We believe! (yippee).

Yet Another Religious Survey

America remains a nation of believers, but a new survey finds most Americans don't feel their religion is the only way to eternal life even if their faith tradition teaches otherwise.

The findings, revealed Monday in a survey of 35,000 adults, can either be taken as a positive sign of growing religious tolerance, or disturbing evidence that Americans dismiss or don't know fundamental teachings of their own faiths.

I’ll take it as a positive sign (while acknowledging that most Americans don’t know the fundamental teachings of their own faiths). Hopefully the past few years have impressed upon some people the need for tolerance; that our reaction to an attack on our country justified by the attackers’ fundamentalist religious beliefs doesn’t mean we have to be more fundamentalist in response.

Among the more startling numbers in the survey, conducted last year by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life: 57 percent of evangelical church attenders said they believe many religions can lead to eternal life, in conflict with traditional evangelical teaching.

Of course the very idea of eternal life is ridiculous and its casual acceptance is absurd, but we’ll let that one go.

By many measures, Americans are strongly religious: 92 percent believe in God, 74 percent believe in life after death and 63 percent say their respective scriptures are the word of God.

But deeper investigation found that more than one in four Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants and Orthodox Christians expressed some doubts about God's existence, as did six in ten Jews.

Go Jews!

Another finding almost defies explanation: 21 percent of self-identified atheists said they believe in God or a universal spirit, with 8 percent "absolutely certain" of it.

Yeah, that makes no sense at all. Not to throw out a “No True Scotsman” analogy, but you CANNOT be an atheist if you believe in God. It’s a contradiction. These people are obviously confused.

So, a mix of the good and bad. I look forward to the day when so few people believe in ghosts, pixies, Santa Claus and gods that it will be unnecessary to conduct polls to figure out which of us still believe in them.

Not that I expect it to happen in my lifetime. Sigh.