I agree with the comment posted in Part 1 that these stats need to be taken with a grain of salt, and Christians probably don’t report as openly their bad behaviors.  This 3 part series of posts is pointing out that playing the hypocrite card is not entirely fair.  A KEY point and pleading would be to not look at the Christian but look at Christ.  Don’t let a Christian hypocrite get in the way of your relationship with God.

Here is another very interesting Barna poll.  This poll suggests that atheists have different moral values than Christians.

A survey of 1,600 Canadians asked them what were their beliefs about God and what moral values they considered to be “very important.” The results of the survey are shown below:

Although the differences between theists and atheists in the importance of values such as honesty, politeness, and friendliness are generally small, moral values emphasized by religious beliefs, such as Christianity, including patience, forgiveness, and generosity exhibit major differences in attitudes (30%+ differences between theists and atheists).

What really concerns me is that only half of atheists think that forgiveness is very important. Either these people have not been married or maybe married multiple times, since a lack of forgiveness in a marriage is a sure recipe for disaster. Couple that moral belief with a perception that neither patience nor generosity are very important, and it seems that the divorce rates are likely to go up significantly in the near future.

According to Professor Bibby, Grandma is the “symbolic saintly person in the clan. So valuing Grandma also means valuing many of the things important to her. In successive generations you have a lingering effect of morality. But further down the road generations get further removed from the sources of those values. That’s where it gets tricky.”²