I don't care enough to delve deeper into whether your "84%" stat is correct. When I click on your link, I just get a 5-year-old headline with no story to go with it.
There was a story when I clicked on it.
“Worldwide, more than eight-in-ten people identify with a religious group,” says a new comprehensive demographic study of more than 230 countries and territories conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.
“There are 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and children around the globe, representing 84 percent of the 2010 world population of 6.9 billion,” the analysis states.
Here’s the breakdown of “The Global Religious Landscape,” based on an analysis of more than 2,500 censuses, surveys and population registers:
• 2.2 billion Christians (32 percent of the world’s population).
• 1.6 billion Muslims (23 percent).
• 1 billion Hindus (15 percent.
• 500 million Buddhists (7 percent).
• 400 million people (6 percent) practicing various folk or traditional religions, including African traditional religions, Chinese folk religions, American Indian religions and Australian aboriginal religions.
There are 14 million Jews, and an estimated 58 million people — slightly less than 1 percent of the global population – belong to other religions, including the Baha’i faith, Jainism, Sikhism, Shintoism, Taoism, Tenrikyo, Wicca and Zoroastrianism, “to mention just a few,” the study says.
About half of all Christians in the world are Catholic, 37 percent are part of the Protestant tradition, 12 percent are Orthodox Greek or Russian.
The largest population of Christians (243 million) is found, incidentally, in the United States, followed by Brazil, Mexico, Russia, the Philippines, Nigeria and China.
Find the entire massive study here:
Religion and Public Life.
Regardless:
- there are many theists who don't belong to a religion.
- a large chunk of the religious people on Earth belong to "non-revealed" religions.
- a lot of the people in "revealed" religions aren't in the religion because they were convinced by some prophet's message.
That is true. But they still believe in God without getting direct communication form God.
And in any case, however large the relative size of people who believe in your "messengers" versus people who don't, we have a difference in outcome that needs to be explained.
I can easily explain why that outcome exists. It is because of religious traditions people hold that do not have messengers as part of their belief systems. They are attached to these beliefs and they have free will so they choose not to relinquish their beliefs. Then there are the nonbelievers who just do not like the idea of messengers for no good reasons they can give me.
When two people hear the same message from a "messenger" - or through a few more levels of hearsay from one of the messenger's followers - and one is convinced but the other isn't, what do you think is the difference between those people? What is it about them that results in the different outcomes?
It is as simple as that everyone is different. Everyone has a different childhood upbringing, different adult life experiences, different education and all that lead to a different way of thinking about God and religion and Messengers.
I think it's a reasonable starting point to consider that the difference in outcome could be because the two people had different standards for what they'd accept, and a hearsay "message from God" from a "messenger of God" only cleared the bar for one of them.
It clears the bar for most people and the other people believe in God without a Messenger so they do not need a religion that has a Messenger. It does not clear the bar for atheists because they have decided they need God to do something else. They call the Word of God hearsay just because they do not get a direct message from God, as if the Almighty God owes them a direct message. It would be funny if it was not so sad.
So you think that the beliefs of every theist on the planet, including the vast majority who disregard the Baha'i faith or believe it to be wrong, became theists because they were convinced by a message from God?
Really?
I do think so because that is what the statistics demonstrate. There are some believers who just believe in God with no message from God, but they have no way of knowing anything about God or what God expects of them, so I consider this rather pointless.
So then we can ask why. We can also recognize that the method that God is alleged to use to communicate his message is pretty crappy: it lends itself to errors and it depends on the audience having trust not only in God, but in the human being claiming to be a messenger.
And there is a reason why. I just posted it to my atheist friend on my forum yesterday.
You are right, you have to trust the God and the man claiming to be the Messenger, and it is possible that there can be errors in interpreting the messages even if it is written down clearly, but there is no reason to think that direct communication to everyone would work better and it is fraught with problems. Right out the door, not everyone could ever understand what Baha'u'llah wrote let alone write it down, in excess of 15,000 tablets. Sure, God would communicate a message to everyone saying “I am God and I exist” but what good would that do? How would everyone even know it was God and not their imagination, a psychotic break?
Obviously, if God exists, God communicated via Messengers for a good reason, because it was the best way to communicate, as an omniscient God has to know the best way.
It sounds like you know he won't come here, so you know he's not going to come here and correct you if you mis-speak.
I do not mis-speak on his behalf. Like I said you can go and read what he says on my forum and then you will know exactly what he says. Otherwise it is unfair to accuse me of misrepresenting him.
I wish to God he would come here, for his own sake, so he could see what rational atheists say. I have asked him to come here but I do not know why he won’t come here, as I do not pretend to know the motives of other people.
Maybe it would be too much of a challenge for him, or
maybe he does not have the time, or
maybe he does not want to learn anything new that would burst his bubble about direct communication from god to everyone. At one point he asked me why I could not get people from RF to come to my forum, so
maybe he is just unable to deal with a very large forum with many different opinions and beliefs, or he just does not want to.
As an aside, for years I used to post to him on other Delphi forums but then I left those forums so I could not post to him for a while. I invited him to my forum many times and he never even answered me. It was a couple of my atheist friends who convinced him to come to my forum about four months ago and he came rather reticently. I do not know what he thought I would do to him because I let people speak their mind, as long as they are not too insulting, but sometimes I even allow that. He now knows he can say whatever he wants to say, unlike on many Delphi forums that are heavily moderated.
He told you to say that his position is illogical?
I posted
what he said in red and then I gave my opinion. Obviously that was my opinion. I have a right to my opinion. If he wants to argue against my opinion he can sign up and post here.
