[Buddha-l] Buddhism,the second largest religion in the world

[Richard Hayes]

On Thursday 01 March 2007 23:07, L.S. Cousins wrote:

> If you look up the source, you find that David B. Barrett works at
> the World Evangelization Research Center, Richmond, Virginia.
> That speaks for itself.

Maybe it speaks, but not in a way that I can hear. Could you explain what it 
says to you?

> But of course, the crunch question is always China. We have no
> reliable figures from inside Mainland China, but that means we have
> to use Census and other figures from Taiwan and Singapore. That
> produces vastly higher figures for those who in a Census claim to be
> Buddhist. This is an honest way to calculate.

The only honest way to calculate, I think, is to admit from the outset that we 
have no idea how many Buddhists there are in China and North Korea. It is no 
more accurate to extrapolate from Singapore and Taiwan into PRC than to 
ignore PRC altogether. Perhaps what would be best would be to take the 
figures we know to be reasonably accurate and then calculate percentages on 
the basis of the world's population minus the population of the PRC.

A few years ago I read a PhD thesis that made the claim that if one counts 
people who belong to a church, then a majority of Americans are Christians. 
No surprise there. If one then takes the number of people who attend church 
regularly (once a week or more), considerably more than half are evangelicals 
or fundamentalists. But the number of people who attend church at least once 
a week is a relatively modest percentage of the US population (around 25% I 
think I recall) and somewhere around 8-10% in Europe. 

Probably the most reliable statistics on religious affiliation and belief 
around the world are likely to be found on the Pew Foundation website.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes