{"id":8078,"date":"2009-07-31T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-31T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2009\/07\/31\/heaven-sure-hell-not-so-much\/"},"modified":"2009-07-31T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-07-31T12:00:00","slug":"heaven-sure-hell-not-so-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2009\/07\/31\/heaven-sure-hell-not-so-much\/","title":{"rendered":"Heaven? Sure. Hell? Not so much."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Source: Religion News Services<\/p>\n<p>BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA, USA: Only 59 percent of Americans believe in hell, compared with 74 percent who believe in heaven, according to the recent surveys from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.<\/p>\n<p>The Rev. Fred Johns, pastor of Brookview Wesleyan Church in Irondale, Ala., said that pastors shy away from the topic of everlasting damnation. &#8220;It&#8217;s out of fear we&#8217;ll not appear relevant,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Pope John Paul II stirred up a debate in 1999 by describing hell as &#8220;the state of those who freely and definitely separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.&#8221; But some U.S. evangelicals expressed misgivings about the implication that hell is an abstract separation from God rather than a literal lake of brimstone and everlasting fire, a concept they favor.<\/p>\n<p>[HPI note: Hindu cosmology encompasses celestial realms, where the Gods live, and also a lower plane of hellish suffering called the Narakaloka. But in the Hindu view no one is condemned forever, because of reincarnation and the natural evolution of all souls.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source: Religion News Services BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA, USA: Only 59 percent of Americans believe in hell, compared with 74 percent who,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8078\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}