Talk:Major religious groups/Archive 2

message: This is concerning the number of followers of Hinduism. For further information, look at the talk page of the article on it.--GatesPlusPlus 14:54, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: For the sake of consistency and because it is well-sourced, this article uses the Adherents.com population.  Adherents has this info as well as the other references on their page supporting the 900 million number, they state that a range of 850 million to 1 billion is common in estimates.  Again, having a single source for these numbers in that chart seems worthwhile.  --Goodoldpolonius2 20:12, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hinduism issue 

message: On wikipedia itself, it says Falun Gong claims 70 million, and the Chinese officials claim 10 million. How about mentioning this?
:The article now mentions a Falun Gong estimate of 100 million (from a Falun Gong web site, and also found on the Wiki article). —Wookipedian 07:39, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Falun Gong 

message: Juche is said to have 19 million adherents. I guess this is the population of North Korea? --Palnatoke 06:36, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There's actually been a good bit of writing which considers national ideologies of this sort as religious systems.  However, I would certainly take issue with putting the number as equal to that of the population of North Korea. Osgoodelawyer 00:27, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

text: A further thought: Juche is considered secular by its followers and seems to have no gods or attainments of ultimate enlightnement or such doctrines.  It seems to be more of a political ideology than a religion (although one must admit that it may be inherently difficult to disentangle such concepts from each other in a really disciplined fashion).  So perhaps Juche should just be lumped into the catch-all non-religious category along with atheism, agnosticism, humanism, etc.? —Wookipedian 06:17, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. (There was no objection to the suggestion after waiting several days.) —Wookipedian 00:07, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Juche 

message: This page is really a cool page. I was like 'woah' when I read it. 
I do question some of the numbers though. Just because there are x million people in N Korea doesnt mean they all follow the state religion.
And I wonder how you got the numbers for 1 billion Atheism vs 300 milion Traditional Chinese religion? Do the 1 billion in China really eschew all religion and adopt the communist atheism as their own true feelings? A difficult question im sure but one worthy of mention in my opinion. 
Thank you for this page, keep up the good work.
:Thanks for your support!
:To answer your question, follow this link given in the article from Adherents.com that explains methodology.  For example, on China: "Estimates for atheism alone (as a primary religious preference) range from 200 to 240 million. But these come primarily from China and former Soviet Union nations (especially Russia). Prior to Communist takeovers of these regions and government attempts to eradicate religion, both places had very high levels of affiliation with organized religions (especially Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Taoism), as well as high levels of participation in and belief in traditional local traditions such as shamanism, ancestor ceremonies, spiritism, etc. Since the fall of Communism in former Soviet nations and the relaxation of anti-religious policies in China, observed religious affiliation and activity has increased dramatically, especially in Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam. "  You can find the rest of the data on the stats from that link too...
:--Goodoldpolonius2 14:03, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Great work 

message: Christianity, Islam, Judaisim, and Bahi'ism are all just sects of Abrahamanisim. Also, Buddisim, Shintoism, Taoisim, and Confucianism are often worshipped together (shinto + buddah = Japanese religion) (buddah + tao + confucuian = many easern Asians).
Superstud
===>What? "Abrahamanisim" is not a definable religion, but a vague (almost to the point of meaningless) category for several clearly distinct religions that are incompatible with one another. The variety of Eastern religions are certainly syncretized, particularly in China and Japan, but that doesn't mean they are somehow not distinct. They all have different histories, worldviews, adherents, and make specific, mutually exclusive claims about the world. For that matter, since Buddhism is a religious offspring of Hinduism (as are Jainism and Sikhism), by your reasoning, they are all one large religion also. Furthermore, Sikhism was founded as a syncretistic faith between Hinduism and Islam, so are both of those huge religious traditions really the same mega-religion? Of course not. Justin (koavf) July 9, 2005 17:37 (UTC)
The article now mentions such high-level families of religion (Abrahamic religion and Dharmic religion) in two places — the 2nd paragraph of the introduction, and one of the maps of world religious prevalence. I think that is sufficient to deal with this issue.  —Wookipedian 21:21, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Abrahamanisim? 

message: I know it's hard to get accurate numbers for the followers of an particlaur religion, but the figure given for Judaism looks high.  The Jewish population article estimated 12-14 million Jewish people in the world, not all of whom will actually follow the faith.  Hard to see how Judaism can have 15 million adherents at the current time.  What is this figure based on?  Indisciplined 17:20, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The cited source actually estimated only 14 million, and I have therefore adjusted the number.  But really, these estimates should be considered rough.  I would imagine that the tolerance range on most of the numbers is at least about 25%.  —Wookipedian 16:03, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Judaism

message: I have added Mormonism under major branches of Christianity. My reasons follow: they are a major American (United States) contribution to Christianity, have somewhat distinct theology from the rest of Christianity but share the basic characteristics of that religion (i.e. a belief in Jesus as the Messiah), but aren't Protestant. These reasons qualify Mormonism as a seperate branch of Christianity distinct enough to merit inclusion without being under the "others" section. Please, if you have any problems with this at all, contact me here or on my talk page and I'm sure we can work through our disagreements. --Pahoran513 23:00, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think Mormons are sufficiently distinct, notably in having their own additional books of scripture, to qualify as distinct from Protestantism in a way that the others do not. Mormonism's origins, also, do not permit any easy identification of a parent among the Protestant churches, in the way that one can more easily for the Amish, or the 7th Day Adventists.  Better comparisons would be to Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Science. john k 12:52, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

text: Well, it starts to get problematic when you do it based on self-definition, alone.  Then you start to get issues with fundamentalist christians who think of themselves only as "Christian," and so forth, despite having orthodox protestant views on theology.  Mormonism does seem sufficiently distinct, to me, to not count as within Protestantism, though. john k 18:08, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Mormons

message: listen Im a Technologysist and I feel the new religion of Technolgysism is being left out. we propably have like not even 0.10% but we are a religion from henderson, colorado. - DV
: Then write wiki articles about it, find some verifiable/citable research on numbers, and post it here. :)  You are an editor too, DV. --Christian Edward Gruber 02:04, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Technologysism

message: Humanism is mentioned twice: under Non-religious and then later again.--Ortho 04:47, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Not any more.  I just fixed that.  (Of course the next edit might "unfix" it.) —Wookipedian 06:53, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Humanism 

message: The assertion that nearly one third of Chinese people are religious is, frankly, bizarre.  The adherents.com figure comes from the World Christian Encyclopedia.  I don't know how what their methods (or their biases) are, but if nothing else the number seems to depend on a very loose definition of religiousness.  I could keep talking, but would have nothing verifiable to say.  If the World Christian Encyclopedia is our only source, then I suppose we are stuck with their definition, but it seems very misleading. Pissant 01:31, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  China 

message: On what basis is Sikhism the 5th largest religion?  Using the link behind the "5th largest number" link Christianity, Islam, Hindu, Budism, Chinese traditional are the biggest 5 with Primal Indigenous also larger.  I would concede that Primal Indigenous is a catch all and so 6th largest might stand.  I understand that consistency and interpretation of numbers is difficult but the credibilty of this article (especially on the front page) is badly undermined when the number on the front page is at odds with the page it links to and claims as its source. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rio Alastair (talk • contribs) 
:I don't understand your question. Eliminating the vague non-organized religion categories of Chinese traditional, primal indigenous, and African traditional/diasporic (and the non-religious/atheist/agnostic/secular/whatever) leaves us with four that are bigger than Sikhism (specifically, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism), making Sikhism the 5th largest reasonably-coherent/organized religion.  So what is the problem? —Wookipedian 04:00, 23 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Consistency

message: Humanism is an organised belief system (the wider meaning of religion), with the IHEU as the world body, the Amsterdam Declaration as its official statement of principles, and the Happy Human as a world recognised symbol of Humanism.
Thus, the second half of the article is unduly biased towards the theistic religions, especially when one considers that the non-theistic believers (including Humanists) rank 3rd in the world by numbers - as per the first half of the article (which is not so biased). --Couttsie 04:45, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: True that Humanism is a belief system which is followed by a lot of people, but this page is about what is generally viewed as religion.  My understanding is that if you can find a reference that states that Humanism fits under the term "Major World Religion" then you can bring about the POV tag and argue that Humanism should be included, but as the page currently stands it reflects the generally accepted view of the term "Major World Religion". -- Jeff3000 04:57, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This article is Major World Religions, and the second half of the article provides a list of classic views of major world religions, all of which are sourced and cited.  Please provide a source giving humanism as a "classical" major world religion, otherwise the POV tag is not justified. --Goodoldpolonius2 06:28, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Other Belief Systems

message: I've added a reference to Religious_pluralism because I think relationships between the world religions are a subject that many people who come to this page are looking for. By the way, the article currently named "Religious pluralism" needs a lot of improvement, so hey guys, you who know about religions, come on over and write what you know about the relationships between them.--Robin.rueth 15:15, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Relationships between World Religions 

message: Quite a few people seem to have problems with the data from adherents.com, and i don't feel right using a website as a primary source. Would it be possible to get a second, more-trusted source for the population data? -℘yrop (talk) 21:23, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure, but it might help by first stating what these problems are. --Goodoldpolonius2 00:11, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Read the rest of this talk page. -℘yrop (talk) 23:28, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I actually don't see a lot of debate over the value of Adherents on this page - I see some people objecting to a number or two, and then not following up with other data.  The good thing about Adherents.com is that they give sources for each number, and they have a rather large database, they don't survey themselves, so the methodology shouldn't be an issue. No information source is perfect, of course, perhaps you could suggest other sources, then? --Goodoldpolonius2 23:55, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

text: Cool, upload away.  As long as you did the pie chart yourself, and credit the data to adherents, it shouldn't be an issue. --Goodoldpolonius2 22:25, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I waited to see if anyone else wanted to comment and then created two image pages -- one for a small version to go into the Major_world_religions page - [], and a larger version which it can link to - []. Goodoldpolonius2, please feel free to insert it into Major_world_religions page. I'll wait a day or two before I do it myself. As this is the first time I've created Image pages I made lots of syntax errors. Perhaps an administrator can delete the edits from the revision history pages. -- Bookish 15:10, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  adherents.com as a source. 

message: Can someone please explain to me what are the characteristics of this category?  Is this what they call themselves?  Or if someone else groups them thusly, who does so, and what are the diagnostic traits?  Otherwise, why should these not be counted as "other"? Timothy Usher 07:16, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The article is relying on the adherents.com source for establishing this category, its characteristics, and its estimated number of adherents.  Some explanation of the category can be found on the adherents.com site. See the introduction section on the various difficulties of determining what categorizations to consider.  Relying primarily on a few external sources prevents a lot of controversy and agonizing here, as determining exactly how to categorize things and how many people to estimate belonging in each category would be very difficult in the absence of some such method.  —Wookipedian 19:17, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Primal indigenous religion, Nature religion

message: From the looks of the history of this article, I'm probably jumping right into an on-going edit war, but this article really needs consistency in its era notations. All religions listed are currently followed by BCE/CE terminology except for Christianity and Islam, which both say AD. I also noticed that they have been going back and forth between AD and CE through constant reverts. Have editors of this page ever come to any sort of agreement on these terms? Although there is not officially a policy favoring one era notation over another, the guidelines do call for consistency within articles. As the majority currently being used in this article is BCE/CE, it seems as though the others should be changed (and kept) to reflect this. romarin[talk to her ] 21:00, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: According to this edit comparison, editor 68.39.193.157 was the sole editor to contribute any dating references. In his edit he used "AD" for years after 1 and "BCE" for dates prior to 1. In a case like this I suggest we either vote among users as to what era notation is to be used to continue consistency, or we simply eradicate any reference to the years of the religion's formation. It may also be possible to keep the inconsistent era notations as is, due to the fact that it was only one editor who initiated the conflicting notations. In either case, it is malappropriate to either convert "AD" to "CE" or convert "BCE" to "BC" without further community discussion — CRAZY`(IN)`SANE 21:44, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I suggest getting rid of the dates completely, I don't think they quite fit in the list.  They have been added relatively recently. If we stay with the dates, I think we should stay with BC/AD, the CE/BCE notation is not understood by everyone.  -- Jeff3000 00:23, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: On the contrary, there is nothing complicated about BCE/CE; I'm sure people understand them just fine. But I agree that the dates are pretty much unnecessary. Anyway, I'm sure they are already part of each religion's main article. Shall we remove them then? Any opposition? romarin[talk to her ] 01:18, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: When it comes to which era notation should be used I agree with Jeff3000, however I also agree with both he and Romarin in the assertion that the dates should simply be eradicated, and that's what we should immediately accomplish. It is already obvious that a consensus will probably not be reached anytime soon, therefore removing these dates (that were added by an anonymous IP in the first place) would be an easier option. If someone re-adds the dates with a consistent era sometime in the future, they can stay unless there is disagreement. — CRAZY`(IN)`SANE 01:54, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well hey, if we're going to remove them we should at least be consistent and not let them back in (unless there is magically a new-found consensus as to which ones should be used, which I don't think any of us see happening any time soon). Setting the stage for someone to re-add them in the future (even consistently) might be dangerous. romarin[talk to her ] 02:13, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

text: Why shouldn't dates be there? It's informative, and useful to see them alongside each other for comparison rather than having to go to individual articles. I mean, I don't really care either way, but I'm curious as to the reason why potentially useful information should be removed (that we can't decide on date format is not a very good reason!) Mdwh 02:35, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: —(In response to Romarin's latest comment, also addresses Mdwh's concerns)—Well this is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, therefore we should always encourage users and IPs alike to make any and all edits they find productive. Since the user who originally implanted these dates was contradictive in his notations, we are probably justified in simply removing the dates altogether. If someone (not involved in this discussion) re-adds dates that are consistent (i.e. AD and BC), we aren't justified in simply removing the dates but we would certainly have a vote on which notation is appropriate, since the original anonymous user responsible for first introducing dates into this article never asserted that. — CRAZY`(IN)`SANE 02:38, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

text: Yes, I'm content with the current AD/BC/BCE/CE compilation, and until someone rejects the compromise I don't think there's any need for a vote toward, or usage of, any one notation. — CRAZY`(IN)`SANE 21:42, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Era notation

message: Substituted at 21:19, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment