Duck!

I regularly hear that of the six or so billion people on planet Earth, some two billion are Christians.

Is this figure believable?

I suspect that myself and an awful lot of agnostics/atheists/secular humanists/etc end up getting lumped in with this lot.

Personally, I live with my parents, and my father filled in our census form a while back. In my religion he put "Roman Catholic", despite the fact that he knows that I'm not a practicing Catholic and that I'm non-religious and probably agnostic at best.

But I didn't argue. To argue would have brought unnecessary family squablle which I didn't want.

Also, I suspect that plenty of people I know would gladly put down "Roman Catholic" or "Christian" on census forms without giving a second thought to what thaty means.

In pub debates with friends and family, when push comes to the shove they'd say "Yeah, I suppose I believe in God".

How many Christians or Muslims or Buddhists the world over are shoehorned into beliefs they don't really hold for the sake of surveys or government censuses?

I think that just about everybody I know would be classified as a Roman Catholic without actually knowing what being a Catholic acually involved believing. I doubt that many "Catholic" I know really appreciates what being a Christian really means or indeed what they really believe about it. I have a brother who attends Catholic mass every single Sunday but who recently stated in an argument about Islam that he thinks that the Koran is the word of God. Is it possible to be both a Catholic and to think that the Koran is the word of God?

I just don't trust these figures. I suspect that the world over, people are "Roman Catholics" and "Presbyterians" and "Shia Muslims" and "Theravada Buddhists", etc. without actually officially subscribing to the orthodox beliefs of these theologies. But somehow I suspect they end up on these quotas anyway.

I'm just wondering, how accurate are these religious figures that are thrown about by so many people on boards like this.

Christians are sometimes eager to point out that "2 billion people agree with them" without actually knowing what they believe and without appreciating simple facts like at least half of all Christians are Catholic therefore the other billion are hellbound or without realising that the other half are non-Catholic are hellbound.

How many people actually believe these kind of 2 billion Xians, 1.5 billion Muslims, 800 million Hindus, 500 million Buddhist etc. figures. I wonder how many of these people actually subscribe to the religion they end up lumped under in these kind of stats.

You know what I mean? Or am I talking shit?


Duck!

Justin70

Hey Duck!

It depends on how you define a 'Christian' - if you go with the most loose interpretation that you can by simply saying that:

A Christian is someone that believes in Jesus the Christ. Or even a Christian is someone that believes that Jesus is the Messiah.

Then yeah, I can see 2 billion people believing in that because ALL forms of Christianity believe in that including the Catholics and that would probably be a pretty huge number.

Then again, I'm just guessing. =)

Justin

Magus55

Yes, according to Adherents.com there are 2 billion professed Christians ( whether they are true Christians is a different topic), 1.2 Billion Islam, 900 million atheist/agnostic/secular. So a little more than 4 billion people follow 3 beliefs/ideals. Another billion or so follow Buddhism and Hinduism and the last Billion is for the other 50,000 some religions on earth.

lpetrich

Furthermore, for many people, it may be a matter of affiliation rather than active belief.

At least Jewish atheists and Hindu atheists are a bit more straightforward about that sort of thing.

Kintaro

example : Quebec. We have 80 % 'catholics'.


And less then 4 % of the population goes to church, the age median being 45-50 since there are so many old people.


I don't intend on hurting atheists on this sentence (which I am, an atheist) but there are not many new cases of atheism, just declared atheists.

I wouldn't be surprised at a 40 % figure in reality for us :P . If not higher.

miscreant

Actually, this probably wouldn't even work. I have many friends who have no interest in religion, would laugh at the idea that Jesus was divine (if they knew he was supposed to be), but would still fill out 'Christian' on a form simply because that's what their parents told them they were when they were little.

In my mind these people would really be agnostic or even weak atheist, but they just fill out Christian out of habit and the fact that they really don't care.

Miscreant

Leigh

Well, here in the UK, people often don't bother calling themselves atheists in much the same way as most people don't bother calling themselves aSantaists.

Conversation I had the other day with 2 work colleagues - we were talking about a friend who was getting her baby christened, despite not being religious:

1st colleague: "Well, I'm not an atheist" (pauses and thinks about it for a moment). "Actually, I suppose I am, technically, since I don't believe in any religion"

Me: "When I went to Catholic primary school, and they taught stuff such that if you weren't baptised you can't go to heaven"

2nd colleague (incredulous stare): "You never believed rubbish like that, did you?"

Radorth

I guess it depends on whether you define a Christian as:

"Anybody who says so, including Adolf Hitler."

The definition changes with wind direction apparently.

Rad

Shake

Sure, if it works in their favor, they'll use the statistic. Know that this is perhaps the broadest definition of "Christian" and if you told some of them what other groups were included, they'd be shocked. We have members on this board who will tell you that Catholics are not Xian, so there goes quite a good number out of that 2B. IIRC groups like the Mormons and others are included. Many more mainstream Xians (Baptists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, etc.) do not consider these other groups Xian.

This question was covered in part in the thread about the geography quiz, which included the question about the most populous religion on the planet.

BTW Radforth, Hitler was a Catholic. There have been several threads about this.

Godless Dave

The class registration forms at my college had a space for religion. A friend of mine put down "Quaker" the first few times because he had gone to a Quaker high school. But once I saw it and asked him "Are you really a Quaker?" He put down "pagan" after that.

I usually left it blank or wrote "none" (since atheism isn't a religion), but once I put "rooster worship".