People are turning from religions all over the world! WHy?

Question

From
Adherents.com

In a world of around 6 billion:
968,000,000 - Catholic
395,867,000 - Protestant (Includes the two below)
14,800,000 - Jehovah's WItnesses
12,500,000 - LDS (Mormons)
Islam (Sunni)-940,000,000
Shiite 120,000,000
Hinduism makes up 14% of all religious adherents
and NON-religious make up 16%.

If you look at the statistical progression, you'll see a secularization trend sweeping the globe

And interestingly, the fastest growing religion in the world is WICCA. It is projected to be the third largest religion in the world by 2012. (Maybe we should find out what WICCA is!?)

Answer 1

Questions like this imply that Jehovah's Witnesses are interested in becoming popular, but that is simply not true. The ONLY opinions of ongoing interest to a true Witness are those of Jehovah and Christ Jesus. Those who work to ingratiate themselves with some human or human group are not doing God's will.

(1 Thessalonians 2:4) We speak, as pleasing, not men, but God, who makes proof of our hearts.

(Matthew 6:20,21) Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven... For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.


Jehovah's Witnesses have the true religion. They are Christian (of course), but they are unique for their rejection of paganisms, use of God's personal name, and global preaching by every active adherent. No other religious organization can claim such purity of worship.

These facts about Jehovah's Witnesses are perhaps relevant to this question. The more one compares this Christian religion with others, the more remarkable it is shown to be.

1. Jehovah's Witnesses have no paid clergy. Yet they remain tightly organized with more than 6.5 million active Jehovah's Witness preachers (about 16 million associate themselves with the religion). Even fulltime preachers and workers at their branch offices are unpaid volunteers.

2. There is no elite class among Jehovah's Witnesses. Even the few 'anointed' among them enjoy no special privileges in their congregations on earth. An anointed person (one of those relative few with a heavenly hope) is not elevated above his fellow congregants in any way, and he may not even qualify for appointment as a simple 'deacon' or elder. There are no titles; EVERYONE is addressed as 'brother' or 'sister'.

3. No person benefits economically from the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses. Even the 8 to 20 men who serve on their Governing Body receive simply room, board, medical care, and reimbursement for certain personal expenses according to the exact same provision as every other branch volunteer.

4. About a hundred men have served on Jehovah's Witnesses' Governing Body committee during the past 125 years or so. The vast majority of them have spent the vast majority of their adult lives volunteering for their organization's purposes, and the vast majority have died faithfully and near-pennilessly while still under their legal 'vow of poverty'.

5. Amazingly, Jehovah's Witnesses did not splinter as a sect from some other religion. Instead, a truly tiny but sincere group of bible students studied only the Scriptures to determine the will of God. Thus their religion remains absolutely independent of and not carrying the sins of Christendom's history, yet carries the authority of Christ's teachings.

6. Despite the distortions of anti-Witnesses, throughout their modern history Jehovah's Witnesses have refused to claim divine inspiration or infallibility for their teachings. They have pointed to the bible (and not any particular translation) as the only inspired infallible means of knowing God's thoughts. For over 125 years, their teachings have been presented as merely the results of sincere bible research by imperfect but godly humans.


Learn more:
http://watchtower.org/e/jt/article_07.htm
http://watchtower.org/e/20040601/article_02.htm
http://jw-media.org/people/who.htm
http://jw-media.org/people/statistics.htm

Answer 2

You know, the website you sourced gave very different numbers:

Out of 6 billion:

1 Christianity: 2.1 billion
2 Islam: 1.3 billion
3 Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion
4 Hinduism: 900 million
5 Chinese traditional religion: 394 million
6 Buddhism: 376 million
7 primal-indigenous: 300 million
8 African Traditional & Diasporic: 100 million
9 Sikhism: 23 million
10 Juche: 19 million

These numbers also coincide perfectly with every major survey in this field, so why did you list incorrect stats? Were those from another category or showing the amount of people leaving religion or something?

So yes, Atheist/Agnostics are about 1/6 of the world's population now (a little more than half the number of christians). It is a quickly growing group and they are far, far more numerous than most people realize.

Answer 3

A) Your numbers are wrong.

B) You left out a bunch of faiths. Buddhism, Shintoism, totemism, animism. That brings the numeric total to well over 3 and 1/2 billion believers.

C) If 14% of the believers are Hindus, then 86% of all believers are not and that, expressed in numbers is 3 and 1/2 billion. Add 14% of THAT number and you get an additional 350 million people. Add 350 million to 3 and 1/2 billion and you get well over half the world's population. I don't call a majority of the total "creeping secularization".

D) And Wicca IS a religion. But since most of their adherents are converted from another faith, you cannot add them to the total OR subtract them from it.

E) In short, your statement is a pitiable excuse for factuality and a ridiculous exhibition of your inadequacy.

Answer 4

Wicca is a Neopagan religion and a religious movement found in various countries throughout the world. It was first popularised in 1954 by a British civil servant named Gerald Gardner after the British Witchcraft Act was repealed. He claimed that the religion, of which he was an initiate, was a modern survival of an old witchcraft religion, which had existed in secret for hundreds of years, originating in the pre-Christian Paganism of Europe. Wicca is thus sometimes referred to as the Old Religion. The veracity of Gardner's claims cannot be independently proven, and it is thought that written Wiccan theology began to be compiled no earlier than the 1920s.Various related Wiccan traditions have since evolved or been adapted from the form established by Gardner, which came to be called Gardnerian Wicca. These other traditions of Wicca each have distinctive beliefs, rituals, and practices. Many traditions of Wicca remain secretive and require that members be initiated. There is also a movement of Eclectic or Solitary Wiccans who do not believe that any doctrine or traditional initiation is necessary in order to practice Wicca. The 2001 American Religious Identification Survey estimated that at least 134,000 adults identified themselves as Wiccans in the US.

Answer 5

want to know why people are turning to wicca?

because wicca has less rules and is the most open and accepting of all religions BECAUSE they don't care if youre gay. in wicca, one can do whatever they want as long as they dont hurt other people. that is the one rule in the whole religion pretty much.

additionally, it is not sexist in any way- you can be a high priest or priestess regardless of gender or sexual orientation. you also dont even have to be in a coven, you can be a solitary practinioner.

it also doesnt help that the fanatics in each religion are gettign their 15 minutes of fame and shining a negative light on their religion.

bottom line: wicca is the most unpolluted by society. although, they got a bad rep.

but alot of that is from the crusades, the malleus maleficarum, and the burning times.

Answer 6

People no longer have faith in the leaders of organized religion...which, in turn, has caused some exodus from the common religions.

I was brought up Catholic and converted to a mix of Wicca and New Age spirituality. The priests angered me...don't even recall why now...and rebelled by doing the absolute worst thing one of the flock could do. I educated myself about spirituality in forms outside what I had been taught there.

Answer 7

If you look at the statistics on religous affiliation you will see that the numbers vary widely. In gathering the data for these statistics it makes a very big difference whether people are asked what religious group they belong to, or what group their religious beliefs allign with. Many, many people belong to a religous group for the sake of family or tradition but not spirituality. The number of people who actually have religous beliefs is much smaller. Your numbers appear to reflect the former, membership of a particular group, and yes, these numbers are getting smaller but there appears to be a resurgance of true faith or belief throughout the world.

Answer 8

People are turning from religions because they are all flawed. We can and will do much better than our caveman forebears in finding a discipline that will make us love each other more fearlessly than they ever imagined. Maybe it could be classified as evolution. I'm sorry it's such a painful process, but what do we expect? Wicca is attractive because it incorporates the perfection of opposites into its discipline. There's a large speck of truth in all religions, but today, when the world gets smaller every day, we're demanding a bigger speck. I pray to God, whatever his/her name is, to guide us in that quest.

Answer 9

One of the basic objectives of religion has been to explain that which can not be explained. In order to achieve that end, some religions have developed DOCTRINE.

As more and more things become understandable, some doctrine is no longer necessary.

HOWEVER

Some of the doctrine has become written in stone and the church refuses to let it pass once it is no longer necessary to explain the unexplainable.

When that happens, people are forced to make a choice between dogma and science -- or maybe even "common knowledge!"
.

Answer 10

The Bible forcasts the falling away.
It also points out that broad is the way that leads to destruction and many are those who are on it.
From the stats you present it looks like the stats are upholding the second part of that statement. Few are those who find it. Of 6 billion 500,000,000 is a very
small percentage. Yes, you figure out the ones i'm talking about.

Answer 11

Wicca is a Pagan religion, and consequently, easy to look up on Yahoo.

Ppl are turning FROM religions? I'd say many ppl are turning from TRADITIONAL religion (Abrahamic religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam) and turning to more non-traditional religions like Paganism (there are many different types) or Hinduism. Paganism is based on ancient beliefs and is an earthbased religion. To say Wicca is growing is great news.