Yeah. I thought lukeprog might be using “grip” in some more general sense like what you suggest. But if that were so I expect he’d have cited statistics on more general measures of religiosity, rather than estimates of the proportion of non-religious people.
If you follow the footnote, it goes to an article on his old website, which takes the figure from the World Christian Encyclopedia, ‘a trusted source on religious demographics’. I would be incredibly sceptical about it: as you said, how would we know? People on all sides of religious demographics debates have an awful habit of comparing like with unlike, and those sort of encyclopedias often just get the ‘best’ figure for point X and point Y while ignoring how comparable they are.
In the original article the stat seems (and I’m cautious here, because my general view of blogs centred on atheism is far worse than the impression I get of Lukeprog from this site) to be used as a rather cheap initial aside: the article is actually about why religion has dropped in Scandanavia and similar, which isn’t clearly linked to the worldwide 1900-2000 statistics given.
As an aside: ‘state religion’ is a dangerous one. It suggests for instance that the UK is ‘in the grip of religion’ in a way than Syria, India and for that matter the US.
IIRC, typically statistics about the number of Christians actually count anyone who has been baptised and has not apostatised. As such, they include lots of people who aren’t under the “grip” of the Church in any meaningful sense.
Hum, I think it greatly depends of the country. In some countries (like Germany) you officially declare your religion because it affects your taxes. In some others like France, the state just doesn’t care about your religion, but (both public and private) institute perform samplings in which they ask people if they have a religion and if what it is.
On the polls, results depend greatly on how the question is formulated (depending on the wording, people who identify themselves as culturally christian but don’t believe in god will answer differently), but the latest detailed poll done, according to Wikipedia, gave something like (simplified and translated by myself) :
Sondage CSA 2006-2007
Catholics : 51 % among which :
Believing catholics : 27 %
Agnostics catholics : (don't know if God exists) : 15 %
Atheist catholics (don't think God exists, but identifying themselves as culturally catholics) : 9 %
Atheist : 31 %
Muslims : 4 %
Protestants : 3 %
Jew : 1 %
Other/not answering : 10 %
Which leads to a majority (55%) of atheists or agnostics. But if just asking ’”are you christian ?” you’ll get a majority of christians… the joy of polls and statistics.
Yeah. I thought lukeprog might be using “grip” in some more general sense like what you suggest. But if that were so I expect he’d have cited statistics on more general measures of religiosity, rather than estimates of the proportion of non-religious people.
If you follow the footnote, it goes to an article on his old website, which takes the figure from the World Christian Encyclopedia, ‘a trusted source on religious demographics’. I would be incredibly sceptical about it: as you said, how would we know? People on all sides of religious demographics debates have an awful habit of comparing like with unlike, and those sort of encyclopedias often just get the ‘best’ figure for point X and point Y while ignoring how comparable they are.
In the original article the stat seems (and I’m cautious here, because my general view of blogs centred on atheism is far worse than the impression I get of Lukeprog from this site) to be used as a rather cheap initial aside: the article is actually about why religion has dropped in Scandanavia and similar, which isn’t clearly linked to the worldwide 1900-2000 statistics given.
As an aside: ‘state religion’ is a dangerous one. It suggests for instance that the UK is ‘in the grip of religion’ in a way than Syria, India and for that matter the US.
IIRC, typically statistics about the number of Christians actually count anyone who has been baptised and has not apostatised. As such, they include lots of people who aren’t under the “grip” of the Church in any meaningful sense.
Hum, I think it greatly depends of the country. In some countries (like Germany) you officially declare your religion because it affects your taxes. In some others like France, the state just doesn’t care about your religion, but (both public and private) institute perform samplings in which they ask people if they have a religion and if what it is.
On the polls, results depend greatly on how the question is formulated (depending on the wording, people who identify themselves as culturally christian but don’t believe in god will answer differently), but the latest detailed poll done, according to Wikipedia, gave something like (simplified and translated by myself) :
Sondage CSA 2006-2007
Which leads to a majority (55%) of atheists or agnostics. But if just asking ’”are you christian ?” you’ll get a majority of christians… the joy of polls and statistics.
1% of people worship a cheesy Hollywood movie about a giant shark?
It was “jew” not “jaw”, sorry for the typo… fixed.