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May 1, 2012 • 3:51 pm
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Sri Lanka is mostly Buddhist not mostly Hindu. Minor quibble.
The map shows Papua New Guinea as mostly Muslim, except for a swath In the center. Not true – even the western part of the island (Irian Jaya) is not majority Muslim, though it is a part of Indonesia.
Worse, it appears to depict all of the pacific islands in green when in fact they are overwhelmingly Christian (lt blue). Is this a sign of sloppiness in the data, or just laziness when it comes to small, insignificant places?
Most of Polynesia would be classified as Protestant, except Tahiti and New Caledonia.
Colouring the whole of Australia with anything is a bit silly (and I’m sure they didn’t intend Antrarctica to be Jewish) but I’d be more more inclined to colour the outback tribal, or tribal and christian.
In New Zealand “in the 2006 Census, just over 2 million people, or 55.6 percent of those answering the religious affiliation question, affiliated with a Christian religion.”* Half a million identified as Catholic, so “mostly Protestant” is not true.
“The number and proportion of people indicating that they had no religion continued to increase in the 2006 Census. In 2006, 1,297,104 people (34.7 percent) stated that they had no religion, compared with 1,028,052 people (29.6 percent) in the 2001 Census.”*
*Statistics New Zealand
The OTF is John Loftus’ idea which he describes in his book “Why I became an Atheist”. The idea is to step outside your own belief system and apply the same sceptical scrutiny to it as you do to all other religions and which leads you reject them. Then see if yours stands up as the true one.
Loftus or someone else, I forget who, maybe Hitchens said: when you come to understand why you reject all of the other on the planet, you’ll understand why I reject yours.
Very sloppy piece of work.
Some more mistakes:
Bangladesh is 90% Muslim, not majority Hindu as shown.
South Korea is 47% non-religious, 29% Christian and 23% Buddhist, not majority “Chinese Religions” as shown.
Two of the Eastern states of India — Mizoram and Nagaland — and predominantly (>85%) Christian, not Hindu.
The Philippines has a Muslim majority on parts of the southern island of Mindanao.
What is Chinese religion? We do not have such things.
Isn’t Shinto Chinese?
Shinto is the original Japanese religious system that preceded the introduction of Buddhism and Christianity.
As for the complaint about Chinese religion: the average Chinese person believes in a blend of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism; adjusting the mix to believe or reject whatever parts of the mix s/he
chooses. Many think of this as a philosophy, not religion.
Only people who click on the image can see your posts here. They don’t get folded into the main set of comments.
It’s a
featurebug in WordPress.Penguins are Jews?
Only the ones that don’t eat shrimp.
The Chinese people I know are a bit superstitious, but not religious.
Unfounded beliefs, but not bundled together and tied to identity.
Outsider Test ?
Seems like a very good idea, I’ll read Loftus!
Yes, of course most of the world is inhabited by people who use their reason to come to conclusions. Those who do not, are usually erased from the gene pool (I’m sorry if this sounds callous, but I cannot help smirking at that guy who decided to install an aerial on the roof of his house during a thunderstorm).
Unfortunately, this is not the real problem: a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim can very well realize that the theory of relativity is correct (so far), but also believe that infidels should be cast into eternal fire as soon as possible, and endeavour to send them there as soon as possible. To that end, they will use knives, guns and nuclear weapons.
Religious beliefs have nothing to do with reason; they stem from a sense of identity, of belonging; in other words, from emotions. That’s why you cannot reason with a terrorist willing to blow him/herself up. The only reasonable course of action is to put a bullet through his/her head before he/she has a chance to activate the detonator. And that’s a pretty difficult task, as events in the UK showed a few years ago.