If I were an Atheist

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Pandæmonium

This isn't a competition, drew. Demographics of religion and atheism differ wildly depending on the part of the world you're looking at or indeed the state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism

Studies on the demographics of atheism have concluded that atheists comprise anywhere from 2% to 8% of the world's population, whereas with irreligious individuals are 10% to 20%.[1][2][3] A poll by Gallup International, featuring over 50,000 respondents worldwide, recorded that 13% of those interviewed said they were "convinced atheists".[4] In Scandinavia and East Asia, and particularly in China, atheists and the nonreligious are the majority.[4] Globally, atheists and the nonreligious are concentrated in Asia and the Pacific with over 76% of all the irreligious or nonreligious residing in those regions.[5] In Europe, the nonreligious make up 12.5% of the population and in North America they make up 5% of the population.[5] In Africa and South America, atheists are typically in the single digits.[4]

I have noticed that some folks who've responded have taken surveys of folks saying there not religious and sliding them into the atheist group. A lot of people would consider themselves not religious if they simply no longer attend any organized church or religious group. Doesn't mean the disbelief or lack belief in the existence of God.

You're right re: bold, but my answer to the rest of your post is 'so?' As I said in the post you responded to, it's not a race. Demographics of atheism are both extremely hard to attain and also completely irrelevant mainly because there is very little official census data available for the vast majority of countries around the world. I can quite easily counter by saying a lot of people who are de facto atheists wouldn't necessarily define themselves in that terminology or are not defined in that way by the person/organization conducting the study. Nobody knows, so discounting it out of hand seems disingenuous. The wikipedia page even indicates that attaining consistent and comparable data on these demogprahics is next to impossible.

In several countries being an atheist is a capital offense, so obviously that skews any results from those areas. And that's discounting the problem of both stigmas attached to being an atheist and over the weight of legitimacy given to both official and non-official polls and data collection methodologies, with the latter tending to give higher instances of accuracy than the former in many cases. As...:

Are 50% of the English and Welsh population thus insiginifcant? Are large swathes of Northern America, Northern and western euorpe? Not even counting places like China?

No where in the article above does it suggest anywhere is 50% atheist. It claims 2-8%. Again I think your sliding non-religious into the atheist group.

...exampled here.

The article then hasn't consulted the BSAS conducted in 2012 which indicated that, from the sample taken, 50% were 'not-religious'. By that figure they indicate "50% are not affiliated with a church [or religion]". So does that mean that some of those people are in fact theists/believers? Yes, naturally. However they qualify with indicators that reveal a lack of religiousness and indeed belief through, for example, tiny rates of church attendance (14% of people who were religious visit once a week), whilst 56% of people of the sample have never once visited a church in a religious capacity. Of the 50% of people who indicated they weren't religious, 88% didn't go/or had never been to church in a religious capacity. So even inferring that the remaining 12% are in fact believers of some sort, and even presuming that of the 88% of the 50% there are some believers contained within, you're still hitting the statistical certainty that the biggest 'religious' demographic of the English and Welsh population being atheist. Indeed I would say that using composites like the above are the only real useful indicators in determining more accurate statistics on topics such as this.

Anecdotally I could go outside right now and almost almost guarantee that at least 50% of the people I'd come across would be atheists above and beyond 'not-religious'.

Ultimately this question comes down to how one defines a religion and indeed a non-religion. There's no easy or I would guess right answer to that question, at least none that I've come across. But a reasonable analysis of the data as presented converted into useful information would allow the reasonable inference of the above.


But again, to reiterate my initial point. This is irrelevant. It's not a race, just a fact.