Oops! 'Our' :D

I type too fast sometimes. Head is way ahead of the hands!

Could you provide a citation for this?Here in Estonia society functions very well without much religious influence, in fact, if memory serves me right Estonia is one of the most aheistic countries in europe, if not the most atheistic one. Actualy food for bacteria and funguses(fungi?). Maggots are not worms, allso maggots do not eat burried human remains because flies do not get a chanse to lay their eggs on the body.

I'm being cremated... no worms, fungi, maggots, cannibals or flesh-eating zombies for me thank you ... :huh:

I commend this guy for his bravery. Sometimes I think Islam is somewhat like Scientology. The church of Scientology has become very defensive just like Islam, but the members are not evil. Once you get to know a Muslim they are not as different as we think. So we should not get as mad at the Muslims for this, but rather Islam's higherarchy, and bigot leaders.

We're waiting. Oh, and you might want to check your sources. That article must be old, since I read, not long ago at all, that ISLAM is actually rising, and Christianity is actually depleting.

http://www.themodernreligion.com/assault/rising.html

That's a bit more on the subject. The part about Christianity I heard on CNN, and that was about four months ago. I don't know if they have an article or not, and I'm not going to go looking for one.

There are various estimates of how many Muslims there are in the world, but let’s say for the purpose of this discussion 1 billion, which is kind of in the middle.

5.84 million divided by 1 billion is 0.00584 percent, or 5.84 per thousand (please correct my math if I have dropped a decimal).

Using the CIA World Factbook as a reference, Nigeria has a birth rate of 40.2 / 1,000 (not all Muslims, to be sure). Iran’s birth rate is 16.57 / 1,000, Iraq’s 41.44 and Saudi Arabia’s 29.1 / 1,000. (Just for comparison, Canada’s is 10.74, that of the USA 14.16 and that of the UK 10.67.)


Even if the 16K/day is in Africa alone and even recognizing that those are just some of the Islamic nations, it's unlikely that the religion as a whole is 'dying a slow death'. It's growing at a fairly substantial rate in terms of the numbers of adherents.

You forgot to include that part about Africa only having 300 mil muslims at the time of the interview, and it declined from a majority of Africa - which used to have what? 700 mil? DOwn to 300 mil? You tell me. - It doesn't take rocket science to figure out it is dying in Africa. Did you miss that part?

And this is just Africa.

-S

You are correct, there is no denying Christianity is for the first time in history "falling away" as an anti-christ, anti-parallel doctrine takes it's place.

You may be right in that regard, but they have a long way to go if this is going to happen:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/worldrel.gif

Seems to me that no one even comes close to Christianity.

-S

Let’s not forget that that this is based on an interview with one man. To be sure, he’s an Islamic cleric, but it would seem to basically be his personal conclusions. Moreover, let’s not overlook the possibility that he’s being deliberately alarmist in order to get attention or to sway people back to his faith. (The 'Rally 'round the flag, boys!' pitch has been used by Christians, too, I recall.) Consider that even one conversion is alarming to Muslims; in many countries, it is a capital offense. Finally, perhaps I missed it in the full article, but there is no mention of the reverse ‘flow’ – conversions from other religions to Islam, which needs to be considered.

While I may have misread Subman’s first post, there’s little doubt that Islam, considered worldwide, is growing. I did a google search on ‘world religions’ + growth and looked at the first few hits. You cannot trust the internet completely of course, but they do seem to be pretty consistent. Just as a sample:

www.religioustolerance.org/worldrel.htm. Christianity 32% and dropping, Islam 19% and growing. This is the site SUBMAN’s graph comes from.

http://t21.ca/religions/tp.htm. Under trends, this mentions, “A rising growth rate of Islam. Among world religions, Islam ranks as the fastest growing faith. This is demographically driven by higher birth rates in the third world rather than by an increase in conversion growth. Worldwide, the number of Muslims has doubled since 1970 to 1.2 billion adherents.”

Given the numbers, it’s going to be a while before Islam becomes the leading faith, but it’s certainly not dying worldwide.

As to Africa, Wikipedia lists the Islamic population of that continent as 402 million, but admits that it’s hard to be sure due to bad records. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Africa. It also notes that Islam is the largest religion in Africa and is growing. As anybody can change the contents of the wikiworld, one must again use caution, but it is indicative. About.com (http://islam.about.com/library/weekly/aa120298.htm) gives the figure at 302 million.

Even if we take the lower figure for African Muslim population, 5.84 million is less than a 2% ‘loss’ rate. One must of course factor in deaths and emigration, but even considering war, AIDS and famine, Africa’s population is growing at a pretty good clip. In short, I would be less than confident that Islam is fading there.

Geezzze, all this trouble would be solved if everyone just joined MY church!!!!!


http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...2&postcount=59

It's natural for you to attack the article, given some of the past posts you've made on Muslims. Here's Europe's case then. Only about 8 months old:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0726/p01s08-woeu.html


Trex, thank you for that detailed information. I'll be damned if I could find it.