate test, since some of the stuff they are quoting comes from the old testament, which christians, jews and muslims all believe to be true. If they only quoted from the new testament, it would be a little more biting and meaningful.
I don’t like quoting Dawkins, but his experiment on an equally fictional belief also makes the point:
Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia @23:
Not that no-one did that, but I actually found myself (happily) startled by how many people didn’t start in with the excuses. Especially the guy at around 3:30, who openly acknowledged his own prejudice once he realized it. It would be very interesting to see the same thing done in the US and see if the reactions would be the same.
I think their approach is plenty meaningful. Many Christians will cite grisly Quran verses in their campaign against Muslims, yet they only circle their wagons and deploy a litany of excuses when you point out that they are the pots calling the kettles black.
“That only applied to a specific time and place, you just didn’t have the magic decoder ring to figure it out.”
“The OT no longer counts, shut up about that passage where Jesus says the law is not abolished.”
“Hey, look over here at these lovely NT verses instead: love, love, love!”
This experiment demonstrates its efficacy in circumventing the knee-jerk apologetics and clearly illuminates a double standard in popular treatment of religions. What better way to show just how biased people are when they only condemn one religion for the sins shared by two others with the very same foundation, premise, and end goal?
@14: “I have to say, I’m really impressed at those people’s responses to the reveal.”
Why? More than half of the Dutch are non-believers. As these interviews are done in The Hague the percentage of non-believing interviewed people in the video is likely higher. Since 50 years or so most Dutch have lost any emotional connection with the Bible.
mnb0:
That isn’t in evidence here, considering that their first impulse, in an admittedly tiny sample, was to regurgitate the very common Christian (or cultural Christian) assumption that the Bible is anything like the Sunday school version kids are invariably taught. That’s certainly an emotional connection, that you’re (unconsciously or not) sympathetic to what you believe is in the Bible, that it’s all rainbows and unicorns, nice liberal values, forgiveness, hope, love, and so forth. Then, you’re rather emotionally stunned and astonished to find out how wrong that is. I thought it was very clear that the people in the video were put in a position like that, and I’d agree that they handled it fairly well.
On the other hand, you’d be immediately (and very understandably) hostile to hateful crap that you believe came from the Koran, since you were never indoctrinated with a Sunday school version of Islam. You’re not going to offer the usual apologetic arguments you’ve heard a thousand times before (since you haven’t heard them applied to Islam), which attempt to handwave all of the problems away — instead, you’ll just be infuriated that anyone could ever have believed that. You’re going to be antagonistic from the word “go,” not at all sympathetic, prepared to explain it away somehow, or prepared with numerous counterexamples of modern believers of whatever sect that you know personally who don’t hold beliefs like that. That can be a difference in the “emotional connection” you have toward them, whether or not you believe either.
The fact is that you don’t need to be a believer, much less a devout one, to be part of a culture that’s thoroughly soaked in nonsensical Christian propaganda. And if you’re a fairly apathetic atheist (or theist) in a fairly comfortable place where it’s not such a prominent issue, you may not bother to critically examine what the Bible/Koran actually says, so you wouldn’t have much ground to question whether the one-sided portrayal of their favorite holy book is accurate or reasonable. You just take whatever second-hand information you’re given about it at face value, because you’re not part of their religion or another religion anyway, so it doesn’t matter to you. But it doesn’t matter, only in the sense that you think it doesn’t matter because you haven’t been paying attention.
This reminds me of a YouTube video I saw once: a bunch of Christians were in a conference room being told about a person named Frank (IIRC) who was always bossing people around, making outrageous demands, and using violence to get his way. The speaker then asked them what they thought of Frank, and they were understandably disgusted by him…until the speaker said that “Frank” was actually God. Then they started making excuses for the actions that they had considered inexcusable just moments ago. The speaker also asked them what they thought of slavery. They all said it was wrong, no matter what the circumstances…until they were shown the Bible verses where slavery is not only allowed, but encouraged by God, and they start making the typical excuses: it was a different time, Old Testament doesn’t count, it was actually just working off a debt, and so on. In other words, they went from thinking slavery was always wrong no matter the circumstances, to thinking slavery was permissible under certain circumstances. And their religion CAUSED them to think that way. I wish I could find that video again. It’s food for thought for anyone who thinks their religion makes them moral.
As someone else already commented, the Urban Dutch population is incredibly secular. These are probably non-religious or apathetically-Christian-ish-maybe identifying people who are (as they observed themselves) influenced by the cultural ideas of what the two books say, rather than religious people who don’t know their own religion. It’s not really a good indication of “Christians” not knowing their own religion. Watching with American demographic assumptions will give the wrong idea.
Nonetheless, despite being so secular, there’s certainly a lot more animosity towards Islam than Christianity in the secular Dutch population, and this video did a very good job of illustrating that cultural lack of scrutiny on Christianity even though it’s hard to find people outside the Bible Belt who are really Christian in the way that Americans think of it.
#19
Uhm, no, actually, although “Dutch” and “Deutsch” are cognates, the former is not an Anglicization of the latter. Both terms are ultimately derived from the Early medieval term “Theodisca”, meaning “(language) of the people”, or “peoplish”, so to speak. This was a widely used term in areas now comprising Germany and the Netherlands for denoting the common people and their tongue, while the elites used Latin.
During the Late Middle Ages and Dutch Golden Age, the term used by the new elites of the then formed Dutch Republic for the common language, which then started to be used in official texts was “Diets” or “Duuts”. It is actually this term that was taken over by the English to refer to the Dutch and their language.
BTW you’d only have to go back a few hundred years or so, to see the German language in English texts being discussed as “High Dutch” (referring to the altitude of the areas where it is spoken). That is why I now still like to refer to German as “Upstream Dutch”… :-)
#29
It is nonetheless true. Ask someone like me, who grew up there and even had a few Bible classes in school now and then. Christianity is generally taken as something to shrug your shoulders upon and devout Christians, rather than cultural ones, are generally considered to be rather fringe.
Yes, many are lulled into believing that the Bible is a “good book”, but there is not much emotional commitment to that notion. You can clearly see it in the video’s anecdotal evidence: The interviewees were quick to drop their preconceived notions, laugh in self-irony and a even be a little bit ashamed.
What is?
You can’t have it both ways. I don’t know what you mean by “not much emotional commitment.” If there’s not any connection (different from commitment), then there’s none. If there’s not much but there is some, then there is any amount more than none. Not terribly specific, but that’s the claim we’re working with, so there you go.
How is that relevant? The fact is that they did have “preconceived notions,” which understandably did have emotional aspects given the sort of content we’re talking about. In other words, there was in fact something like that for them to drop, however quickly they dropped it or however dropping it made them feel. Maybe the interviewees are not a representative sample of “most Dutch,” but all of them responded that way as you can see, which means they certainly aren’t evidence for mnb0’s claim that most Dutch have no emotional connection to the Bible.
And indeed it doesn’t follow that, because many are non-believers, we thus have no reason to be impressed by their responses to the big reveal at the end. It’s simply not the case that atheists are different, by somehow lacking emotional connections to the dominant culture they were brought up in, including things they don’t personally believe. Like anyone else, whether we realize it or not, we tend to be partial to things which are more familiar to us, for no particularly good reason. And I think you probably should be impressed by these Dutch people, since they were being exceedingly reasonable about it, compared to the kind of bullshit you could expect from U.S. citizens (atheist or not), who in my experience seem much more hostile to Muslims and much more biased in favor of Christianity. From my point of view in the U.S., it is impressive, even though their reactions before the reveal were of course very frustrating. That’s why, to answer mnb0’s kind of strange question, which seems like it had an incredibly obvious answer — and it’s neither here nor there, that they have a higher proportion of non-believers.
Let me put it differently, with an analogy. Suppose not many people in a group drink Coke or Pepsi. They are, however, inundated with advertising for both, and because of their fond childhood memories of Santa ads or whatever it may be, the vast majority of them are predisposed toward Coke. You then tell them about the crap that allegedly goes into Pepsi, so they express how terrible they think it is and reveal their biased and uncritical view of both Coke and Pepsi, even though they themselves do not drink either. When you reveal that, actually, you were describing Coke and not Pepsi, they very admirably recognize and admit their biases. I think it’s pretty fucking silly to consider a situation like that and say to yourself, “well, they don’t drink either, so we shouldn’t be impressed by how they handled their mistake, since they weren’t biased in the first place.” They clearly fucking were. That’s in fact what the experiment showed, which simply isn’t about measuring the number of Coke drinkers or Pepsi drinkers in the population.
Oh, there’s a lot of sort of default Christianity here, though it’s not in your face. Kids do St. Maarten’s instead of Halloween (involves singing songs and getting candy). Saint Nick (called ‘the Saint’) just went back to Turkey yesterday, and wears a full on bishop’s costume.
And this from a buddy of mine who has to take the cultural integration exam, and has been (illegally) posting some of the questions:
“Dutch boys don’t get circumcised, but Muslim boys do.” Probably unintentional, but it sure implies those are two non-overlapping domains from the question…
Oh, and outside the Randstad (Utrecht, Amsterdam, Den Haag, Rotterdam) there are plenty of very Christian Christians. I had a buddy consulting at an ERP company who got caught out for not saying grace before lunch at the company cafeteria, and some friends of mine (Muslims, ironically) live in a neighborhood called ‘The Holy Land.’
Derek VANdivere
Wait, you deny Dutch boys something that might be a necessary medical procedure? How cruel! Also, are there no Dutch Jews anymore?
+++
Yep, the question of this experiment isn’t to find out how many people are actually christian in the Netherlands. It’s to show that western Europeans (and NOrth Americans) think that christianity is especially nice and Islam is especially evil and that both properties are intrinsically linked to their respective holy texts.