61 percent of Americans think Bin Laden is in hell
Written by Robin Marie in News, Politics at May 5, 2011
So says a new CNN poll.
Not surprisingly, who is more likely to think Osama is burning works as a window into the landscape of religious and political belief in the United States:
Who feels the strongest that bin Laden is in Hell? Men more than women, people who earn less than $50,000 a year more than more affluent respondents, people without college educations more than those who have them, conservatives more than liberals, and people from the South and Northeast more than people from the West and Midwest.
Only 5 percent of respondents replied that they do not believe in hell. The dynamics of believing in supernatural justice in this way is an interesting one; in cases like this, it could clearly be quite comforting. On the other hand, I wonder how many of that 61 percent see hell as a place only unambiguously bad guys go to - it’s Osama, Hitler, Stalin and Timothy McVeigh down there rather than say, your Jewish neighbor or your agnostic cousin. One hopes, at least, that the number of people who have this rather proscribed, convenient concept of hell is rather large.
