felis_ultharus

'Twas a stressful day at work. Things are still crazy in that environment, even though September ended a month and a half ago. Yet the paperwork just keeps building up.

So today, I just relaxed. I did finish a short story, but otherwise I've been completely goofing off. I did find a book review by Margaret Atwood reviewing Brave New World that basically makes the point that we're almost living in Huxley's world now.

So, uh, yeah. Probably the fault of Phoenix Wright, but I've been reading up on a lot of crime statistics the last few days, and every time I do that, I'm struck by how completely detached from reality perceptions of crime tend to be -- most people are shocked when I tell them that violent crime has been dropping for thirty years, that re-offence rates are extremely low for convicted criminals, and that children are in far more danger from their families than they are from strangers.

On this and so many other things, reality is so detached from "common-sense" perceptions, and it's usually those who think they have the most common sense, especially when it comes to matters of crime or economics, who are the most astonished by the numbers.

Maybe it's because I come from such a multireligious family (Anglican, Atheist, Baha'i, Wiccan, and Catholic), or maybe it's because I'm a member of a religion that gets forever shunted off into the "other" category, but I've always been fascinated by religious demographics.

So I was happy to find this very thorough list from religioustolerance.org, more detailed than the one at StatsCan, showing changes in religion in Canada.

It confirmed a lot of what I heard and suspected. Christianity is slowly vanishing from this country, so it's not just paranoia on the part of fundamentalists. They've gone from more than four-fifths of the country to a little more than three-quarters. They grew, but much more slowly than the population grew -- factoring in all changes by immigration, conversion, and birth, they only grew by 1.5%.

Even the two religions that most discourage converts -- Judaism and Zoroastrianism -- are increasing faster than than the number of Christians. Going by percentage increase, Judaism is actually growing twice as fast as all forms of Christianity combined (+3.7% versus +1.5%).

"Islam" is now the 3rd-largest religious grouping in Canada, after "Christian" and "No religion." Also, First Nations spirituality -- the religious practices of the Native peoples of the continent that Europe tried to exterminate -- are making a major comeback.

The ten largest religious groupings in Canada -- and all these are very general categories -- are, in order:

Christianity
No religion
Islam
Judaism
Buddhist
Hindu
Sikh
First Nations spirituality
Neo-Pagan
Baha'i

Of course, these statistics are all five years old, now. Next year, StatsCan will release a fresh set of statistics based on this year's census.

Don't know how interesting anyone else finds this stuff, but I think it's really neat ^_^

ETA: Eeep! I just found the page where it shows which forms of Christianity are growing and which are shrinking. The extreme fundamentalist groups and Orthodox Christianity are the only groups which seem to be increasing significantly.

Our Prime Minister's extreme faith-healing, fundamentalist conservative church, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, is growing a little faster than the population as a whole :/

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30

(no subject)

(no subject)

Profile

September 2011

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags