Current statistics rate the top beliefs systems by adherents as follows:
(1) Christianity: About 2.3 billion followers. About 50% of Christians are Roman Catholics.(2) Muslim: About 1.5 billion followers. About 80-90% of Muslims are Sunni and 10-20% are Shia. The Shia-Sunni split in the Muslim religion occurred due to the dispute over the succession after the prophet Muhammad died in 632.(3) Non-religious or atheist: About 1 billion people(4) Hindu: About 900 million followers with the vast majority living in India.(5) Buddhist: About 400 million followers. Based on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, the vast majority of Buddhists live in Asia.
In America it is said that atheism and non-belief in God, has risen from about 900,000 in 2001 to approximately 1.6 Million persons currently. Please note that those who have no religious belief are also lumped in with those who are atheists. There is a big difference between one who does not believe that God exists and one who has no opinion either way.So the numbers are slightly skewed as a result. Over the same period of time, it is said that Christianity has lost about 15% of it's adherents. Reminder that atheism has actually existed longer than Christianity estimated back over some 2,400 years.
In an article in the USA Today forum Anthony DeStefano points out much of the preceding information and claims that although atheism appears to be successful in its current marketing efforts through books, conferences and other schemes, it is worth noting that the atheists themselves are engaging in potentially the biggest fraud in history, by making it seem that the existence of material (materialism) is all that there is and that all other experience stems from it.
There are two trains of thoughts to DeStefanos' argument. 1- That material observation (empiricism) can be deceiving and give us completely wrong ideas about material reality. He points out that at one time the "observable world" was flat, and that although we don't observe that we're moving through space that we're actually hurling through space on a planet going millions of miles per hour. So material observation by itself fails. Then 2- The "superstition" of atheism, as DeStefano calls it, is the belief that biological processes and the interaction of molecules account for immaterial realities such as love, passion, memories, philosophies, dreams, thoughts, consciousness and other abstract concepts such as logic. The facts are that none of these things have ever been extracted from a body or brain and placed under a microscope and examined.
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