On Jan 24, 2008 2:03 AM, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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 :-) I would welcome more directly comparable information. That was just what I could discover in a ten minute web search. Entirely subjectively, India feels much more homogeneous religiously than Europe taken as a whole, but yes, it does feel comparable to say Spain or Italy in "religiousity" where the vast majority of the population is nominally of a single religion, where most of the middle and upper class are not particularly religious, and religious minorities feel conspicuous and there is some overt discrimination. > > > 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. I'm not sure what we're dealing with. I was just trying to check the facts behind the claims, I'm not even sure what your point was supposed to be. The facts as far as I can tell are that Europe as a whole seems to be less homogeneous religiously and less religious in general than India as a whole, but as you say the statistics are not directly comparable and it'd be nice to have better facts. Linguistically both India and Europe are extremely diverse, with dozens of official languages, and hundreds of living languages. My wild ass guess is that both are more diverse linguistically than any other comparable political divisions. Which means... what? -- Charles
