I am surprised it is as high as that. Is that for a particular country?
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I am currently finding dozens of figures, all of them suggesting numbers nowhere near 84% of anything so I’m fascinated to find out exactly what 84% are. I’d bet it’s 84% of people have been in a church, or 84% of people think the 10% of British people who say they are ‘deeply religious’ should not be locked up in the Tower of London or something, or maybe even 84% of Britain’s think there is some kind of extraterrestrial almighty, I could just about believe that, but from the stats I’ve just been pouring over there’s no way 84% could be anything substantial. 84% may even say they were Christian I guess as most of us don’t formally label ourselves atheist but actually don’t really believe, but there’s nothing I’ve seen with anything like that number. Very interesting…
This here maybe?
You clearly don’t know about our education system!
We don’t have RE, it does not exist as a school subject in state schools. We are a secular republic, there is separation of church and state, religions whatever they are can be practised in private, and if people want to indulge in superstition they do it out of public life.
It does rather look as if Gavin Williamson got the basic facts wrong (true to Tory type) …
I was thinking rather of the UK system, given the nature of this discussion - though I believe France now teaches (as - I think, reasonably - it should, because it’s important to understand why people behave like they do) a type of comparative religion as part of other courses.
I do think it’s amusing that France, as a secular State, should be so much an outlier in this (I hadn’t anticipated such a high percentage of faith).
Though, of course - unless you believe the existence of a Higher Being is provable/disprovable in some way - atheism is just as much a faith position as is Islam.
Sunday’s coming!
This research is not reliable Kirstea - it is funded by the Templeton Foundation - a notorious extremist christian organisation, closely linked with the extreme right-wing - Trump-supporting - Cato Institute, and is a major funder of climate change denial and evolution denial (so-called ‘intelligent design’). The negative impacts of its science funding are explored a bit in Jim Baggott’s excellent book on ‘fairytale physics’ Farewell to Reality.
But I think all such surveys are unreliable in principle. In many countries and contexts it is socially unacceptable to say you believe in anything other than the official or community religion. In almost all contexts, people tend to tick the box that officially applies to them - so for example active christianity in the UK, measured objectively through regular church attendance etc, is tiny - 1 or 2% - but surveys come up with higher figures because people tick the ‘christian’ box for all sorts of reasons, such as the fact that they were christened.
The UK Humanist Association has explored all this in some detail, as well as the fact that it is extremely difficult to frame a question that is not leading (a long standing criticism of the UK census, which it is known has always over-estimated religious belief). See
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Oh, I completely appreciate that @Geof_Cox. If it was in anyway reliable I would have been able to find that 84% figure all over the internet obviously, I was just desperately trying to find out where that figure may have come from. I expected @Porridge may have let us know the source given they used it.
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Religion is mentioned in history and philosophy. We don’t go into it as a faith but as a factor in historical events and as a system of belief to be examined. But that is it.
I think you forgot ‘and any other religion’.
In many parts immigrants make up the majority. Well tell me Tim where you get that fact from. The Census would tend to disagree but it’s the sort of fact much promulgated by the Far Right. List of English districts by ethnicity - Wikipedia
London has many boroughs where the majority of the population are not ‘white’ and several towns/cities have also now flipped over from that Wiki link which is 10 years old, this change in the ethnicity demographic will continue in more parts of the UK over the coming decades.
Sorry, I went to bed.
I’m not going to die in a ditch over the percentages, which are in any case hardly the point, but I seem to have erred in thinking it was fairly common knowledge that people holding the atheist worldview are vastly outnumbered by people of some sort of faith.
My point was that something so important to so many people is a topic worthy of study and, indeed, that it’s far better to try to understand people than not to!
I would have thought it was closer to 50/50 - a survey here of SF would be interesting.
To try the phrase the question correctly could be tricky… Something along the lines of “Do you believe in some form of a god or multiple gods?”
Mat, here on SF - in the West in general, and probably France in particular - I would guess there are more atheists than believers.
Good example of the irrationalism of religion.
Believing something because it can’t be disproved is not logically equivalent to not believing something that can’t be proved. If it were, all rational people would still believe there are fairies at the bottom of their gardens.
But there is proof plentiful that religions in general have it all wrong. For a start they all say different things. Some say there is one god, some many gods, and some, such as zen budhism, that there are no gods at all. But I’ve had this discussion with religious people before - they have no answer without resorting to the kind of sleight-of-hand logic exhibited above.
And faith is surely the most pernicious idea of all: it makes a virtue of believing in something despite reason or evidence. Here, if you look hard enough, you will find the roots of violent religious extremism: my sanction is from god; no human reason, or feeling, or restraint of common decency will stop me doing what I in faith do for my god.
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Well we’ll just have to see won’t we. London is not the Former United Kingdom nor is Leicester or Bradford. Your reference to flipping is nothing more than supposition on your part.
I’m truly shocked by your posts here Timothy - don’t you realise you’re slipping back and forth between two very different things: ‘immigrants’ and ‘non-white’ people - this is another sleight-of-hand by which the Daily Mail etc create the illusion that there are far more of both immigrants and black people in the UK than there actually are.
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If you go down to a small enough scale - a few streets, say - I’ve no doubt you will find ‘places’ in the UK that meet almost any categorisation of people - but it’s meaningless.
Moreover, it is a deception, because by ‘places’ we usually mean towns and cities - so what is being perpetrated is the insidious lie that ‘white British’ people are now a minority in some towns or cities.
Tim does like to play Agent Provocateur at time s
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So do I - but not on issues as volatile as racism.
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