25% Of People Believe In Angels Apparently !

[mikey4444]

Interesting article in this mornings BBC News website ::

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24576115

According this survey, 25% of people interviewed for the survey, think that angels actually exist. You know, those creatures that look like man-sized pigeons. You couldn't make it up if you tried !

[naomi24]

//Despite the falling popularity of organised religion, most people in the UK still believe in the power of spiritual forces, research suggests.//

I think that's true. I have a friend who swears she has seen an angel - and apparently he wasn't man-sized - he was enormous!

[pixie373]

That is scary- although the study was by a Christian Think-tank, so I'm sceptical. It depends who they asked.

[LazyGun]

Study was carried out by ComRes, a respected polling institution,and the sample size was 2000 adults, randomly selected to best represent the UK adult population.

I had a glance through the actual report, and the questions do not seem unnecessarily scewed to favour a religious/spiritual interpretation, although some might be considered borderline misleading.

The results are interesting. Theos have interpreted the results to put a positive spin on the underlying trends, I think. It is undoubtedly true that less and less people,year on year, attend any form of religious services apart from those culturally dictated - hatched, matched,dispatched etc., so this should not represent comforting reading for any believer of organised religion.

What comes in religions wake though? And this study fits with what others have observed; The growth of new age spiritualism, or some poorly articulated woolly minded belief in the supernatural or similar. And the big ticket issues in these "post-religious" views tend to focus around doctrines about the soul, or the presence of angels ( but, curiously, for those angel believers, they do not seem to be associated with god- they could almost be regarded as benevolent, guardian spirit alien even).

So, whilst those who do not believe in organised religion cannot necessarily be described as atheists, it certainly reflects modern trends towards a less religious outlook on life.

I would be interested to see if organised religions seriously responded to studies like these to make real changes to the hierarchies of the church and the formality and discipline required to regularly attend churches, or the extent to which they intrude into peoples private and family lives, because there is clearly an appetite amongst the general public for a belief in the "spiritual" however poorly described or articulate that belief is.

This growth of belief in personal guardian angels is fascinating t me though, partly because so many who believe this have no beleif in any of the major religions - so angels now seem to have evolved a mythology and identity completely divorced from organised religion or even god, in some instances

[Graham-W]

I think they probably mean those aliens, from another galaxy, who come and visit us, from time to time, and take away a selection of people from the deep south of the USA for research and procreation.
It should be made clear that these are NOT true angels as they hold no magical powers, unlike true angels who have the useful power to turn water into wine.

[jim360]

I know people who insist that there are ghosts, or such things as psychics. Angels isn't too surprising.

[naomi24]

People who claim to see angels are in no doubt about what they claim to have seen - a winged figure in human form - and I suspect that image emanates from religious artwork.

[RATTER15]

Oh dear! I bet that is far higher in the USA.

[maggiebee]

I believe in angels
Something good in everything I see
I believe in angels
When I know the time is right for me
I'll cross the stream - I have a dream

Good enough for Abba - good enough for me lol

[jim360]

If anything 25% strikes me as rather lower than I'd expected. By default all Christians, Jews and Muslims at least ought to believe in Angels (even if they don't, they do) and then some people on top of that might believe in guardian angels or similar.

[LazyGun]

@Maggie Abba were asked about that song once - they were genuinely surprised by the question. You see, it was all down to an error in translation, apparently. What the swedish band were actually warbling happily about was there belief in angles.

All this nonsense about angels, and all down to a typo :)

[jim360]

That's acute story LG.

[Kromovaracun]

Frankly I'm surprised it's not higher - I would have guessed more like 40-50%.

I find the "need" for something "spiritual" in peoples' lives a little confusing, but if it works for them and they're not hurting anyone else, then there's no arguing I guess.

What I would say is that seeing or perceiving something doesn't necessarily mean that it is real.

[LazyGun]

@ Jim "That's acute story LG"

Very droll -must have had your coffee this morning! :)

[starone]

There are angels. They haven't got wings and they don't belong to any religion. They are just nice people who look after people less fortunate than themselves.

[FredPuli43]

I certainly believe in Hell's Angels.

And, of course, I have a spirit guide. She was revealed to me in a drunken séance with some student friends, years ago. She is, as I recall, a Red Indian, as they were then called. Pity I can't remember her name. In an earlier séance the question "Is there anybody there?" got the answer "N. O". That proves that the spirits have a sense of humour or that we had had too many spirits.

[sandyRoe]

75% of our Guardian Angels must weep to see their best efforts to protect us go unacknowledged.

[jno]

there's nothing in the survey to say the angels look like man-sized pigeons; that's your belief at work, not theirs

[FredPuli43]

Which raises the question "What do angels look like?". Where did the Renaissance artists and the church get the 'man-sized pigeons' image from?

[Old_Geezer]

Ah but do they all mean the same thing by "angels" ?

[Khandro]

In all the arts, creative people, composers, poets, painters and sculptors have always looked to the muse or their daemons for inspiration; in Plato's Symposium, the priestess Diotima teaches Socrates that love is not a god, but rather a "great daemon" She goes on to explain that "everything daemonic is between divine and mortal" and she describes daemons as "interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men. In Plato's Apology of Socrates, Socrates claimed to have a daimonion (literally, a "divine something") that frequently warned him—in the form of a "voice"—against mistakes but never told him what to do. However, the Platonic Socrates never refers to the daimonion as a daimōn; it was always an impersonal "something" or "sign". Regarding the charge brought against Socrates in 399, Plato surmised “Socrates does wrong because he does not believe in the gods in whom the city believes, but introduces other daemonic beings…” Burkert notes that “a special being watches over each individual, a daimon who has obtained the person at his birth by lot, is an idea which we find also in Plato.