May 15, 2007

A religion (according to some writers)is a set of beliefs and practices generally held by a community, involving adherence to codified beliefs and rituals and study of ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal faith and mystic experience.Many Muslims (and some non-Muslim) observers claim that there are more practicing Muslims than practicing Christians in the world. We has no reason to dispute this. It seems likely, but we would point out that there are different opinions on the matter, and a Muslim may define “practicing” differently than a Christian….

Other sources quoted in this article put the percentages of various countries’ populations who rank Religion (any denomination) as “Very Important” at small fractions of those used to compile the table below[16]]. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Chinese folk religion and Buddhism are the largest world religions today. Approximately 69-78% of humanity adheres to one of these five religions[citation needed]. Christianity is the religion with the largest number of adherents, followed by Islam, Hinduism, Chinese folk religion and Buddhism respectively. However, the third-largest “group” of approximately 1 billion people do not adhere to religious approaches. Their irreligious approaches include Humanism, Atheism, Rationalism, and Agnosticism. These figures are necessarily approximate: note that the figures in the following table total nearly 7 billion people, yet the world population was only 6.4 billion (2005),[17] and a person can claim adherency to more than one religion[citation needed].

  1. Christianity 2.1 billion (see below)
  2. Islam 1.3 billion (see below)
  3. Non-Adherent (Secular/Atheist/Irreligious/Agnostic/Nontheist) 1.1 billion
  4. Hinduism 900 million (see below)
  5. Chinese folk religion 394 million (see below)
  6. Buddhism 376 million
  7. Primal indigenous (“Pagan“) 300 million
  8. African traditional and diasporic 100 million
  9. Sikhism 23 million
  10. Juche 19 million
  11. Spiritism 15 million
  12. Judaism 14 million
  13. Bahá’í Faith 7 million
  14. Jehovah’s Witnesses 6.5 million
  15. Jainism 4.2 million
  16. Shinto 4 million (see below)
  17. Cao Dai 4 million
  18. Zoroastrianism 2.6 million
  19. Tenrikyo 2 million
  20. Neo-Paganism 1 million
  21. Unitarian Universalism 800,000
  22. Rastafari movement 600,000