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Ten Percent of Us Think We're Going to Hell, According to a Real Downer of a YouGov Survey

That number seems a bit low, doesn't it?

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The only thing more inevitable than death is that we will all be dragged by the reaper kicking and screaming into the yawning magma abyss of hell. Weird, then, that a new study by YouGov has found that just 10 percent of the population think they are going there. The ego on 90 percent of you lot. The ego on you, thinking you're not going to hell. The sheer hubris of you, thinking you're a good person, thinking you're destined for heaven.

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A survey of 1,770 adults found that—if heaven or hell is real, and that we don't just close our eyes to inky darkness and utter silence and nothing, just a soft zzvt sound and then oblivion—if hell is real, then 14 percent of men think they are going there compared to just 6 percent of women. Hell is a really sweaty sausage party.

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Of those who think they are going to hell, more come from Scotland than anywhere else (14 percent of Scottish hell believers believe they are condemned), while those who voted Labour are slightly more likely to think they are going there (12 percent, compared to 10 percent Tory, 7 percent Lib Dem and 10 percent UKIP). A frankly absurd 48 percent of people thinking they are going to heaven—honestly, who in the fuck do you think you are?—and 68 percent said they feared death. Twenty percent—presumably old people, or people with children or responsibilities, people whose deaths would actually have an impact on the world—feared death a lot. A cheery YouGov survey, then.

More death findings: 27 percent of people want to live forever (with the greatest of respect: why), the median age people wanted to live to was 90, and 40 percent said they would die happy if they died right now compared to 32 percent who wouldn't.

We all like to think that we're good, don't we? We all think we're generally on a moral level. We all pretend to think that benevolent powers unseen are smiling down on us knowingly whenever we drop a $1 in a busker's hat or eat a vegetable, etching us one mark closer to heaven. But we're not. We're all bad.

For a vision of hell, watch Jamie Oliver and Alex James dance to Wonderwall, over on NOISEY

Am I going to hell, you ask? Oh, for fucking sure. I once watched a man in a mobility scooter tip sideways off a particularly high pavement and all I could really do was laugh—laughing that hard laugh, the one you have to squat down into, the one where you think you might straight up crack a rib—while his little wheels trundled uselessly in the air, while cars screeched to a halt around him to ease him back onto the pavement. "Funny, is it?" he said, afterwards, furiously. "Laughing, are you?" So I'm definitely going to hell, and on the whole I am a good person. You think you're a good person, too, but then if you flick through the archives of your horrible life then you've probably done something indecent and disrespectful to an extremely angry and disabled man, too. See you in hell, VICE readers. See you all in hell.

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