Survey says ...
Greg Clarke, over at CASE, has helpfully alerted us via his blog to a very recent survey (PDF) of 1,000 Australians about their views on (among other things) Jesus and life after death.
It's certainly worth a read, even though it probably reflects similar results to past surveys. Worth noting is the percentage of people who believe that Jesus was the son of God (51%), or who believe Jesus was a prophet or representative of God but not an actual son (8%). 10% are unsure about Jesus, 23% think he was just a man and 8% think he never existed at all.
A far higher proportion (65%) of Coalition voters think that Jesus was God's son, compared to Labour voters (43%). Yet only 32% of Coalition voters go to church at least once a month.
34% of those surveyed believe in ‘conscious’ life after death, 21% don't believe in it and 45% are ‘unsure’.
The survey breaks these results down by gender, age bracket, income level and state.
Once again, these sort of surveys seem to be telling us there are more people out there than we intuitively expect who are sympathetic to a Christian view of Jesus.