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10/27/2007: "Americans are religiously delusional"

About eight-in-ten Americans say that they have no doubt that God exists, that prayer is an important part of their lives, and that "we will all be called before God at the Judgment Day to answer for our sins." But the intensity of agreement with these indicators of religiosity has shown a modest decline in recent years, after increasing through much of the 1990s. While overall agreement with the three statements has remained fairly stable, the number of people who completely agree with each statement rose during the 1990s and has declined more recently. For example, the percentage completely agreeing that "we will all be called before God at the Judgment Day" rose from 52% in 1987 to more than 60% in the 1990s. It now stands at 54%, down 7 points from 1999 and five points from 2003.

[ This isn't an anti-religion rant. God wants you to do good things in this world and treat this world, his gift to you, as you would treat your own home. God may or may not exist, but if he does exist, he doesn't intervene in this world, so we're in the driver's seat and it's up to us to make sense of it. People can get religious about Jesus, science, politics, civil rights, or many other things. Being religious in this sense means putting your total trust in it like a neo-Stalinist pact, and figuring that if you just keep bleating the liberal/conservative/white supremacist dogma, EveryThing Will Turn Out Just Fine. That's a crock of lies. We have to make our own path and the universe and God will still be smiling if we exterminate ourselves. Back to reality, kids. ]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pew/20071026/ts_pew/79awaitingthejudgmentday