Comparing Religions/Non-Religions and the Like

This is copied from ReligiousTolerance.Org: http://www.religioustolerance.org/index.htm

Comparison of religions in the U.S. and the world:

The numbers of U.S. adherents which are shown (in brackets) were taken from the World Almanac and Book of Facts 2005. The lack of agreement between the ARIS and Almanac are quite remarkable for some faiths. Another estimate of worldwide adherents is provided by Adherents.com. ₁₁

I've never felt that charts like this one were of much use to anyone interested in knowing how much influence the believers in a particular religion within a country have over the evolution of its laws and customs. Just because someone is listed as being a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, etc. does NOT tell us anything about the strength of the person's beliefs or how they influence behavior in daily life,

There are clicable links in the chart and it would do you good to go do research insted of telling us what you are NOT going to do or believe.  View with an open mind, just as you tell others.

Realityrebel wrote:

I've never felt that charts like this one were of much use to anyone interested in knowing how much influence the believers in a particular religion within a country have over the evolution of its laws and customs. Just because someone is listed as being a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, etc. does NOT tell us anything about the strength of the person's beliefs or how they influence behavior in daily life,

This is what was written before the chart that I copied and pasted here and the site name is http://www.religioustolerance.org/

Definition of religion:

We define religion very broadly: "Religion is any specific system of belief about deity, often involving rituals, a code of ethics, a philosophy of life, and a worldview." Thus we consider Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Native American Spirituality, and Neopaganism to be religions. We also include Agnosticism, Atheism, Humanism, Ethical Culture etc. as religions, because they also contain a "belief about deity" -- their belief is that they do not know whether a deity exists, or they have no knowledge of God, or they sincerely believe that God does not exist.

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Religious diversity:

The United States has been described as the most religiously diverse country in the world. In spite of this, it is relatively free of religiously motivated violence. Some observers attribute this to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which guarantees:

• A wall of separation between church and state.
  
  
• Freedom of adults to follow their own religious and spiritual path without oppression or discrimination.
  
  

All of the world's major religions, from Asatru to Zoroastrianism are practiced throughout the U.S. However, thepercentage of adherents of a given religion in the U.S. is often quite different from the corresponding value elsewhere in the world. For example:

• About 75% of American adults identify themselves with Christianity; only 33% of the world's population is Christian.
  
  
• About 2% of Americans regard themselves as Muslim; the corresponding world-wide figure is 20%.
  
  

It may make sense for some meditation rooms, or school libraries or other religious locations visited by the public, to provide sacred texts on the basis of the popularity of religions within the U.S. However, meditation rooms located in international airports on the East and West coast might consider the religious makeup of their international visitors as well.

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Estimating the size of each religious group:

Listed in the table below are the major religions, in order of decreasing numbers of adherents in the U.S. These numbers are based on the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS). ₁ This was a telephone survey of 50,281 American households conducted in 2001 between February and June. Often, the religions of both partners or spouses were recorded, so the sample size is probably on the order of 75,000. This is unusually massive, compared to most public opinion surveys which only sample about 1,000 people. They were asked the simple question: "What is your religion, if any?"
Various almanacs and religious encyclopedias list some data that are very  different from the ARIS survey data. The former are generally based on information provided by individual denominations -- data that is often not particularly reliable.

• Some faith groups count as a member anyone who has been baptized;
  
  
• Others count only active members;
  
  
• Some include only adult members;
  
  
• Others count children as well;
  
  
• Some pad their numbers;
  
  
• Others refuse to release membership data."
  
  

Lady Guinevere wrote:

There are clicable links in the chart and it would do you good to go do research insted of telling us what you are NOT going to do or believe.  View with an open mind, just as you tell others.

I simply don't have time and energy to do this kind of research. I'll read your postings and comment on what I see, but that's all I'm willing to do. But at least I'm willing to do that, which apparently not that many other people are.

Soooo what I am getting from you is that you don't want to LEARN anything that doesn't equate with what you think that you KNOW?

Apparently someone else wants to learn and do the research....or I wouldn't be in your group.

Lady Guinevere wrote:

Soooo what I am getting from you is that you don't want to LEARN anything that doesn't equate with what you think that you KNOW?

Apparently someone else wants to learn and do the research....or I wouldn't be in your group.

I'm nearing the end of a long life spent researching the nature of spiritual reality and I genuinely believe in the accuracy of a lot of my past-life and pre-life memories and the information I've channeled over the years. So I'm not very receptive to anything that doesn't equate with what I think I know, and I don't apologize for this.

And I assume you're in this group for the same reason I am: we've both been banned or ignored in oodles of other groups and this is one of the few Web discussion venues where we stand a reasonable chance of getting replies to our postings. So I hope you continue posting here even though I just skim through a lot of your messages without reading them carefully, and criticize or argue with what you say in others.

IMO when one has very poor eyesight one can only be on the net or read a book, for a limited time.
I know this because last year before my cataract surgery I was declared legally blind. I could see, but not good enough to drive or to distinguish a broke off limb on the ground from a rattlesnake. Plus the headaches after reading too much, made me limit my reading time. No matter that I wanted to read books and as many posts as I could, the headaches stopped me.

Actually I respect all the work you do researching topics, some of which I would never have dreamed of much less thought of.

IMHO each of us are on a different path that ends at the same destination. We can all learn from each other which may or may not contribute to our own lessons we have chosen this time.
The best thing IMO is finding people of like mind, even if we differ in our basic principles.

Skytiger wrote:

IMO when one has very poor eyesight one can only be on the net or read a book, for a limited time.
I know this because last year before my cataract surgery I was declared legally blind. I could see, but not good enough to drive or to distinguish a broke off limb on the ground from a rattlesnake. Plus the headaches after reading too much, made me limit my reading time. No matter that I wanted to read books and as many posts as I could, the headaches stopped me.

Actually I respect all the work you do researching topics, some of which I would never have dreamed of much less thought of.

IMHO each of us are on a different path that ends at the same destination. We can all learn from each other which may or may not contribute to our own lessons we have chosen this time.
The best thing IMO is finding people of like mind, even if we differ in our basic principles.

Thank you and I also know how hard it is to read things on the internet.  I was born with an Optic Pit and RR knows that...he did the research on that for me.  I appreciate your comments and reading and learning.

When you stop learning, you stop living.  I don't plan on doing that anytime soon.  It appears that RR is ready for that and has stopped wnating to learn.  That is a durned shame.

LadyG, #9: When you stop learning, you stop living. I don't plan on doing that anytime soon. It appears that RR is ready for that and has stopped wanting to learn. That is a durned shame."

Actually, I stopped learning on one important level back in 1983 when I started channeling the information for the "War in Heaven" book. From that day to this, I have altered my viewoint on spiritual matters only according to advice from my Spirit Guides. And over the last thirty years, I have also gradually reduced my making value judgments on all controversial issues, though my mind has always been open to learning new information. I don't apologize for any of this, and I've always freely admitted it in my on-line postings. And I actually don't feel less self-respect or self-confidence: I'm simply admitting something that happned to almost all of us as we grow older, but most people are either unaware of or are unwilling to talk about.

LadyG, #18: "IMO, my #10 in the "Comparing Religions/Non-Religions and the Like" thread here on the NHB Forum already gave what I believe to be a satisfactory reply to what you just said.

I'm starting to get old but I am trying to stay open. However I have shifted to a late set of beliefs connected to RR's book and my deep and ongoing experience of these forces so you can safely call me dogmatic.
I find this table interesting though no doubt it does not reflect a lot with possible distortions. Plus it was my experience that for example in Buddhism, many people declared themselves Buddhist who merely believed in reincarnation and karma (in the Hindu sense) and had nothing but a romantic affiliation with Buddhism, never heard of the Four Noble Truths etc.
For example it is new to me that there are nearly a million Hindu believers in the US, I thought it was less.
The Church of Scientology is banned in Germany and it would be a good idea worldwide as it is a nefarious and rather paranoid sect really based on money-making. I have never seen such a schizophrenic attitude about money as with them - I cannot be in the company of a Scientologist...

Reg, #12, re: "For example it is new to me that there are nearly a million Hindu believers in the US, I thought it was less."

I suspect they may be including the "Krishna Consciousness" sect as part of Hinduism.

That dampens my enthusiasm considerably...

regmelocco wrote:

That dampens my enthusiasm considerably...

Yeah, mine too, but the people who compile these stats aren't at fault. Krishna Consciousness is officially recognized as a Hindu sect in India, along with lots of even sleazier groups, simply because Hinduism has always prided itself on being inclusive rather than exclusive.

I wonder how these figures are compiled? Also, do people go default Christian if they were raised that way but they're not actually practicing Christian?

BSSM wrote:

I wonder how these figures are compiled? Also, do people go default Christian if they were raised that way but they're not actually practicing Christian?

I tend not to take articles and charts like the ones we're discussing here very seriously, simply because I usually have no inkling of how the figures were actually compiled. And this is even true of material published in most professional journals: the authors assume their readers already know the group's standards for compiling data, and don't even try to explain them to the general public, because they're always quite complex and assume that the person reading them has extensive background knowledge in the field.