On Wed, 2008-01-23 at 12:54 +0530, Charles Haynes wrote: > On Jan 23, 2008 7:14 AM, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote > Eurobarometer 2005 showed that only 52% of Europeans "believe there is > a god" and 18% say "I don' t believe there is any sort of spirit, God > or life force" while the 2001 Indian census shows over 80% of Indians > are Hindu.
the problem with wikipedia is that it only has part of the information and the information it has on different things is not necessarily presented in a comparable format :-) the indian census didn't show how many indians "believe there is a god". according to the CIA world factbook which _does_ show european populations by religion, shows that about 70% of the population is christian in germany (where only 47% told eurobarometer that they "believe there is a god") and over 90% of italians are (though only 74% told eurobarometer they "believe there is a god"). i believe a very large majority (well over 80%) of germans allow the government to deduct and transfer to the church a tax on their income - without which they are not given a christian burial. danes talk about "4-wheel-drive christians" who visit the church for baptisms in a pram, marriages in a limo and burial in a hearse. they still hold a christian identity enough to want to keep turkey out of the EU because it's muslim (though more secular, officially, than many EU countries). i'm not sure if the indian census allows you to respond that you "don't believe there is any sort of spirit, god or life force" or even that you are "atheist". i do believe it does not allow you to report multiple religions within a single family. i could be mischievous here and note that if we include india's neighbours in the definition of india, the hindu population is most certainly a smaller share of the population, compared to christians in the EU... > > and has fewer linguistic divisions than india > > Europe has 23 official languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, udhay already dealt with that, i believe. india does not officially recognise most languages because languages with significant populations get their own state in india. for that matter, they usually do so in europe, too. -rishab
