[Buddha-l] Buddhism,the second largest religion in the world

[Richard Hayes]

Joanna Kirkpatrick writes:

>Speaking an an anthropologist, I agree with what Vicente has said here.
>The "counting: system is quite flawed.
>
Yes, the counting methods on the Vipassana Foundation website are 
flawed, or at least rest on questionable assumptions. There is another 
website with quite different statistics. 
http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html claims that the 
total number of Buddhists in the
world is around 376,000,000 (about 6% of the world's population).  For 
the sake of comparison, the total number of Christians is estimated to 
be 2,100,000,000 (33% of the world's population), Muslims 1,300,000 
(21%), Hindus 900,000,000 (14%), and Jews 14,000,000 (0.21%). The number 
of people claiming to have no religion or to be
atheists comes to about 16% of the world's population. I have no idea 
what assumptions are being made here, but the figures are close to those 
published in a United Nations source a few years ago.

Richard