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

[Richard Hayes]

On Friday 02 March 2007 16:17, L.S. Cousins wrote:

> It just that we don't know
> for certain how to translate that into specific figures.

Thank you for saying more carefully what I had said less elegantly. Our 
figures the demographics of many places in the world are quite conjectural. 
To add conjectural figures to figures that are precise yields results that 
are meaningless. But that does not prevent people from throwing meaningless 
figures around for the sake of political posturing.

> Well, if you omit 90% of the world's Buddhists from your figures, . . .

That i begging  the question. The fact is, we simply have no way of knowing 
how many Buddhists there are in the world, so we have no way of knowing 
whether the Buddhists we are omitting make up 10% or 90% of the world's 
Buddhists.   

> How about disallowing figures from any country that doesn't include a
> specific question about religious affiliation in its Census ?

That would rule out Canada, where it is illegal to ask questions about 
religion in the census. I have no idea what the situation is in the United 
States. I have not been here for a census since 1960. But I should hope it is 
illegal to ask questions about religious affiliation, since such questions 
are completely irrelevant to the issue of voting and taxation, which is the 
sole reason for taking a census.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico