LAT:

If you want to know about God, you might want to talk to an atheist.

Heresy? Perhaps. But a survey that measured Americans' knowledge of religion found that atheists and agnostics knew more, on average, than followers of most major faiths. In fact, the gaps in knowledge among some of the faithful may give new meaning to the term "blind faith."

A majority of Protestants, for instance, couldn't identify Martin Luther as the driving force behind the Protestant Reformation, according to the survey, released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Why is such the case? According to the article (and there is some truth in this reasoning), a person abandons God precisely because he/she has thought long and deep about God—the where, how, and when of Him. Because the atheist is so close to God, he/she sees right through Him. Once the word-magic ("in the beginning") is gone, all that's left to see is the raw magic of iron and oxygen—the blood, the red earth, the rust of being.