Surprised to learn that according to Pew Survey (on polling 35,000 people), while 74% of Americans believe in life after death, only 61% of Hindu's (in the US) believe in reincarnation.
A Pew study reports that 98 percent of Mormons believe in an afterlife, the top percentage in the U.S. The biggest believers in hell: evangelical and African American Protestants, and Muslims.
Evil is always a hot topic among people who study religion, and it's one of the big questions people always grapple with: 'If there's an all-powerful God, why is there a Holocaust?' " said Bart Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of "God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer.Major organized religions fail to provide a convincing answer to this fundamental question. When we are well fed, well cared for, and are assured of food and shelter in the foreseeable future, it would be a breeze for us to preach things like "pain and pleasure are mere illusions" and "God loves all". I will believe in this illusion theory, if someone smashes his toe deliberately with a brick, and still manage to keep a smile on his face. For all practical purposes, this world is real, and reality can bite hard.
