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You have to remember that just because a person officially belongs to a certain religion, doesn't mean they believe in it, since you might join it by birth. Very few people in Sweden are officially non-religious as in having left the church, but polls asking if people believe in God or some deity usually have the believers at 50% or so. It goes without saying that the Christian world is very secularized.

Personally I believe that governments can make people embrace any idea or religion as long as the government cares for their living and safety, given time enough to establish traditions. People don't really care about politics or religion, it's simply something handed to them by authority figures, so whether people belong to a certain ideology or religion doesn't say very much.

Since a lot of Buddhists are atheists too, the actual figure of atheists is actually higher than 2%.

This is going on FSTDT, by the way.

That's right. Buddha himself said there was no god.



I know an Orthodox Jew, who identifies as being a Jew, follows the Jewish ways of life (ie no pork) but is an atheist. In high school, I was president of the bible club and led christian bible studies. I had stopped believing in god in 3rd grade.

I also know many people who say they are nonreligious because they mistakenly believe that being religious entails believing in a god.

Oh, I'm really in the minority.

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Interesting stats.
Compare to Revelations 8:10-12.

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God speaks to everyone. Few people listen.

Screw the statistics. It doesn't matter how many people believe in a religion; it doesn't make it any more true. A lot of people used to believe the Earth was flat, but did that make it any flatter? Hell no. Just because a lot of people don't choose atheism over organized religion doesn't mean we should give up and start believing. If everybody thought that way, we would have never learned about the heliocentric solar system and the shape of the Earth.

The flat earth theory is fairly recent, really.
Already the Summerians knew that it was a globe, and a lot of other ancient cultures also showed signs of knowing it, like the Mayans, the Greeks and the Phoenicians.
Even the bible hints at it, even though it doesn't really bother with geography.

You jsut provided proof for why we shouldn't believe traditional religions interpretations of the bible. The Catholic church, which teaches based on the bible, has only accepted the belief that the earth is round for about 100 years now. Prior to that anyone advocated such was labeled a heretic. If you are right, than clearly the Catholic church/pope/bishops etc cannot be trusted to interpret the bible correctly and so everything we know about god from them must be called into question.

*the Catholic church is of course not the only one that has a history of killing people for saying the earth is round. They just happen to be the most well known religion that held onto a flat earth belief the longest

I'm aware of that, but it wasn't accepted within a particular society for the longest time ever, and that's because of the way they treat religion. Imagine what would have happened if this religion applied to ever civilization--if you wanted to believe the Earth wasn't flat, they wouldn't let you. And the bible is too nonsensical to make any interpretation out of it as to what the authors think the shape of the Earth is. Apparently, it's a circle, has four pillars, four corners and "hangs". How a circle has four corners is completely beyond me.

Yep, can't trust those.
Might be a reason why it says that one third of the stars (leaders), water sources (teachings), oceans (people/followers) etc would be destroyed in Revelations.
Well, that's one interpretation of it. Just that it hit me when I saw that chart...

Angelus-Mortis:
It could be argued that the base word for "circle" indicates a sphere-like shape, but I've had that discussion before and won't get into it again.
Four pillars, corners, etc. is very ingrained into our collective idea of the world.
There's the four compass directions, north, south, east and west, which we all understand and use even though the earth is round, for example.
"Hangs on nothing" is a very succinct description IMO.

Indeed!

"Keep thy religion to thyself!" -George Carlin

Atheist = one who denies the existence of god (literally "without god"). It is a stronger belief than:

Agnostic = one who believes that no-one knows whether god exists or not (literally "without knowing")

Nonreligious = may encompass the above two, but would also include people who believe in god without participating in organized religion.

I believe that the belief in a round earth, even among Roman Catholics, goes well before 1907.

The Earth was known to be round since ancient Greek times. The main controversy centered around whether the universe was heliocentric (i.e., the sun was the center, and the planets revolved around the sum) versus geocentric (i.e., the Earth was the center of the universe, and the sun, moon, planets, and stars all revolved around the Earth). You haven't taken High School physics yet?

The Catholic Church has accepted that the Earth is round for as long as it has existed - after all, Archimedes pretty well proved it with his well experiment, some centuries before the birth of Christ. They did, at first, reject the idea that the Sun, rather than the Earth was the center of the universe, but it was at least tacitly accepted by the early 1800s (although Earth's displacement from God's navel wasn't officially acknowledged by the Papacy until the 1960s).

Now, if only they could accept the fact that living beings, organized by the laws of chemistry, tend to evolve into forms ever better suited to their ecological niche, or that the idea that mere potential for human life equates to actual human life (the standard reason for opposing contraception) implies that masturbation is mass murder...

at the defense of atheists: we are at a disadvantage here....we don't kill people who don't convert to our side...unlike the christians.

How about the non-religious?

A circle, by definition, is a flat object. You could only use the description of four pillars or four corners if you believed there was a point in which if you kept going in one direction, you would reach the extreme end of that direction, (ie, the most northern part), but those are things that we define now that didn't exist then, and the Arctic and Antarctic did not exist to the bible writers, and if you kept going north, you wouldn't end up at the most northern part of the world; you'd end up back where you started. The problem with using metaphors is that they're too loose and inaccurate to be reliable. You could twist any interpretation of them completely out of context to mean whatever you want (just as an inexperienced essay writer might analyze the theme of a story to be whatever he wants it to be), which would mean that if science found that the Earth was more spherical in shape through evidence, all you'd have to do is readjust the interpretation of what's in the bible, and suddenly, there's no contradiction. Although I wouldn't buy the years and years of the church telling people to believe the Earth is flat, particularly since the western scientists who found out about that were shunned for those discoveries.

I'm fairly sure the bible writers meant for the Earth to be as nonsensical as they make it out to be; (in other words, they don't agree and are completely clueless) they probably have no shame whatsoever in presenting a false representation of the Earth, even if they made it up since they were so sure (and you may say they had too much faith in this) that no one would be able to see the Earth in its entirety, but they underestimate human intelligence and understanding, and we are able to see the Earth in its entirety, and know much of what they couldn't figure out on their own.