User:LBird BASc/sandbox/ATK/Seminar6/Evidence/Evidence in Christianity

Religions statistics

Statistics divide population into groups of which religion they belong to. Thus, there is a plethora of data of each country's, region's or continent's religiousness. And the first most popular that has the biggest amount of believers is Christianity (34% of population), then goes Islam with 1.8 billion followers (or 24.1%) and in the third place people do not consider themselves to be religious, so they are atheists (16%). However, the statistics that consider people to be part of some religion often are arguable.

Christianity statistics

Only analyzing the statistics of Christianity in Europe (which is considered to be a quarter of all Christian community) we face controversies of who is considered to be a christian. For instance, people who were baptized in the childhood by their parents choice and afterwards had never been in a church in some countries are statistically considered to belong to Christian community. This is an issue of interpretation, because usually data does not show if ones are practicing their religion, how often do they go to church, do they follow the main principles or have a basic knowledge about their belief. Therefore, numbers can even be influenced by how someone is questioned. As an example The Humanist Society of Scotland made a poll where they asked people in Scotland ‘What religion, religious denomination or body do you belong to?’. 42% of adults responded ‘None’. However to the question ‘Are you religious?’ 56% of the same sample answered ‘No’. This is not the only example of inconvenience just by forming a question. In a survey conducted in England and Wales by YouGov in 2011, citizens were asked ‘What is your religion?’, 61% of surveyed people responded to be religious (53.48% to be Christians), meanwhile while two fifths of surveyed people's answer was ‘No religion’. The following question was again ‘Are you religious?’, but this time only 29% responded that they were. Focusing on Christians in this survey half of the people did not believe that Jesus Christ was a real human. Also, from the same surveyed people 63% had not been in a church in the past year. Therefore, the statistics that show how people are divided into different religious groups could be very misleading and should be taken with a grain of salt.