Talk:Major religious groups

Concerning the use of Encyclopedia Britannica as a source

ElvenHighKing has said in this discussion: "A better solution for this article would be to use numbers from well-respected sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica directly." ([1]) I agree with him that statistics for the major world religions from the Britannica website should be posted in this article.

Wookipedian, however, disagrees with ElvenHighKing. Wookipedian has said: "[The Britannica website] seems to require some kind of subscription for access to the information. I think it is helpful for resolving disputes if we use a source that everyone can easily access without such restrictions. As far as I can see, Britannica does not satisfy that criterion." ([2])

My response to Wookipedian is that posting Britannica statistics on this article does not mean that we have to stop using adherents.com as a source. We can still keep the adherents.com list on this article just as we always have; but at the same time, statistics from the Britannica website should be posted in this article as an alternative list for people to look at. It is not necessary for all of the readers of this article to be able to look at the Britannica website for themselves. The statistics from the website can be posted with a link to the website, but a disclaimer can be used in order to warn people that the website requires a subscription. Besides, the article already contains some information from alternative sources, such as the Christian Science Monitor, anyway.

I would appreciate it if any wikipedia user who has a subscription to the Britannica website would post the Britannica statistics of the world religions on this article. - SadisticSuburbanite 3 April 2007

Nearly two weeks have gone by and no one has commented on the above comments, which were made in response to previous comments by me. I would like to make a few relevant remarks:

• SadisticSuburbanite refers to the existing use of the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) in the article. It may be worth pointing out that the CSM list is freely accessible on the web, via secondary reporting of its content on the adherents.com site. The Brittanica information (if such information actually exists in the Brittanica) does not seem to be that easily accessible. Also, as a minor point of clarification, the population estimates in the section of the article that refers to the CSM categorizations do not actually come from the CSM. See the footnote in that section. Only the categories came from the CSM. The numbers listed alongside them came from adherents.com.
• Anyone who has watched this page for a while will know that people come here all the time and play around with the numbers and categories, usually without saying what they are attempting to achieve or why, and once in a while the page gets all confused with such edits and we have to go back and look at the cited adherents.com source again to make sense of the situation. If we use a source that some/most of us can't easily access, it will be even harder to keep the page sensible. Really only a couple of us are diligent about keeping the page from spinning out of control as it is.
• Perfection in the estimation of such numbers and in the structuring of religions into categories is impossible to achieve. That should be obvious. All of this should be understood as rough estimates and "best effort" categorizations about something that no one can really accurately know and about which there will be no universal agreement. After a certain point, more effort becomes pointless. Even small differences in how you ask a person what their religion is, or in the context of the question can make a significant difference in the outcome. (Is it the government that is doing the asking? Is it a church? Is the person doing the asking acting friendly? Is the person answering the question feeling cranky or mischevious? What penalties are associated with what answers in the neighborhood where the person answering the question lives? Etc.)

–Wookipedian 03:47, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Hello! I just happened to notice this link in the Wikipedia page to some statistics published by Brittanica. So I did a quick little study of their differences relative to what adherents.com is reporting. Basically, for the most populous religions, the two sites list very similar numbers. Adherents.com seems to have a few more people overall, and a few more of them assigned to the non-religious category. That's about it. I only compared the most numerous categories, since below that, it seems to become harder to make sure the categories are the same — for example, the Brittanica spreadsheet doesn't have a category called "primal indigenous" (also, I didn't want to spend all day on the effort). See table below.

Religion	Adherents.com	Brittanica	Percent difference
Christianity	2.1 B	2.0 B	+5%
Islam	1.3 B	1.2 B	+8%
Secular	1.1 B	0.92 B	+20%
Hindu	900	828	+9%
Chinese Folk	394	390	+1%
Buddhist	376	364	+3%

—Wookipedian 02:09, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Below are a few more. For these smaller groups the correspondence is also very good, but with adherents.com being slighly lower than Brittanica. For groups smaller than this, it should not be surprising that there are significant differences in the counts. Overall, I would say that the two sources match each other very well in the vast majority of cases.

Religion	Adherents.com	Brittanica	Percent difference
Sikhism	23	23.8	-3.4%
Jewish	14	14.5	-3.4%
Baha'i	7	7.4	-3.4%
Jainism	4.2	4.3	-2.3%

—Wookipedian 03:05, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

I corrected the number for Christianity according to the comment above. 1.3 B is obviously wrong. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.15.92.120 (talk) 14:40, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

Delete the table

I was looking to see how many Marxists there are in the world today, and I discovered that nobody has tried to compile such numbers. Similarly, it is impossible to determine how many people are party to "Chinese folk religion", "African folk religion", blah blah, etc. Basically this entire table is useless, most likely wildly inaccurate, and can only be cited to vague authorities like the CIA World Factbook. Shii (tock) 03:47, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

As usual, people are revert warring over the figures for their religion (in this case, atheism) without bothering to supply a citation, much less discuss it on this page. I sit here all alone, twiddling me thumbs... Shii (tock) 00:11, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

Well, there doesn't seem to be any response to this, so I'll go ahead and remove the table. Shii (tock) 22:47, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

Stop pushing your view and abide by the consensus. There have been many others who disagree with your analysis. Regards, -- Jeff3000 (talk) 23:47, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

Unfortunately we have this policly WP:V here and we don't submit to a tyranny of the majority. At least, I don't. Shii (tock) 00:09, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

Why is it that so many people insist on re-adding unsourced content without discussing it at all? Shii (tock) 20:59, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

Atheism is an Abrahamic Religion

At least, according to the table. This doesn't make much sense to me, especially given the percentage of atheists in, e.g. China. Giford (talk) 17:41, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Chinese people are Marxist, which is based on Judaism; see the Oxford Concise Companion to the Jewish Religion citation. Shii (tock) 17:48, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Too many non-validated variables to actually define.

This subject has too many non-validated premises, sect division types and confirmed facts even within each individual sub sect for even the sect themselves to agree with. This is the nature of Man and religions. To this end I suggest K.I.S. (keep it simple) as the basic starting point. It is agreed that the combined variations of Christianity (any sect that believes that Jesus was the son of God), Islam (sects that believe in a single God which originated in the middle east AND do not believe Jesus was a deity AND that we are all children of Abraham), Monotheistic (any religion that believes in a single God but is not previously mentioned), Polytheistic (belief in more than one God), Spiritual Non-Deity based religions (Buddhist, Hindi, Scientology, etc...) that believe in an all connected force/power/entity that ebbs and flows but is not sentient. Then Lastly Non-Religious (any person that believes there is not connecting and/or controlling force encompassing everything.)

This gives 6 major forms of belief to start with. Once that is done then use each religions published theory's as to how many persons are affiliated with them to compile your statistics. Each religion will dispute another. This is human nature. Governments are notorious for not being accurate and biased either for or against based one the majority of those running the body.

In the end without a non-biased research body going door-to-door counting people and conducting surveys you will never have accurate figures.

Perhaps, this topic should be removed and a statement of non-definable be placed here instead. —Preceding unsigned comment added by OldWolf99 (talk • contribs) 17:06, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

I agree; this table is unwieldy. It cites almanacs and encyclopedias, which are unreliable and may have made up the data for all we know. I'd like to hear any arguments against removing it. Shii (tock) 22:12, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Do the math

If you add all the numbers of the religious groups it equals MORE THAN THE ENTIRE HUMAN POPULATION! The top religions are wrong too. The top religions in order are, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gsangha (talk • contribs) 22:58, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Graph relevance?

It seems that a graph such as a timeline like this one might help the article. Thoughts? --Wikiwatcher1 (talk) 20:57, 29 October 2010 (UTC) px150|center