Poll: Nearly 8 in 10 Americans believe in angels
In this photo released by the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2011, is seen a fresco painted by Giotto in the famed basilica. / AP Photo/Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, ho
Angels don't just sing at Christmastime. For most Americans, they're a year-round presence. A new Associated Press-GfK poll shows that 77 percent of adults believe these ethereal beings are real.
Belief is primarily tied to religion, with 88 percent of Christians, 95 percent of evangelical Christians and 94 percent of those who attend weekly religious services of any sort saying they believe in angels.
But belief in angels is fairly widespread even among the less religious. A majority of non-Christians think angels exist, as do more than 4 in 10 of those who never attend religious services.
Beyond the religious gap, women are more likely than men to believe angels are real, and those over 30 are more apt than younger adults to think they exist.
The finding mirrors a 2006 AP-AOL poll, which found 81 percent believed in angels.
Previous polling has found the public a bit more likely to believe in God, but far less likely to believe in other other-worldly beings. In May, 92 percent of adults told Gallup pollsters they believed in God. But just 34 percent in an AP-Ipsos poll in 2007 said they believed in ghosts or UFOs.
The AP-GfK Poll was conducted Dec. 8-12 and is based on interviews with 1,000 adults nationally. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.
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Poll - Circa 1200 C.E.: 100% of Europeans believe the universe revolves around the earth.
Please, portentous, pretentious "biblical" BS is just as idiotic as the myths mankind no longer believes in. Dgunner's all caps diatribe citing the bible (as if that is an authority on anything) for justifying ANYTHING only makes me chuckle and shake my head. Such scribbles are the work of men, for men, against men for the obtaining of secular power and nothing more. No one prays to Zeus or to Odin or to Baal any more and yet, their religions were just as, if not a lot more, valid to their followers as anything pulled out of a hatchet-job religious tome like the "bible".
If you want to believe in invisible sky friends, great. Enjoy. But leave the rest of us out of your delusions. The universe is a strange and wondrous place without inventing a bunch of imaginary friends who will alleviate you of the responsibility for your actions.
If mankind lived as if this life as the only thing they will ever know, their only contribution to the future will be what they do in it and that when they are dead and gone, they are GONE forever, then we'd have a much more peaceful existence. The inane BS of "heaven" or the even stupider one of "hell" - imaginary afterlives we have invented to impose some kind of sense or explanation on existence where none really exists - is why people go off and do the stupid things in the name of their invisible sky friend that they do.
Be happy in your delusion. Be at peace in your delusion. But keep your delusion to yourself. You're screwing up the planet for the rest of us.
That's funny, coming from you. Because your "belief" is there is no future, since all those who benefit from those contributions will also disappear. No memory of anything and nothing ever having existed. Therefore, you are saying that "this wondrous" universe, as you call it, and our lives in it have no meaning whatsoever.
Congratulations and Merry Christmas.
Angels shoujld be easy.
There is no way in hell that 80% of the people believe in angels.
After yesterdays turn around on the payroll tax cut extension, yes I believe in angels!
The Teabaggers aren't governing. They're a bunch of crybabies who can't get their way because their agenda isn't governance. It's dictatorship. That's not how it works in this country.
Angels? Hardly... It's called political reality. And they've had the veil of ignorance ripped from their eyes by that reality.
Oh, and by the way, people believing in taxing the rich - something that they can actually afford to have done to them since during WW II, the tax rate on the top 1% was more than 90% and not one of them went hungry, wore second-hand clothing because they had no money to buy new clothes or had trouble keeping a roof over their head - is in no way related to people believing in invisible sky friends.
One has to do with reality - taxing the rich. The other has to do with delusion - believing in invisible sky friends.
The utter lack of correlation in your comparison is typical of the lack of logic and critical thinking skills most people who believe in their delusions display (like the teabaggers, different delusion, though). It's best to look for a realistic explanation (they actually do exist) than to invent one.
Lazy "thinking" like that will kill mankind and probably take the rest of the planet with him.