Thursday Thoughts on “How Do You Get To Heaven?”

When one of my sons was a little boy he asked me if he could climb a ladder to Heaven.

I explained that he could not and cautioned him not to try it.

Years later when the twins came along they had a cat named Whiskers who ran away from home and used up his nine lives on the highway. Unfortunately they saw the scene of the accident and were very distraught.  I told them Whiskers had gone to Heaven and they were pacified until we passed back by later in the day.

“Mommy,” one of them said. “The angels forgot to come get Whiskers! He’s still there!”

Yesterday my GRANDdaughter, Abby, came running in the kitchen. “Nana, my fishy went to Heaven.”

I told her I was sorry.

“He went to Heaven down the toilet.”

Uh oh.

She thought for a moment. “Is that how people get to Heaven?”

I assured her it wasn’t. It’s easy to understand why children are confused by religious matters, but what about adults? What do most Americans know about religion?

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that…

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.

If you are interested in the rest of the survey findings you can read more about it here.

http://pewforum.org/other-beliefs-and-practices/u-s-religious-knowledge-survey.aspx

I found the survey very interesting and kept reading articles and responses about it. There is even a site that has the same questions that the survey had and you can see how many you can answer. (I missed one)

If most of us want to go to  Heaven, and I’m assuming we do considering that the alternative is not a good one, then why do we know so little about religion? I suspect it’s because we are filling our lives with other things and not taking the time to study and mediate on God’s word as we should.

So back to my original question. How do we get to Heaven?

I could tell you about my personal faith and what I believe to be true, but ultimately every human being on the planet has to answer that question for themselves. If you haven’t thought about it, I encourage you to do so.