TruthBook Religious News Blog

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Sydney: A new poll conducted has found that a majority of Australians believe in God or a similar universal spirit, miracles, heaven, life after death and angels.

The findings by a Nielsen poll showed that Aussies are willing to mix and match religious faith with belief in other phenomena.

The research showed that Australians are more religious, with 68% believing in God or a universal spirit, and 50% saying religion is important or very important in their lives.

But atheists and agnostics also had a strong showing in the national survey of 1000 respondents, taken early this week.

Almost one in four Australians (24%) do not believe in either God or a universal spirit, and 7% are not sure or say they "don't know'".

Women have more faith than men, with 56% saying they believe in God and 13% saying they believe in a universal spirit, compared with 43% and 11% of men, respectively.

Most people with faith hold it strongly, with 88% saying they were either absolutely or fairly certain in their belief.

Christianity, generally considered to be on the decline, was still the largest faith, with 64 % of believers nominating it as the religion they most identified with.

The next biggest was Buddhism, at 2%, followed by Hinduism and Islam, which each had 1% of believers.

Judaism accounted for less than half of 1% of believers.

But God is not the only thing Australians believe in. They place their faith in a range of other phenomena. For example, 63% believe in miracles, and 53% believe in life after death.

Angels are also popular, with 51% of respondents saying they believe in them, slightly more than the 49% who hold faith in psychic powers such as ESP.

While 56% of people believe in heaven, only 38% believe in hell, and belief in God is much more popular than faith in the devil, with only 37% of respondents believing in Satan.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article

Labels: angels, Australia, God, heaven, life after death, Nielsen poll

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Sunday, March 15, 2009

The spirit moves Baby Boomers

December 2

AARP has found that Baby Boomers are intensely spiritual, believing in divine healing, miracles and guardian angels.

AARP's Knowledge Management division commissioned a study to measure, in its words, "what Americans 45 and older think about miracles and miraculous events, including what they believe about divine healings, guardian angels, the circumstances under which someone may receive a miracle, and how miraculous events have changed their outlook on life."

The telephone survey included an oversample of Hispanic respondents.

The survey found:

* 80 percent said they believe miracles occur today as they did in antiquity,
* 67 percent said they believe illness and injuries can be divinely healed,
* 37 percent said they witnessed a miracle,
* 27 percent have witnessed a divine healing,
* 11 percent of seen an angel.

In addition, younger Boomers hold to more spiritual beliefs than older Boomers: Respondents age 45-54 were more likely to believe in miracles (85 percent) than those age 55 and older (77 percent).

Also, from the oversample the survey found that Hispanic Boomers have stronger spiritual beliefs in this regard than their white counterparts:

* 86 percent believe in miracles,
* 86 percent believe in spirits and angels,
* 82 percent believe in divine healing.

Labels: AARP, angels, Baby Boomers, miracles, spirituality

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Thursday, December 18, 2008

Virgin Birth More Believable Than Darwin's Theory, Say Americans

By The Staff at wowOwow.com

God may be loving some recent religion-related poll results. A Harris Interactive survey released today shows that more Americans believe in an Almighty presence than in Darwin’s theory of evolution and that the majority of the public believes that the Virgin Mary gave birth to baby Jesus.

The findings, compiled from 2,126 U.S. adults, included:

— 80% of adult Americans believe in God

— 75% believe in miracles

— 73% believe in heaven

— 71% believe in angels

— 71% believe that Jesus is God or the Son of God

— 70% believe in the resurrection of Jesus

— 62% believe in hell

— 61% believe in virgin birth (Jesus born to Virgin Mary)

— 47% believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution

— 36% believe in UFOs

Click here for more of the poll’s findings.

American’s aren’t the only ones to believe in virgin birth. Another poll out today from theology think-tank group Theos has found that more than a third of Britons believe that the virgin birth of Jesus Christ really happened. In the poll carried out by ComRes on behalf of Theos, 34% of people agreed that the statement "Jesus was born to a virgin called Mary" was historically accurate, while only 32% said they believed it was fictional.

What’s also interesting is women — who experience the agonizing pains of birthing — were more likely to believe in the virgin birth (39%), compared to 29% of men, who just stand in the hospital room sweating.

Labels: Americans, angels, Darwin, God, heaven, Jesus, miracles, virgin birth

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Friday, September 19, 2008

Guardian Angels Are Here, Say Most Americans

By David Van Biema
Thursday, Sep. 18, 2008

More than half of all Americans believe they have been helped by a guardian angel in the course of their lives, according to a new poll by the Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion. In a poll of 1700 respondents, 55% answered affirmatively to the statement, "I was protected from harm by a guardian angel." The responses defied standard class and denominational assumptions about religious belief; the majority held up regardless of denomination, region or education — though the figure was a little lower (37%) among respondents earning more than $150,000 a year.
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The guardian angel encounter figures were "the big shocker" in the report, says Christopher Bader, director of the Baylor survey that covered a range of religious issues, parts of which are being released Thursday in a book titled What Americans Really Believe. In the case of angels, however, the question is a little stronger than just belief. Says Bader, "If you ask whether people believe in guardian angels, a lot of people will say, 'sure.' But this is different. It's experiential. It means that lots of Americans are having these lived supernatural experiences."

What's interesting about the Baylor findings on guardian angel experiences is that they cross all boundaries. They have scriptural writ (in Psalm 91 and elsewhere). They are clearly experiential. And guardian angels are a prominent part of Catholic belief that happens to float freely outside of a sacrament. The cross-spectrum legitimacy of the notion of angelic interventions may free Americans to engage in the kind of folk faith that is part of almost any religious system but is not always officially acknowledged.

Randall Balmer, chairman of the religion department at New York's Barnard College, says that the Baylor angel figures are one in a periodic series of indications that "Americans live in an enchanted world," and engage in a kind of casual mysticism independent of established religious ritual, doctrine or theology. "There is," he says, a "much broader uncharted range of religious experience among the populace than we expect." Just possibly, Baylor has begun to chart it.

Labels: angels, Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion, David Van Biema, faith, religious experience, supernatural