Talk:Major religious groups

Talk:Major religious groups/Archive 1

Talk:Major religious groups/Archive 2

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)

Adherents.com as source of data

I have strong doubts about the suitability of adherents.com as the source of data for this article. The website lists a variety of sources for calculating the number of adherents but fails to follow a cardinal rule of scholarly publications -- it does not indicate the source for each particular number; it simply provides a laundry list of books and other sources, making it almost impossible to verify any number. In addition, the website does not appear to be refereed or peer-reviewed in any way.

As an example, consider the population figures attributed to branches within Hinduism: Any student of Indian religions will realize that only a small minority of Hindus adhere to exculsive branches, while most Hindus do not consider themselves as belonging to any branch, or in fact know that such "branching" exists. I tried to contact the webmaster for adherents.com requesting the source for these numbers but email delivery fails. There is no way of knowing what is the source of these numbers or how authoritative the source is.

A better solution for this article would be to use numbers from well-respected sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica directly.

Maybe you have had this debate before -- "longstanding consensus" seems to indicates this. In that case, can someone kindly point me to the debate transcript.

ElvenHighKing 01:57, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

See the talk archives at the links above for the history of the subject. I think adherents.com has been the primary source for the numerical estimates in this article for at least roughly two years. If you have some concrete suggestions, then we can discuss them. I have no problem with the basic idea of agreeing to use some other source(s), but we need a way to avoid chaos and stick to a consensus-based and disciplined editing process. Often people just come by here, change a few numbers in whatever way suits their mood, and move on their merry way leaving a mess behind. We already deviate from adherents.com in a few ways (see the notes at the end of the first section of the article for explanations of those differences) and those particular differences have documented reasons and have seemed generally agreeable. I just looked up the Britannica source that you mentioned. However, their site 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. I realize that I have not responded to your discussion of Hindus yet - I will try to look into it. –Wookipedian 02:28, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

I just checked the Hinduism categorization. Each of the categories has well-developed Wikipedia pages, so I think it is difficult to argue that the categories don't exist. In probably all cases where we list sub-categories within some religion, different people would probably have different preferences on how to do that (see the discussions of sub-categories of Christianity, for example). The only way we can say anything at all is to have a clear method for resolving such issues. Thus far, we have primarily relied on adherents.com for that purpose, and I don't see a big problem caused by that reliance in this case. –Wookipedian 02:35, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Ibadi Islam

Shouldn't Ibadi Islam be listed among the Muslim denominations, especially since it is the majority denomination in Oman? It's not reasonable to leave it out of the list, especially when you consider that Druze is included as a Muslim denomination, when it really isn't Muslim at all. In any case, it's certainly much less Muslim than Ibadi. - SadisticSuburbanite 27 March 2007

This site primarily references adherents.com to establish its categorizations and numerical estimates. That site does not appear to provide a category devoted to Ibadi. Perhaps they have been lumped into one of the other categories. How many Ibadi are there? (I didn't see a numerical estimate on the Ibadi page.) Note the discussion below about Christianity sub-categories. Many people would have used different sub-categories for Christianity too, but using one referenced source is the way we deal with avoiding turmoil. –Wookipedian 04:33, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Certainly, we have to had the Kharidjism-Ibadi, because there are between 3.000.000 and 5.000.000 living in Oman and South-Algeria (WIKI-FRANCE). Also, they took an important place in the "Islam History". --83.134.216.132 14:09, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Subdivisions among Hindus

What is the source for population figures for adherents of various Hindu traditions? I am not even sure that Hindus can be categorized along such mutually exclusive lines.

ElvenHighKing 02:56, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

By longstanding consensus, the page generally uses adherents.com as its source for such numbers, and it references that source. In the case of Hinduism, the corresponding table can be found here –Wookipedian 04:02, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Mormon Membership Numbers Are Incorrect

Self-published sources are not viable under Wiki standards. The 12 million world-wide membership number is claimed by the Mormons themselves (ie self-published), but has been proven bogus. The Salt Lake Tribune has released several well documented articles over the past few years showing a world-wide membership around 4 million, and declining. http://www.sltrib.com/search/ci_2886596

The 2000 census in Mexico is a good example. The Mormons claim 1.2 million members, yet the census showed only 205,000. http://www.allamericanpatriots.com/m-news+article+storyid-16344.html

Mexico is just one example, the links show the same pattern of false membership claims across at least a dozen countries. Additionaly, the Salt Lake Tribune aquired through the freedom of information act, the actual statistics provided to the State of Utah under a confidentiality agreement (why would they need one of those?) which showed dramatic differences in membership numbers within the State of Utah, by at least 10%. Recently the Mormon leadership has responded to the Salt Lake Tribune by claiming that the difference in membership was becasue all those people were moving at the time. The Salt Lake Tribune responded by showing that home sales and rental rates could not match the claim.

The Salt Lake Tribune articles show that the Mormons have a habit of falsifying there data. The membership number should be changed to a verifiable source. http://www.sltrib.com/search/ci_2886596. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.107.12.220 (talk • contribs) 18:41, 19 November 2006

All independent sociologists have verified that the numbers are accurately kept according to the disclosed standards that are used. Members are counted according to disclosed and strict criteria. Your references do not at all show what you claim.

1. [3] does not show a decreasing membership, but discusses a decreasing percentage of total population in Utah. Additionally it does not mention world-wide membership at all.
2. [4] the issues of retention and activity in mexico (in fact in all of Central and South America) are well documented and should come as no surprise. There are completely different criteria for the two counts (thus no intelligent person would ever think they would correlate). Additionally, government gathering of religious information is suspect because of possible improper use (for example the US census abandoned gathering information about religions after 1936 - and now Title 13 prohibits the government from requiring answers about religious beliefs or to membership in a religious body).US Code

The common misconception about fastest-growing has not been the case for a few years, but gathered steam from the past when it was the fastest-growing for several years in a row.

Please don't misstate the information going forward. --Trödel 04:36, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

On this site, we use adherents.com as our source. If the neutral, unbiased site lists twelve million, then we use twelve million. The Mormons have 12 million in their records too. I'm sure that if you look, you can find numbers talking about how all religions listed don't actually have this number too. We should continue with precedent of using adherents.com.

I just looked at the articles you listed and found that of the claims you make, only the one about Mexico is correct. Nowhere do you cite a source verifies "Mormons have a habit of falsifying their data;" no where do you cite a statistic supporting a claim that Mormons have been "showing a world-wide membership around 4 million, and declining." The articles simply talk about Utah--not the world

Pahoran513 19:43, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Removed word "Lamaism"

hello, I removed the word "lamaism" from the description of Vajrayana/Tibetan Buddhism, as it is an outdated and inaccurate word to use. Also, it is considered somewhat derogatory by practicing Tibetan Buddhists.

thank you,

K. Jamba — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.96.243.135 (talk • contribs) 04:23, 29 September 2006

Validity?

I think this page is WAY off. The primary source that it sites is a website (adherents.com) which uses sources such as the world christian encyclopedia, etc. You mean to tell me the worlds youngest religion (by a 100 fold) is 33% of the world and the largest of all? Impossible. Islam, Hinduism, and other religions have by far many more followers than Christianity. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.81.219.191 (talk • contribs)

Keep in mind that Islam is younger than Christianity. And if you look at any source, Christianity is the largest religious group in the world. Let us speak no more of this. Pahoran513 23:03, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

saying "any" source isn't enough. if "any" source is looked out, then it should be referenced. "Let us speak no more of this." doesn't fit the wikipedia policy Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. I added the unreferenced and verify needed tags to make it more clear.

But adherents.com and the CIA sources are clearly not reliable sources.What we have here is lots of Christian sources citing each other and mostly dependent on information provided by evangelizing groups. Overall it seems more accurate to say that Buddhism, Christianity and Islam are roughly equal in overall numbers.here We have no means to estimate numbers more accurately than that.SelwynC 20:00, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

also i wanted to add Pastafarianism http://www.venganza.org/ if that's not vandalism.

Tsinoyboi 09:17, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

We already have sources referenced in the article. Pahoran513 was simply pointing out that there is approximately zero dispute between various well-recognized sources about these issues. Pastafarianism is not listed in the sources for this article, and does not appear to have a large population of adherents listed in any reliable source, so it should not be in the article. The article is not about listing every possible religion or variant - the article is about major religions, not all religions. There is another page where listing it would be more appropriate - specifically, the List of religions page, and it is in fact already listed there. It may not really be appropriate to list joke religions there either, but that is something to reach a consensus about on that Talk page, not this one. -Wookipedian 05:00, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Growth Rates

Anyone have any links / stats. on rates of growth / % of change of the world's religious population? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.148.70.70 (talk • contribs) 15:25, 20 December 2005

Religion#Trends_in_adherence--Smkolins 15:56, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

Eastern Orthodox?

What's happened to the Eastern Orthodox? Were they removed from a listing alongside Oriental Orthodox and Assyrians? john k 12:52, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

They seem to have been removed without explanation by 195.229.242.83 in an edit timestamped as 15:35, 1 August 2006. Presumably they would be considered to fall into the catch-all "Oriental Orthodoxy, Assyrians, and Other Christians" subcategory. I hesitate to speculate about why the change was made. Perhaps it was just vandalism. Some of the other edits associated with that IP address appear to have been vandalism, including at least one on the same day (see the user's edit history and discussion page). —Wookipedian 05:15, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

I just made an attempt at reverting that unexplained anon change of 1 August. The change affected the status of Mormons/LDS in a way that may need further consideration. —Wookipedian 05:57, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm not totally convinced that the change was an improvement, but I'll leave it there and see what others think. It does seem desirable to me, considering the diversity of variations within Christianity, that we have some lower-level granularity in the categories. But I really don't know whether what is there is appropriate or not, and I suspect that it has some problems. —Wookipedian 06:09, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Confused numbers in subdivisions within Christianity

Where are the numbers coming from for the adherent count estimates within the subdivisions of Christianity? I don't think they are coming from adherents.com (I looked there and what I found was quite different than what is here). I recently lumped together Protestantism and Restorationism when I discovered that I could not determine who fit into which category. The same faiths seem to be counted in both categories in some places. Now someone has separated these again, which is fine, but where are the numbers coming from and who is in which category? Here is the current content of our article:

• See also the List of Christian denominations by number of members and List of Christian denominations pages.
• Roman Catholicism: 1.1 billion
• Protestantism: 675 million
• Restorationism (including Mormonism): 275 million
• Eastern Orthodoxy: 200 million
• Oriental Orthodoxy, Assyrians, and other Christians: 325 million

Now let's look at a couple of numbers. On the List of Christian denominations by number of members Wikipage, there are only 30 million in the Restorationism category. Where did our additional 245 million come from? We are off by a multiple greater than nine! Similarly, the List of Christian denominations by number of members lists only 500 million in Protestantism, but we seem to have another 175 million of them here. So our extra Restorationists did not come from drawing a different boundary between Restorationists and Protestants (both numbers seem to be too big by a couple of hundred million). –Wookipedian 05:13, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I was wondering the same thing the other day - I think it is more likely that it is 27.5 million and someone just didn't read carefully when they were doing the table. That also jives with the numbers on adherents.com for the groups included in restortionism. --Trödel 13:32, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

When I made that edit, I got my numbers from past editions(?) of the article. And I agree the numbers don't make sense. I was just using numbers that already had made an appearance on wikipedia; under no circumstances would I make up my own numbers. Please, correct it. My issue was with the categories, not the numbers. So please--make this article better. That's all I was trying to do. Pahoran513 22:38, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

But the reason the categories were the way they were was that we have no reliable/referenceable source for numbers to go along with the categories. The categories and the numbers are connected to each other. Rather than having numbers with no cited source, I suggest that we restructure our subcategories within Christianity according to the "Major Denominational Families of Christianity" table found here on Adherents.com, the site which is our primary reference in the corresponding section of the main article. In other words, our divisions will become Catholic, Orthodox/Eastern Orthodox, AICs, Pentacostal, etc. rather than different subcategories that we invent ourselves. We need to be able to cite a source. We cannot have numbers that just pop out of nowhere and just get adjusted upwards and downwards on the whim of every individual Wikiperson. —Wookipedian 23:18, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I like that table. It does seem a bit too jumbled for this article, but the numbers are reliable and such. Let's go ahead and change the article after a few more editors comment. Pahoran513 01:20, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Wookipedian in that we should use the categories, and numbers from the adherents.com page. Verifiability is of utmost importance, and helps defray the criticisms against Wikipedia. Thus we have a reliable source, with that page, and should go with it. If, however, we do find another source, we could, of course, change the categorization, to something that is most acceptable to the editors, but currently we are limited in what sources/categorizations we have. Regards. -- Jeff3000 06:17, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Okay, but should we use all of the list? It would seem to make the article crouded. But I know that this would make disagreements spring up like liberals around Dick Cheney. Still, my concern is there. But hey, what do I know? Let's add the list. The numbers are good and that's what we're worried about. Pahoran513 03:37, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Done. Personally, I think more detail is better. In other categories outside of Christianity, we have groups as small as a half million, so I think it is best to use the whole list for the sake of completeness and providing the most possible information. —Wookipedian 04:25, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

By the way, it is probably also obvious now by looking at the article that I also aligned the divisions of all other listed religions in this section (not just Christians) with what I found at adherents.com. —Wookipedian 20:48, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Wow! That was a lot of work. Thanks Wookipedian for improving this article so drastically. Pahoran513 23:04, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Why is there no listing for Protestantism now? I added the numbers in the Christianity group, and came up with 1.96425 billion, not 2.1 billion like the table says. Where are the other 140 million, and where are the protestants? –— Preceding unsigned comment added by unknown (talk • contribs)

Thre is no listing for Protestants because that is not the way adherents.com performed its corresponding categorization. Several of the listed categories are considered Protestant. Also please read the referenced site regarding trying to make numbers add up perfectly. The intent is to make each number a best estimate rather than to try to force the numbers to conform to mathematical rules. –Wookipedian 03:45, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Mormonism vs. Islam

I've commented out the following sentence of the second paragraph:

For example, Mormons are ordinarily considered Christians, while Muslims are ordinarily not — yet both of them share a common heritage and each of them adds one major prophet and one major text to those that distinguish Christianity from other faiths; and these faiths, in turn, share a common heritage with Judaism as Abrahamic faiths.

This is a very misleading statement. First of all, it's true that LDS and Islam each add one major prophet; but whereas LDS Christians, like other Christians, take Jesus as the Son and as the most important prophet, Muslims view Jesus as a minor figure compared to Mohammed. Second of all, it's true that each adds one major text, but LDS appends the Book of Mormon to the ordinary Christian Bible, whereas Islam substitutes the Koran for the Christian Bible.

I understand the point that is trying to be made here — that it's not always easy to draw the line between two religions — but the example is a bad one, because it's very easy to see that Mormons are fundamentally Christians and that Muslims are fundamentally not. This kind of statement risks offending Mormons, who consider themselves Christians but are often rejected by other Christians; that risk would be understandable if the example served its purpose, but really it's a better example of how to lie using facts, and of how to justify an intentional miscategorization of a religion, than it is of the difficulty of categorizing religions.

Addendum: By the way, I'm neither Christian nor Muslim, so consider myself relatively unbiased in the matter. (I do have some Mormon and some Muslim friends, though. And plenty of non-Mormon Christian friends, for that matter.)

Ruakh 19:11, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Just because Mormonism is used as an example does not mean that we're picking on Mormons. And besides Mormons there are several other religions and categories of religions mentioned as examples in the paragraph. The example shows that it is not always obvious what fits into a category and what does not. I haven't noticed any Mormons or Muslims offended by the example. Obviously there are other issues involved that we are not discussing in detail - the idea is to just give an introduction to the notion that categorization can be difficult and provide some specific examples where obvious difficulties arise. Providing two easy examples like Roman Catholicism and Protestantism defeats the purpose, because most people would consider those to be rather obvious fits within the category of Christianity. The substitute wording that you changed it to is rather poor and does not illustrate the same problem of determining what is a religion versus a subcategory within a religion. Here is what you changed it to: "For example, within each of the main Abramic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) are a number of sub-categories; given two subgroups of one of these religions, say Roman Catholicism and Protestantism (both subgroups of Christianity), some might consider them to be as far apart as Judaism and Islam, and argue that they should be considered separate religions." What is "Abramic"? I also find the phrase "as far apart as Judaism and Islam" to be a unnecessarily restrictive criterion - what we are trying to show is that it is not always easy to form categories. I think it is useful to show some example(s) that illustrate the difficulty of determining whether something fits into a category or not. Muslims hold Christ and the Christian Bible, or at least the Torah, in very high regard, so on the surface they could plausibly be considered Christian (although this is not a typical interpretation, which is why the example was chosen). Mormons have an extra prophet after Christ and have an extra text, so on the surface they could plausibly be considered to fall outside of the typical umbrella category of most Christian faiths (although that is not a typical interpretation either, which is why this example was chosen as well). The idea is to show some examples that would result in what most people would consider miscategorizations in order to show that there is some degree of judgment involved in establishing categories and showing how some people might therefore differ in their categorizations. Providing only examples where everything works out in the obvious conventional way defeats the purpose of the discussion. —Wookipedian 20:00, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

It may also be useful to point out that you did much more than comment out the one sentence that you quoted. You also extensively changed much of the rest of the paragraph. —Wookipedian 20:12, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Based in part on the above feedback, Ruakh has changed the paragraph again. I am less hostile to the new version and I am trying to step back and not be too defensive of the previous text. However, I have a problem with the following new sentence: "Conversely, Protestantism and Roman Catholicism are commonly both considered variants of Christianity, but members of each variant have often viewed the other as non-Christian, and ..." That sentence asserts a fact, namely that some substantial number of Protestants have said that Roman Catholicism is not a Christian faith and vice versa. This may be true, but I am not aware of it, and such a statement of fact should be supported with a citation to back it up. Unless one is provided, that needs to be changed. —Wookipedian 21:38, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

You're right that a citation needs to be provided eventually (lest we run afoul of WP:OR), but the general idea that many Protestants don't consider Catholics Christian is easily confirmed by googling "Catholics and Christians" (40,000 hits) and "Christians and Catholics" (34,000 hits). (The reverse is less true, though: "Protestants and Christians" gets only 100 hits, and while "Christians and Protestants" gets 24,800 hits, the first few pages of results suggest that only about half of these are implying that Protestants aren't Christians, the other half being in phrases like "{Orthodox Christians} and Protestants", "Christians, and {Protestants in particular}", etc. That said, I think the English-speaking world is more heavily Protestant, which might have something to do with it; I notice that Googling for other-language equivalents of "Christians and Protestants" and "Protestants and Christians" also pulls up hits, with a higher proportion of hits implying that Protestants aren't Christian.) Ruakh 22:14, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

The paragraph was further edited by Trödel and the statements made there seem sufficiently obvious now to not require citation. I think I'm basically OK with the current version. (However, its use of a semicolon may be a little hard for some people to follow.) —Wookipedian 05:00, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Have Islam 1,3 billion or 1,5 billion followers ?

It says 1,3 here, but in another page here it says close to 1,5 billion

[5]

and in another place here I remember reading that the figure is 1,4 billion [6] and yeat another place that it is somewhere between 1,4 and 1,5 —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 85.167.190.29 (talk • contribs) .

This page uses adherents.com for all its sources. -- Jeff3000 00:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Honey, but the site is not updated! The information should be updated. SeMiTiC (This remark attributed to SeMiTiC was added by 58.109.114.88 on 25 March 2007)

Personally I doubt the quantity of Islam adherents has changed dramatically in the (less than two years) time since the referenced site was updated. Percentage-wise, the estimates are likely to be even more volatile and rough for other less major religions. In any case, it is most important that we have a reasonably consistent and agreed consensus-based way to establish what is said in this article. Otherwise, everyone just picks their own individual favorite reference (or no reference at all) for their own favorite estimation, and we have a completely useless unobjective, and constantly changing battle of numbers. For a long time now, the consensus has been to use Adherents.com, and I see no constructive suggestion of a better alternative approach that makes sense. –Wookipedian 04:26, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Scientology

Is Scientology an actual, recognized religion? On the surface it seems more of a cult or marketing scheme. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.4.70.65 (talk) 18:47, 18 December 2006 (UTC).

The section of the page that you are referring to uses adherents.com as its source, and it references that source. –Wookipedian 03:35, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

This is no argument surely? Scientology has not been awarded the status of religion in many countries (UK, Germany etc.). They are recognised as a cult, and as such, shouldn't be on the Religion page. BroxiRangersFan 18:34, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, a reasonably-good working definition of the word "cult" is "a religion that the person who is doing the talking doesn't like". We arean't here to decide whose religions we approve of and don't approve of. We are just here to document what exists. If you want to start another page called "religions approved by governments of countries", please go ahead. But this is not that page. —Wookipedian 00:58, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Jewish Denominations

Are there really more Conservative Jews than Reform? I can't find anything about it in the source. And I have heard that the Conservative population is getting smaller. Can someone find a reliable source for Jewish denomination information? --Max 23:24, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

See this table at the referenced source site. I added a link to it in the article. It seems to match the numbers in the article. –Wookipedian 03:50, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

The Christianity/Islam map could use a better color scheme

The map with relative concentrations of Islam/Christianity has a very confusing color scheme (at least to my eyes). The two extremes are both bright colors while the transitional colors seem to all be more reddish giving the illusion that territories on the 50/50 line are actually more Christian than majority Christian countries. Could you please change it to a more intuitive color scheme? The Dharmic/Abrahamic scheme for example is very accessible.--Karkaron 09:11, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Humanism as a subset of Islam

Obviously it's merely a typo, but the way the page is set up makes Humanism appear to be a subset of Islam. I haven't done anything about it, since I'm afraid of messing up the article by fixing this myself. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by KriskoDisko (talk • contribs) 18:12, 16 February 2007 (UTC).

There was a change made by Chsbcgs (on the same day as your comment) that caused that. It appears to have been vandalism, and it was reverted after about 9 hours by Jeff3000. –Wookipedian 04:52, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Masonry's creation of cults

i know we have alot of left handed admins.. but really. it's time we just called a spade a spade and lumped all the stupid cults that masonry has created together. mormons, jehovas witnesses, christian science, theosophy, scientology, wicca.. moonies (i dont have direct proof on the moonies as yet, but.. that cant be hard to find)

it's just sicking having to explain to everyone the issues seperately. it's all just a part of the same group - you cant create a big cult without some major funding.

i could go as far to tie it to a universalist one world religion movement - or point to the hundreds, if not thousands of pastors/priests/ministers that are masons in 'Christian' churches.. when by Christain scriptures, they cannot JOIN masonry. the 'universalist/unity/etc' churches seem to have the highest number of mason leadership.

anyone wanna work with it? info is easy enough to find. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.184.3.60 (talk) 06:58, 17 February 2007 (UTC).

The section of the page that you seem to be referring to uses adherents.com as its source, and it references that source. –Wookipedian 03:53, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Sikhism as the youngest of the top 5

"Youngest of the top 5 with most located in Punjab region of parts of India and Pakistan."

However, Sikhism is the 6th on the list, so it couldn't possibly be in the top 5 :)

It's because someone has just inserted Confucianism. I doubt the source that list if from (CSM) included that as an organized religion. 87.194.38.9 18:44, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Actually, the CSM did apparently list Confusianism, according to this. I just removed the self-contradictory claim of being the youngest of the top 5. –Wookipedian 04:46, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Well it also listed it as having 5.3 million followers.... 87.194.38.9 14:17, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Oops. It looks like you're right about that. The reference page has different numbers of adherents than what this page does. We should probably copy the numbers from the reference. This would restore Sikhism to the top 5. It looks like the numbers here were copied from Adherents.com. But if the source we're citing in that section is the CSM, we should use the numbers reported from the CSM too. —Wookipedian 01:03, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Figures

I think that it is important for the figures exposed in this article to be the same as those exposed in List of Christian denominations by number of members. Now they are different. Can someone solve this problem? --Checco 19:47, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

By longstanding consensus, the page uses adherents.com as its source for such numbers, and it references that source. By Wikipedia policy, other Wikipedia pages do not carry the authority of being considered source material. –Wookipedian 03:56, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Ok, but these two pages need to be coordinated. --Checco 14:16, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

The other article is already tagged for not citing the sources for its numbers. It's perhaps not a big problem to have differences between what different articles say when they cite different sources. But when you have an article that doesn't even cite its sources at all, that's a problem of its own. I suggest taking that problem to the other page as an action item. (But I don't see a problem here on this page.) –Wookipedian 04:19, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

AD/CE

I don't suppose there's any chance that we could settle on CE/BCE for this particular article? I'm guessing this is a huge can of worms (as I know it is for Wikipedia as a whole), but just in case it isn't... —Ashley Y 08:14, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for bringing it up here instead of just editing it into the article. It's been discussed several times before. See the discussion archives. I suggest not waking it back up again. –Wookipedian 17:15, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

WIkipedia Should settle on a standard that everyone can agree on, if their is such a thing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wake266 (talk • contribs) 23:19, 23 April 2007

Jeff3000 revisions

Jeff3000, interesting comment in your last edit.

rvt back further to remove vandalism, and match the cited data

You reverted several people's edits calling it "vandalism." Setting aside the obnoxious term, you should at least provide more explanation regarding your reversion here. Can you clarify the "cited data" you are referring to? --Mcorazao 02:56, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

The article uses adherents.com as the source for the statistics, and you added statistics that not only were not cited by any source, but clearly did not match the source of all the other statistics on this page. Please read all the above comments regarding the use of adherents.com as the source of statistics for this page. Furthermore one of the anonymous editors changed the date of the one of the groups, that's why I had to revert back more than one edit to fix it. Please assume good faith, it is one of core pillars of the talk page discussions. -- Jeff3000 03:17, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

While we're on the subject of edits made by Jeff3000, I would like to thank Jeff3000 for those edits, and in particular for his diligent help in keeping the page reasonably coherent and consistent with its cited sources. His editing has been a great service to this article. —Wookipedian 17:50, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

Map of world religions disputed

Map showing the prevailing religion of each country.

There has been discussion about the suitability of this map. The debate has to do with the factual accuracy of the map. One point of view is that the maping of religions within state boundaries is misleading. Another view is that the map is informative in that it shows the primary religion of each state.

Join this debate here. Sunray 19:25, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

The predominant religion in Vietnam is Mahayana Buddhism!

The map of World religions disputed was wrong when in Vietnam and Japan; Mahayana Buddhism and Roman Catholicism is equal===>idiot!

85-88% Vietnamese people is Mahayana Buddhist or more exact is "triple religion" is Buddhism mainly and Taoism with Confucianism!Only over 6,5% of Vietnam's population is Roman Catholics!

China,North Korea are also like Vietnam!

95-96% Japanese people is Mahayana Buddhist with Sinto.Less than 1% is Christian!

The coloration for Japan seems to be light yellow (Mahayana Buddhism) striped with Grey ("Other;" in this case Shinto). This may be a little misleading, since the country isn't "split" so much as most Japanese practice a syncretic mixture of the two, their lifestyles being affected by traditions, events, holidays etc. from both. Still, I think striped is probably the best way to show it on the map. As far as I can tell, it doesn't show any Christian presence in Japan. - June 9, 2007

Leading image

Regarding the article's leading image labeled, Major religious groups (percentage of world population):

(1) The image does not give a percentage for Other. It looks to be near 3%.

(2) The image starts by showing the percentages clockwise, so the final order should be as per the article: Chinese traditional, Buddhism, Primal indigenous, Sikhism (0.36%) Judaism (0.22%) and the final grab-bag of Other, with its percentage.

--Wfaxon 18:23, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Chinese Universists?

in the featured pie graph it mentions "chinese universists" as a major world religion. What is this exactly? I looked it up but it just gave me the article for Nigeria. Just curious really.

–

Apparently the term refers to Chinese folk religion. Shouldn't the graph be edited to avoid confusion with the Universist movement ? Ed Mercer 20:49, 1 July 2007 (UTC)