Atheist Centre 50+ Golden Jubilee (1940-1990)
International Conference on
"Future of Atheism -- Humanism"
Vijayawada, December 29-31, 1990
[OCR, HTML, editing, Cliff Walker]
Growth of Atheism:
Impressive Statistics
Contributed by Arnold Via, USA.
The Universal Almanac, 1990, reports that there are 805,900,000 non-religious and 210,500,000 atheists in the world. This accounts for 16.9% and 4.4% respectively, for a total of 21.3%.
"According to The World Christian Encyclopedia (1985), more than a billion of the world's people consider themselves nonreligious (agnostic about religious claims) or atheistic (actively opposed to religion). Nearly three-quarters of these people live in East Asia, where they are a majority of the population of China. Nonreligious persons and atheists also make up a majority of people in the Soviet Union.
"If the estimates of non and anti-religious peoples are correct, these peoples make up the largest bloc in the world after Christianity," indicates the Almanac.
It reports that 20 million of these non-religious/
The Catholic News Service and Encyclopedia Britannica Book Of The Year, 1989, shows this breakdown of world religions (and nonreligions ):
Christianity: (1.7 billion) 32.9%
Nonbelievers: (1.1 billion) 21.6%
Islam: (880.6 million) 17.4%
Hinduism: (663.5 million) 13.1%
Buddhism: (311.8 million) 6.1%
Chinese religions: (172.3 million) 3.4%
Others: (167.5 million) 3.4%
Tribal religions: (92 million) 1.8%
Judaism: (18.2 million) 0.3%
The World Development Forum reports that if the world were a village of 1,000 people, there would be:
564 Asians
210 Europeans
86 Africans
80 South Americans
60 North Americans
There would be:
300 Christians ( 183 Catholics, 84 protestants, 33 Orthodox)
210 without any religion or atheist
175 Moslems
128 Hindus
55 Buddhists
47 Animists
Of these people:
60 would control half the total income
500 would be hungry
600 would live in shantytowns
700 would be illiterate