When asked whether God uses natural disasters as a way of testing people's faith, quite a few Americans agreed: 16% completely agreed and 24% mostly agreed that natural disasters can be a test from God. Slightly more Americans disagreed, even though there are plenty of examples in the Bible of God uses disasters, illness, and other ills to test human faith.
The Public Religion Research Institute and the Religion News Service conducted a survey on Americans' views about God in the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. When asked how much they agree or disagree with the statement "Natural disasters are God's way of testing our faith," people responded:
- Completely Agree: 16%
- Mostly Agree: 24%
- Mostly Disagree: 20%
- Completely Disagree: 29%
- Don't Know / Refused: 3%
The idea of God testing a person's faith has a lot of support in Christian theology so it's no surprise that it's a relatively popular belief. At the same time, though, this belief requires also believing that God causes widespread death, destruction, and suffering just to put humans through a little test.
It would be difficult to argue that such behavior is consistent with being even a little bit good, never mind perfectly good. In fact, this is arguably worse than the idea that God punishes entire nations for the sins of a few citizens â€" a position that has a bit less support among Americans.
This survey was by the Public Religion Research Institute was done with phone interviews of 1,008 adults between March 17 and March 20, 2011. The margin of error is +/- 3%.
No comments:
Post a Comment