Thursday, September 20, 2007

Religious Background Poll for Skeptics

Last Tuesday GoingGoingGone wrote a post titled "Who is More Likely to Go Off?" in which she asked:
I'm curious about whether it's more likely for Modern Orthodox, Charedi, of Chassidish individuals to go off the derech (or become orthoprax), particularly for intellectual reasons[?]
A great question.

Orthoprax suggested we take a poll. I think that's a great idea and I have included one here. The poll closes at midnight this Saturday. Tell all your skeptic friends!

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UPDATE: Results posted HERE!

13 comments:

Baal Habos said...

Add a spot for Chareidi Light.

Lubab No More said...

Added. Thanks for the suggestion.

Anonymous said...

You forgot Yeshivish.

Abandoning Eden said...

as a demographer (by trade), i'm going to have to note that your poll is going to be biased becuase people from different backgrounds will be more or less likely to read your blog (or any blog); for instance someone from the chassidish community is probably a lot less likely to know how to use the internet and blogging in general than someone from the modern orthodox community.

Also I might have accidentally voted for modern orthodox 3 times becuase it kept giving me an error message.

Lubab No More said...

arielle, there are huge holes in my methods (if you can even call them that). At best it gives us a general idea about people in this blogging community, who also click online polls, and who visited my blog.

I've been thinking about what it would take to do a more formal survey of the Jewish skeptic blog community. Any thoughts?

I noticed a jump of three votes in MO just after you posted your message. I would delete two of them but there is no way to know that they all came from you. The poll IS supposed to reject votes from the same IP address so that should count for something. Either way, as you pointed the poll if far from scientific. But it is fun! ;)

Stephanie said...

what does the word orthoprax mean?

Lubab No More said...

Stephanie,

I this context "orthoprax" refers to someone who practices as Jewish orthodox but doesn't believe in it.

See: Othopraxis

Orthoprax said...

"I've been thinking about what it would take to do a more formal survey of the Jewish skeptic blog community. Any thoughts?"

Not to offend, but it might be better on a bigger name blog like Dovbear's or GH's. Smaller blogs are far too easy to have skewed reader populations.

Abandoning Eden said...

hmm, actually i tried voting twice when i was at my boyfriend's place this morning, and then came home and voted again since both those didn't go soon...so maybe two of those votes are me then :)

I have no idea how you would survey that. How would you garuntee that a) everyone would vote and b) you would know who all the skeptic bloggers are? This seems to be a little circle of skeptic bloggers, but there might be other circles out there somewhere

Lubab No More said...

Maybe 'census' is a more specific word. When I say survey I'm thinking of a user-by-user collection of data, not a poll. My idea is to write up a questionare that asked questions about demographics and beliefs. We could create some kind of spreadsheet with the data of those willing to share.

Beno said...

a survey... good idea! looking forward to seeing the results.

Orthoprax said...

"Maybe 'census' is a more specific word. When I say survey I'm thinking of a user-by-user collection of data, not a poll. My idea is to write up a questionare that asked questions about demographics and beliefs. We could create some kind of spreadsheet with the data of those willing to share."

That involves a more significant effort. And all censuses (censi?) suffer from volunteer bias. In general, I'm also curious about the demographics of skeptical thought - if not the number of individual skeptics - in otherwise orthodox communities.

If such a census was made and the results came back showing that some significant minority of Orthodox Jews were willing to admit that they found fault in some ikkarim - I wonder what the reverberations of that demographic knowledge would be on Orthodoxy in general.

Anonymous said...

wat about lubavitch?