Re: Fastests Growing Religion?
According to Wikipedia,
Christianity
Within Christianity, numerous distinct groups have developed, with diverse beliefs that vary widely by culture and place. Since the Reformation, Christianity is usually represented as being divided into three main branches:
* Catholicism: The Roman Catholic Church, the largest single body — which includes several Eastern Catholic communities — as well as certain smaller communities (e.g., the Old-Catholics), with more than 1 billion baptized members.
* Eastern Christianity: Oriental Orthodox Churches, the Assyrian Church of the East, and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, with a combined membership of more than 240 million baptized members.
* Protestantism: Numerous denominations and groups such as Anglicans, Lutherans, Reformed, Evangelical, Charismatic, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Anabaptists, and Pentecostals. The oldest of these groups separated from the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. The later groups typically formed as separations from the older ones. Some Protestants identify themselves simply as Christian, or born-again Christian. Others, particularly among Anglicans and in Neo-Lutheranism, identify themselves as being "both Catholic and Protestant". Worldwide total is just under 500 million.
Other denominations and churches which self-identify as Christian but which distance themselves from the above classifications together claim around 275 million members. These include African indigenous churches with up to 110 million members (estimates vary widely), The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also called Mormons) with more than 12 million members3, Jehovah's Witnesses with approximately 6.6 million members4, and other groups5. The early leaders of most of these groups were originally Protestant adherents.
Islam
Based on the percentages published in the 2005 CIA World Factbook ("World"), Islam is the second largest religion in the world. According to the World Network of Religious Futurists, the U.S. Center for World Mission, and the controversial Samuel Huntington, Islam is growing faster numerically than any of the other major world religions. Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance estimate that it is growing at about 2.9% annually, as opposed to 2.3% per year global population growth. Non-Muslim observers attribute this growth to the higher birth rates in many Islamic countries (six out of the top-ten countries in the world with the highest birth rates are majority Muslim[1]). A recent demographic study, however, has determined that the birth rates of some Muslim countries are plummeting to the levels of western countries [2].
Commonly cited estimates of the Muslim population today range between 900 million and 1.4 billion people (cf. Adherents.com); estimates of Islam by country based on U.S. State Department figures yield a total of 1.48 billion, while the Muslim delegation at the United Nations quoted 1.2 billion as the global Muslim population in September 2005.
Hindus
More than one billion people across the world practise Hinduism. 950 million of them live in the Indian subcontinent, the birthplace of Hinduism. The Himalayan kingdom of Nepal is the world's only Hindu nation. Though the majority of the Indian population practices Hinduism, India is a secular republic. Large Hindu communities, mostly expatriates from India, live in South East Asia, North America, the West Indies, Western Europe, the Middle East, East Africa and South Africa. The Hindus of Bali, and in other parts of Indonesia are indigenous Indonesian Hindus.
Buddhism
Numbering over 350 million people, Buddhists spread all over the nations of South East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, China, Korea and Japan. Small Buddhist communities are also found in Western Europe and North America.
I expect they are excluding the Chinese from that count.
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