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

[Timothy C. Cahill]

> Moreover, many organizations systematically lie about their membership in 
> order to get more funding.

> I am not sure what you mean. I would take the view that we should respect 
> people's answers. Why do you think they are particularly unreliable ?

    First off, thanks to Lance for the earlier message.  On this point 
above I'd guess that Joanna assumes that organizations are made up of 
people, those lying liars who tell lies!  Liars are generally regarded as 
unreliable, except by Republicans, who extol the reliability of liars 
according to Richard, our leader, although I myself am skeptical about 
this.

    In South India many practicing Christians do *not* report their 
Christian identity because they will then lose the government subsidies 
that go along with their former caste status. So the statistic that lists 
Christianity as 2.5% or 3% of India's population is underrepresenting the 
situation. But, as Lance notes, some who use such data seem very willing 
to provide generous estimates of Christians in these situations without 
doing the same for Buddhists in contexts where we can be equally confident 
that their numbers are underreported.

Regarding:

David B. Barrett works at the World Evangelization Research Center

I know nothing about this man, but I'd like to point out that he is the 
editor of the *World Christian Encyclopedia...* published by Oxford 
University Press (1982).  This source is listed by Andrew Wall in his 
chapter on Christianity in *The New Penguin Handbook of Living Religions* 
ed. by J. R. Hinnells (1997, 1998).  I have found the charts that Wall 
provides on pages 85-86 to be useful. The regions listed are Africa, E. 
Asia, Latin America, Europe (p. 85) and N. America, Oceania, South Asia, 
U.S.S.R. (p. 86).  These include numbers (in millions) for the dates 1500, 
1980 and 2000.  They are arranged in a such a way that broad trends are 
emphasized and this helps push the competition of "who's-the-biggest" to 
the background.  Wall's has another chart (citing Barrett's Encyclopedia) 
that lists the 1980 percentage of Christians as 32.8% of the world's 
population, while the 2000 number (projected in 1982, I suppose) is listed 
as 32.3%.  The absolute numbers for these dates are 1,432.7 million and 
2,019.9, respectively.  It's interesting to note in the context of this 
discussion that the chapter on Buddhism in *The New Penguin Handbook of 
Living Religions* contains no comparable presentation of demographics. 
Perhaps this was wise!

best,
Tim Cahill