IS HELL BECOMING obsolete? According to an extensive study by the widely respected Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, the answer may be yes. An unusually large polling sample of 35,000 Americans, representing many different religious groups, as well as atheists and agnostics, confirmed what experts have been observing for some time now—public belief in hell is losing its foothold.

It's not that people have given up their conviction in the hereafter; at the same time that just 59 percent of those responding said they think there is a hell, 74 percent of them said they believe in heaven—the exact same percentage as those who said they believe there is an afterlife.

According to John C. Green, a professor of political science at the University of Akron and a senior fellow with the Pew Forum, the discrepancy is significant—"Many more people believe in heaven than believe in hell," he says. His explanation? "It does seem to be associated with a decline in viewing God as a judge, and as someone who punishes people, but a continuing emphasis on a view of God as someone who is merciful and generous and forgiving." He notes that people no longer automatically see heaven and hell as "two sides of the same coin" ("What lies beneath: Why fewer Americans believe in hell than in heaven," The Boston Globe, June 29, 2008).

Public affirmation of a beneficent God is cause for great gratitude. God is the one omnipotent Life of us all, throughout all time. And the more people come to know this Creator who Genesis 1 says "saw every thing that he had made and, behold, it was very good," the more they come to know the Christ or Truth, which sets humanity free from its ills. We should count these latest findings as another sign that Truth is transforming the collective thought and moving it toward the light.

For centuries, the common belief has been that you can't have a heaven without its opposite. And that has certainly been perpetuated by a view of heaven and hell as actual physical locations. Christian Science explains that they are, in fact, mental states. While heaven and hell, life, death, and punishment are theological terms that can seem contentious and hard to fathom, the healing Science that Jesus practiced—which is explained fully in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures—sorts them out in a consistent and uncomplicated way, drawing healing conclusions based on the understanding of God as All and eternal good, and man as made for all time in God's likeness, preexisting and coexisting with Him. "Perfect and infinite Mind enthroned is heaven," wrote the author Mary Baker Eddy. "The evil beliefs which originate in mortals are hell. Man is the idea of Spirit; he reflects the beatific presence, illuming the universe with light. Man is deathless, spiritual. He is above sin or frailty. He does not cross the barriers of time into the vast forever of Life, but he coexists with God and the universe" (p. 266).

Some might argue that it's too simplistic and easy for a person to blithely choose to believe in heaven and not in hell—that this could set the stage for misconceptions that God allows us to commit crime, murder, cheating, deceit, or any other form of wrongdoing, with abandon. And indeed, such an assumption would be very inaccurate. We must each take responsibility for our actions, good or bad, and the Science of the Christ does not, cannot, involve wrongdoing. Conviction in the reality of good and the unreality of evil is not on solid ground until it is based on an honest appreciation of the sacred law that Jesus summed up so simply: Love God, and your neighbor as yourself (see Matt. chap. 22).

We experience heaven or hell in direct proportion to the goodness or badness, purity or impurity, truthfulness or corruption, of our thoughts, motives, and actions. We escape hell by growing spiritually—through inward reform and outward living that daily express more of the "very good" nature that God has invested in every man and woman.

Bottom line: It's encouraging when people appear increasingly ready to seek and follow the Bible's inspired promise of eternal good, and to leave behind the flawed theology of eternal damnation.

So many circumstances these days threaten to make our world hopeless and hellish, at the mercy of a fickle, punishing God. But such states of thought are neither right nor natural, now or in the future. They are, in fact, something to fan into flames—not the fearsome flames of guilt and original sin, but the cleansing flames of the understandable, divine Science of being. The God who is Truth and Love consumes error, fosters peace, and heals humanity.

|CSS