Heaven, Hell, Evil, Afterlife, "Globe Article"

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Fewer Americans believe in hell than in heaven

Michael Paulson covers religion for the Boston Globe, where a version of this essay first appeared. He can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com

"People are increasingly less willing to say, 'I have the truth, and you either have my truth, or you're going to hell,' " said Nancy Ammerman, a professor of the sociology of religion at Boston University.

"People are increasingly less willing to say, 'I have the truth, and you either have my truth, or you're going to hell,' " said Nancy Ammerman, a professor of the sociology of religion at Boston University. Evil is always a hot topic among people who study religion, and it's one of the big questions people always grapple with –

'If there's an all-powerful God, why is there a holocaust?' " said Bart Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"People who believe in hell still think that if God is a just god, he has to punish evil," said Dr. Ehrman, who is the author of God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer



10:06 AM CDT on Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Life is hell, or so the expression goes, but for many Americans, the afterlife is looking up.

The recent release of a sweeping study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life confirmed a long-developing trend in popular cosmology: Belief in heaven is outstripping belief in hell.

The Pew survey, significant for the breadth and depth made possible by its unusually large 35,000-person sample, found that 74 percent of Americans say they think there is a heaven, "where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded," while just 59 percent think there is a hell, "where people who have led bad lives, and die without being sorry, are eternally punished.

"At first blush, the idea of a God who rewards good but does not punish evil seems counterintuitive, after centuries in which one of the key benefits of eternal salvation – and one of the promises of conversion to Christianity – was the avoidance of eternal damnation.

But hell experts – and yes, there are scholars who spend this life studying the next one – say the underworld has been losing favor for some time. Since the Enlightenment, a liberalizing trend in religion has favored conceptions of

God as benevolent, rather than judgmental. But also, there are peculiarly American characteristics to this emerging hell gap: an insistent optimism, perhaps a kind of cultural self-contentedness, and a tolerance born of diversity that makes damning the other more problematic.

"Hell is for nonbelievers, and most Americans don't believe there are nonbelievers next door, even if their religion is different," said Alan F. Segal, a professor of religion at Barnard College and the author

"In the body of literature about hell, you see a range of punishments," said Martha Himmelfarb, a professor of religion at Princeton University and the author of Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature.

"Some are measure for measure, so if you blaspheme, you get hanged by your tongue, while others are lakes of fire or pools of excrement and horrible fluid that people are sunk in," she said.

Any comments?

This subject has generated huge debate over the years, but I do not see why our little forum cant tackle the problem

Regards

Alan

Hi, Lucy


Quote:


Why delete heaven?, surely in the afterlife we need to progress into higher better realities. Maybe earth is the only hell?

I see our earthly lives as a school of learning it we dont pass the test we come back again until we do. Only then are we able to go to "heaven", not return and progress upward back into the glorious light from wenst we came

Regards

Alan