[Buddha-l] How Gallup, Pew & Templeton Pro$elytize in the Guise of "Research"

[Curt Steinmetz]

According to the recent Pew Report on "Global Restrictions on Religion", 
India is one of the very worst places on earth when it comes to 
religious freedom. It is ranked alongside Iran, an openly theocratic 
nation in which religious police roam the streets beating women who 
violate the medieval dress code.

India is ranked by the Pew report as MUCH worse than China when it comes 
to religious freedom!

What, one might wonder, is up with that? Well, as it turns out, it is 
more or less an open secret that Pew, Gallup and Templeton are all in 
the business of promoting Christianity under the guise of "studying 
religion".

Luis Lugo, who is Director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 
is a member of the group Christian Political Scientists, and has said, 
when speaking to that group, that "we must make the Christian tradition 
our primary intellectual community". He also described to CPS in 1999 
how Pew's goal "is [to] train, over the next few years, at least 120 of 
these promising young Christian scholars who will be equipped to provide 
that kind of leadership to church and society."

Gallup has been run since 1988 by Don and Jim Clifton, who give an 
annual prize to an institution of higher learning called the Don Clifton 
Compass Award. The most recent recipient was Lee University, a 
"Christ-centered" liberal arts college whose president has written three 
books on Amway.

Slate magazine ran a profile on Sir John Marks Templeton in 1997, in 
which the author, David Plotz, describes Templeton as a "religious 
philanthropist, investment wizard, amateur philosopher, and full-bore 
crank" who "believes he can reconcile the irreconcilable contradictions 
of contemporary society: Christian conservatism and New Age loopiness, 
capitalist greed and sweet charity, old-time religion and modern 
technology."

Personally I have nothing against rich people (or anyone else) who want 
to spend their money promoting their own religious ideas. But the folks 
in question pretend to be educating the public with objective scientific 
research.

More, with extensive linkage, here:
http://egregores.blogspot.com/2009/12/form-of-ministry-push-polling-for-jesus.html

Curt