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  1. 0.01B Jews = 10M. What?? That doesn’t seem right.
    Anyway, yeah. Billions of delusional people. Oh well.

  2. Should the Chinese data be taken seriously given the CCPs relationship with religious groups?

  3. Reasonable_Fold6492 on

    How does one even know that person is relgious or not? I have a danish friend who says she is protestant yet she is bisexual and prayed to a korean spirit God. Yet she refused to pray to Buddha since according to her she was still a Christian. Also I have met so many Irish catholic who says they are catholic yet almost never goes to church. Are they relgious?

    In korea there was a politician that said he was atheist yet he spent millions of dollars to buy a room that was supposed to give him good luck according to daoism. When I was in turkey all of the korean tourist despite saying they have no relgion went the mosque and prayed to all hoping for good luck. Is this relgious? 

    Simlar thing with Indian friend who says he isn’t hindu or french friend that’s says he isn’t catholic yet they go to temple or church multiple times a weak. 
    Even trying to know what a relgious person is hard. I do not trust this graph.

  4. disaffected sub-saharan african teens gonna be a huge demographic right about now.

  5. It should be said, in my experience the majority of Chinese people follow the Chinese folk religion, which the CCP pretends doesn’t exist and doesn’t officially measure.

    It’s a very interesting belief system that’s extremely understudied because of the government.

  6. Jews who do nothing associated with Judaism all year but do a fancy dinner with their family for Passover are generally listed as “Jewish”.

    Christians who do nothing associated with Christianity all year but do a fancy dinner with their family for Christmas are generally listed as “religiously unaffiliated”.

    People forget about the cultural water they swim in. I think the number of people who truly have no affiliation with religion is lower than these numbers suggest, and the number who have no spiritual commitments to their religion is probably higher than these numbers suggest.

  7. Data for China is a wild estimate from pew research btw. Officially they haven’t surveyed anyone there and instead scrubbed data from other sources. Their own data says their estimate for people who are religious is between 10-50% while saying it’s impossible to be accurate due to cultural differences, language interpretation of the word “religion”, government restrictions on religion, and so forth. In the same data they say 33% of Chinese people believe in Buddha and bodhisattva and that they influence the world.

  8. Statists are the world’s largest religious group. Also, the most destructive religion.

  9. mywholefuckinglife on

    I’m struggling to not read the first image as saying (on the right) that Christianity saw an increase of 121.6M (million) meaning 121.6 million million people, while the other religions saw only hundreds or dozens of millions

  10. Just think: no matter which specific religion, or indeed special branch of that main religion, someone might follow; the obsolete vast majority of everyone else in the world disagrees with you and does not believe what you believe.

  11. There is one problem with this methodology

    It is consistent, yes, which matters when you have to count THE ENTIRE PLANET

    But changing your religion in the census, specially if you are no longer religious, is not usually done

    Case in point: Turkey has nearly 0% official atheists/non religiously affiliated, while it has a significant non religious population, that’s many millions of non affiliated not being counted there

    Same thing happens on most countries, India has virtually no religiously unaffiliated, but in reality India has millions of non believers

  12. Jebusfreek666 on

    Jews make up only 0.2% of the world population? That feels like it has to be wrong….

  13. JustinUrHead on

    Christianity is the easiest to join. You can pretty much stumble into a church and you become Christian.

  14. I know proselytizing is frowned on but I can’t help it. I’m pretty excited to see an Unaffiliated-Dominant World™!

  15. The numbers are pretty questionable. Is there actually some kind of world wide reliable census that asks for religion status? What determines if a person is religious and which religion precisely? How many are agnostic? Atheist?

    If religiously unaffiliated is atheism, it seems like that is growing at more than twice the Christianity rate per these records.