How Well Do YOU Know religion? Take Nick Kristoff's Pop Quiz and Find Out

At a time when we keep hearing that certain religions include some really, really bad stuff, what do we find if we actually look at assorted holy books?

Over at the NY Times, Nicholas Kristof has put together a list of quotations from assorted scripture. Your task? Identify the source. You get immediate feedback as you choose — it shows you the correct answer for each question as you go, and gives you a final score at the end. In a time when belief overrides knowledge, when faith based on ignorance is considered somehow virtuous, well Kristof’s little test might open a few minds. Or maybe not.

Some of you are probably angrily objecting right now that I am cherry-picking texts. Yes, I am. My point is that faith is complicated, and that we’re more likely to perceive peril and incitement in someone else’s scripture than in our own.

In fact, religion is invariably a tangle of contradictory teachings — in the Bible, the difference between the harshness of Deuteronomy and the warmth of Isaiah or Luke is striking — and it’s always easy to perceive something threatening in another tradition. Yet analysts who have tallied the number of violent or cruel passages in the Quran and the Bible count more than twice as many in the Bible.

Kristof closes with a plea and an acknowledgment:

It may be human nature to fear what we don’t understand, to allow apprehension to override compassion. But this is a time that tests our fundamental values, and let’s not surrender to base impulses.

Yes, the Islamic world today has a strain of dangerous intolerance. And for all of America’s strengths as a society, as Donald Trump shows, so does America.