Expect to see more writing on religion and spirituality here. While crypto investment is still my current obsession, I’ve shifted that content over to Breaking Bitcoin and an email newsletter.
There is tremendous wisdom and value stored in the world’s major faiths. Huston Smiths calls them the great wisdom traditions and he’s not wrong. For me this interest snowballed with Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists book [Amazon]. Fwiw I don’t consider myself an atheist. Here are some of my blog posts about his book.
I hope in the future to join or launch a lifelong project to identify, collect, and share all of the world’s religious wisdom with all of the world’s people. And the best sort of wisdom is when you are not just reading but doing. Not only reading but practicing. I call this loosely the soul habit and have written briefly about it before. Let me know if this interests you.
The Pew Research Center regularly publishes valuable survey data and analyses on how religion is practiced and how it’s changing around the world. Here are my notes from a recent study on demographics. Here is the Pew analysis and full report.
NOTES
Islam will become the most populous religion in the world because, simply put, Muslims have more babies
In the period between 2010 and 2015, births to Muslims made up an estimated 31% of all babies born around the world – far exceeding the Muslim share of people of all ages in 2015 (24%).
As a group, nonbelievers and the unaffiliated will continue to decline as a percentage of the world population. This is driven primarily by people leaving Christianity. Other groups unable to keep pace with global population growth: Buddhism, Judaism, and folk religions
…the religiously unaffiliated population is heavily concentrated in places with aging populations and low fertility, such as China, Japan, Europe and North America.
Between 2015 and 2020, religious “nones” are projected to experience a net gain of 7.6 million people due to religious switching; people who grew up as Christians are expected to make up the overwhelming majority of those who switch into the unaffiliated group
The relative influence of Muslims is expected to increase in sub-Saharan African and decrease in Asia
By 2060, 27% of the global Muslim population is projected to be living in the region, up from 16% in 2015. By contrast, the share of Muslims living in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to decline over the period from 61% to 50%.
The youngest major religions are, in order, Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity
The median ages of Muslims (24 years) and Hindus (27) are younger than the median age of the world’s overall population (30), while the median age of Christians (30) matches the global median. All the other groups are older…
China is home to 61% of the world’s unaffiliated population as of 2015 (!)