mormonman said:
If you have "proved" our falsehood w/o a doubt, then why is the LDS Church the fastest growing religion in the WORLD?
Those are slippery statistics, and no two sets of statistics are likely to agree with each other.
http://www.adherents.com/rel_USA.html
Shows that the Baha`i Faith has grown more than 200% in the U.S. since 1990, and the growth of the LDS (in all its splinters) has increased only 8% since 1990. This is in the U.S. of course.
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http://www.adherents.com/adh_rb.html
Most Ubiquitous Religious Bodies: The religious bodies on this list which are most likely to have a church, mosque, or congregation near you (in most countries in the world) are:
- Catholic Church
- Sunni Islam
- Baha'i Faith
- Jehovah's Witnesses
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
- Seventh-day Adventists
Regarding ubiquity: There are many large religious groups which are not especially ubiquitous, although they may seem widespread. This is the case with groups whose membership comes primarily from one country or a limited region, yet is also organized in a large number of countries. The group may only have a small or token presence in most of the countries in which it is organized, or it is only organized in the major cities of the foreign countries, often primarily among expatriates. Groups which are "widespread but not ubiquitous" like this include Sikhs, Eastern Orthodox, Soka Gakkai, Ahmadiyya, International Church of Christ, Church of Scientology, Church of the Nazarene, and the Churches of Christ. Protestant Christianity taken as a whole is, of course, quite ubiquitous, but most individual Protestant religious bodies do not currently have a sense of doctrinal exclusivity on the denominational level sufficient to attempt establishing a presence worldwide.
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Top 10 Largest Highly International Religious Bodies
These are religious bodies in which at least 30% of their world membership live outside the "core country" (country with the largest number of members).
Religious BodyNumber of AdherentsCatholic Church1,100,000,000
Sunni Islam875,000,000
Eastern Orthodox Church225,000,000
Anglican Communion*76,000,000
Assemblies of God50,000,000Seventh-day Adventists16,811,519Jehovah's Witnesses15,597,746Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints12,275,822New Apostolic Church10,260,000Ahmadiyya10,000,000Bahai World Faith6,000,000
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Classical World Religions Ranked by Internal Religious Similarity:
Most Unified to Most Diverse
- Baha'i
- Zoroastrianism
- Sikhism
- Islam
- Jainism
- Judaism
- Taoism
- Shinto
- Christianity
- Buddhism
- Hinduism
No "value judgement" is implied by this list. There are adjectives with both positive and negative connotations which describe both ends of this spectrum. From an academic, comparative religions viewpoint, there is no basis for "prescribing" whether it is better for a religion to be highly unified, cohesive, monolithic, and lacking in internal religious diversity, or whether it is better to be fragmented, schismatic, diverse, multifaceted and abounding in variations on the same theme.
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Anyway, Adherents.com is an interesting site and a worthwhile starting place for discussing the statistics of religion. One will quickly discover that there are (in the words of some wise man or other) there are "lies", "damned lies", and "statistics".
This isn't always true but every grain of salt used with believing something should be dipped in the old adage first.
Regards,
Scott
