So you’d rather follow the “make numbers up” school of demographics? People’s self-reporting, along with observation of behaviour, are the best tools for answering questions like this.
What alternative method are you proposing? Mind reading?
Because censuses generally don’t distinguish between cultural membership and belief. As the UK example given shows.
Except when it does, of course,
As I said, my wife filled it out and didn’t really think that is was a question worth any real thought. Even though she is just as much an atheist and non-religious as I am. Were I the one filling it in I’d have answered differently.
No, census, where everyone has to answer and people answer anonymously. There are also a absence of leading questions. Too many polls have biased or leading questions.
Such as a famous poll question:" Are you in favor of reducing mass shootings by increasing gun control?"
Or here:
http://www.public.coe.edu/~gcross/toolkit/collect/ct-lead.html
Really, a single anecdote proves this? 
‘Now sure, just because someone checks the box “CofE” does not mean that are deeply religious but it does mean they are not atheists.’
Except when it does mean they are atheist. As the single anecdote proves, ya know, Black Swans and all…
That’s not how the census works. Religion questions are optional (N_B has also said as much about the UK one), and no census I’ve ever taken has been anonymous.
The questions I cited are right there, critique them if you must, not some other hypotheticals.
It’s a different question though. So I don’t care if you or the OP calls it a “clarification”; it’s a new question. And the absolute best faith response in such a thread is what I am doing, which is answering both questions.
294 million Chinese would still be very much the minority in a country of 1.4 billion. And anyway, the point was, that self-identifying with a group doesn’t necessarily mean believing the spiritual claims on which that group was founded.
Most of the world? Go ahead and point out where I said that.
Shall I google it for you?
What exactly is the point you’re making?
No-one said they were the majority of Chinese. CFR followers aren’t the only Chinese religionists. But they definitely shouldn’t be counted in with the atheists and agnostics.
Nor does it mean they don’t.
That is not the case in the UK. It is an “optional” question which skews the numbers to start with.
again, demonstrably not the case in the UK. As I said to a previous poster, on the last census all four of us were down as “C of E” and none of us believed in god. I guarantee we were not alone in that.
That also doesn’t begin to deal with the glaring issue of adults answering the question on behalf of their kids.
Ah I’m sorry.
I thought I was responding to a thread about about countries with a minority of people being religious, but I guess I posted in the wrong thread.
Of course not. It would be bonkers for anyone to look at the census data and conclude that anyone saying “China folk religion” is necessarily atheist. What an absurd straw man.
I was suggesting that many of those people are likely atheist based on my personal experience of living in China and taking part in those rituals.
I ask again. What nations do you consider to be “developed”?
I follow the standard definitions of the term such as the UN HDI.
I’ve been reminded that this is a trick that you’ve tried in other threads: that as soon as anyone mentions the term “developed country” you go off on a tangent about that, and ignore the main topic. e.g. on gun homicides in developed countries.
But it’s especially silly in a thread like this, where my statement that the US was “unusual among developed countries” in its degree of religiosity was just a throwaway comment. I wasn’t basing my argument on that, nor has anyone else.
So, you withdraw the “unusual among developed countries” comment?
Do you know that that list does not call any nations “developed” it just gives a relative score? Where is you cut off? Say the top half?
Who gives a shit?
But nice try.
Please drop the hijack about which counties are developed, or what “developed” means. Neither is relevant to the topic.
Warning for DrDeth and we’ll be reviewing if you are due for a suspension.
As you were just suspended July 13 for obsessive posting. It will be an immediate one day suspension pending our discussion.
You’ve been told not to hijack threads and here you are with one of your pet-peeves as the flagger noted. This hijacks about developed countries is derailing the thread.
Also I previously mentioned that I think I ticked CofE, and I’m also an atheist.
Although I think an afterlife is very unlikely, there’s no way I can know. So I don’t believe in an afterlife, I guess - it certainly doesn’t guide my actions in any way. I don’t chose what to do, or centre my morals around, whether my choices will send me to heaven or hell or turn me into a cockroach in the next life, it’s all about the results in this life.
So, not China then…
Distinction without a difference. You were arguing that China is effectively majority atheist, which it is not.
That feels like a weird definition to me. I feel like a belief in an afterlife is not very closely correlated with what I think of as “religious”. For instance, my very religious childhood rabbi, when asked about Jewish beliefs about any afterlife in my confirmation class, replied, “We don’t know”.
Yeah when pinned down, just repeat your assertion again, that’ll work.
You just said that some 300m claim “China folk religion”.
Even if all those people actually believed in the existence of the gods of that religion (and I know that to be false for the Chinese I interacted with when I was in China), that leaves 1.1 billion to account for.