Atheists: Have you study world Religions ?

Yes, to a lesser extent.

My background culture is 'christian', and I was a member of 2 major christian denoms, for over 30 years of my life.

I studied Judeo-Christianity, and (to a lesser extent) Islam... I know a little about Hindu and Sikh beliefs. I also studied psychology and history.

From all of these I can extrapolate to make decisions about the relative merits of other religions.... and my judgement is that no religion has any merit whatsoever

I dont find philosophy, generally, useful. It is too woolly and merely obfuscates other, more important, areas.

for example, it may be fine and dandy that the philosophy of the Mormon church is very pro-family, but it makes no difference to the fact that the founder was a con-man who was a lecher and told lies.

the philosophical merit of Mormonism does not allow me to make any judgement about it's doctrine

the historical fact of it's founder's infamy allows me to judge that Mormonism is a false, man-made religion.

I have because our school has mandatory Bible lessons for us. The benefit of studying world religions are that you get to know more about other religions. You don't exactly have to believe in it, but you know more about what other people believe it. You also get to know more information about their rituals and all that, it's easier if you've studied world religions even if you're an atheist (like me) so that when we meet people of other religions, we won't do anything wrong to offend their own religion.

But World Religions can be boring, I've been sitting through this class for half a year now, to be honest, I do fall asleep at times.

Nope.

In theory a study of religion leads to an understanding of religious people but in practice quite the reverse is generally true: so few theists have bothered to learn about their own - much less any other - religion that it's pretty much a waste of time.

The only two religions that do seem to encourage their members to learn their stuff and actually practice what they preach are Islam and the Jehovah's Witnesses. Most other denominations just pay lip service to all things religious.

One of the complaints atheists such as myself make is that Christians (for example) simply don't read the Bible, since people usually feel it's enough to go to church, where the past will undoubtedly go over The Good Samaritan again again without any reference to God sending bears to kill children for mocking a man's bald head, the talking donkey, zombies rising from their graves upon Jesus' death, and Jesus' inexplicable cursing of a fig tree.

I am no expert in religion but I don't censor out the bad bits.

No. It wouldn't matter how much I would study religion, they wouldn't make any more sense to me. And plus; I wouldn't want to study something I'm not interested in. I'm staying atheist.

many atheists have knowledge of other religion and faiths and are able to see the discrepancies between them, that's why they are atheists, many christians however are often totally ignorant of other faiths and have been brainwashed into thinking that their way is the only way - too many comments on here show many christians are clueless about any other faith

I have seen enough of the world through study and travel to be an atheist for life.

I 've began it yesterday at noon. And now I read Zoro and the Tom Mix.

they are not that INTERESTED, because if they studied truly, they would be in awe on what the common denominater is, that underlies all religions.They would have a spiritual bent from some angle,other than just negation of this amazing set up called life.

Saying that, you don't have to be religious to be spiritual.

yea...only in a minor way

benefit: i extend my mind, i learn about history, i learn about different people and i learn where/how religions origined from