Once again, an interesting article. It talks about how religions are coming to more of a "middle ground," and that they feel this is a good thing. More people of one religion believe that people of another religion can go to heaven than was believed 50 years ago. It also gives some nice little facts about church attendance and tithing at the end as a nice ending. I feel that the reporting does not have very much depth, but that could be due to a certain word limit (only a certain amount of space in a paper).
And once again, it leaves me with some questions. When it says "researchers found that while 72% of respondents said at least half of Christians will make it into heaven, the figures were lower for other faiths: Jews (46 percent), Buddhists (37 percent) and Muslims (34 percent)," how were the religions represented? Were there 22% Christian, 22% Jews, 22% Buddhist, 22% Muslim, 11% no religion (no religion statistic was actually given), and 1% other? Were there trends among religions, such as Buddhists seeing more people from other religions making it to heaven?
Was heaven defined, and if so, how? Different religions have different views of heaven. Was it just will people of these religions make it to your view of heaven?
How do religious leaders feel about these things? This article shows an increase in numbers for tolerance, but are the fanatic becoming more fanatic?
What do other studies indicate? Are there other studies?
There are good statistics and reasonable sources in this story.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-09-18-baylor-heaven_N.htm
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That's the problem with these types of stories. The USA Today loves to run stuff on new studies, but they often fail to truly look at the given statistics. It's a rare day when the USA Today actually explains the methodology of a study. Journalists should not be scared of numbers, but they have to get more adept at analyzing them.
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