[Assam] Heaven for the Godless? - NYT

[Chan Mahanta]

But some of us knew it already :-).










At 8:13 PM -0600 12/27/08, Ram Sarangapani wrote:
>A religious revivalism?
>
>Interesting survey. Highlights mine.
>
>_____________
>
>  December 27, 2008
>Op-Ed Columnist
>Heaven for the Godless? By CHARLES M. BLOW
>
>In June, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published a controversial
>survey in which 70 percent of Americans said that they believed religions
>other than theirs could lead to eternal life.
>
>This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear
>that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus
>said so: "I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the
>Father, but by me." But the survey suggested that Americans just weren't
>buying that.
>
>The evangelicals complained that people must not have understood the
>question. The respondents couldn't actually believe what they were saying,
>could they?
>
>So in August, Pew asked the question again. (They released the results last
>week.) Sixty-five percent of respondents said - again - that other religions
>could lead to eternal life. But this time, to clear up any confusion, *Pew
>asked them to specify which religions. The respondents essentially said all
>of them. *
>
>And they didn't stop there.* Nearly half also thought that atheists could go
>to heaven - dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt - and most thought
>that people with no religious faith also could go.*
>
>What on earth does this mean?
>
>One very plausible explanation is that Americans just want good things to
>come to good people, regardless of their faith. As Alan Segal, a professor
>of religion at Barnard College told me: "We are a multicultural society, and
>people expect this American life to continue the same way in heaven." He
>explained that in our society, we meet so many good people of different
>faiths that it's hard for us to imagine God letting them go to hell. In
>fact, in the most recent survey, Pew asked people what they thought
>determined whether a person would achieve eternal life. Nearly as many
>Christians said you could achieve eternal life by just being a good person
>as said that you had to believe in Jesus.
>
>Also, many Christians apparently view their didactic text as flexible.
>According to Pew's August survey, only 39 percent of Christians believe that
>the Bible is the literal word of God, and 18 percent think that it's just a
>book written by men and not the word of God at all. In fact, on the question
>in the Pew survey about what it would take to achieve eternal life, only 1
>percent of Christians said living life in accordance with the Bible.
>
>Now, there remains the possibility that some of those polled may not have
>understood the implications of their answers. As John Green, a senior fellow
>at the Pew Forum, said, "The capacity of ignorance to influence survey
>outcomes should never be underestimated." But I don't think that they are
>ignorant about this most basic tenet of their faith. I think that they are
>choosing to ignore it ... for goodness sake.
>
>E-mail chblow at nytimes.com
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