World Religions
Geographical distribution of the world's religions.
Religion is usually defined as a cultural system of certain behaviors and practices, cosmovisions, texts, sacred places, prophecies, ethics or organizations that relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental or spiritual elements, although there is no academic consensus on what exactly constitutes a religion Bernard Lonergan approaches religion as a set of experiences, meanings, convictions, beliefs and expressions of a group, through which its participants respond to their dialectics of self-transcendence and relationship with the divine.
According to some estimates, there are about 4200 living religions in the world and countless extinct ones.A worldwide survey of 2012 reports 59% of the world population as "religious" and 36% as non-religious (including 13% of atheists) , with a decrease of 9 percentage points with respect to the religious belief of 2005. On average, women are "more religious" than men. Some people follow multiple religions or several religious principles at the same time, regardless of whether the tradition of religious principles that follow allows for syncretism or not.
Religion is usually defined as a cultural system of certain behaviors and practices, cosmovisions, texts, sacred places, prophecies, ethics or organizations that relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental or spiritual elements, although there is no academic consensus on what exactly constitutes a religion Bernard Lonergan approaches religion as a set of experiences, meanings, convictions, beliefs and expressions of a group, through which its participants respond to their dialectics of self-transcendence and relationship with the divine.
According to some estimates, there are about 4200 living religions in the world and countless extinct ones.A worldwide survey of 2012 reports 59% of the world population as "religious" and 36% as non-religious (including 13% of atheists) , with a decrease of 9 percentage points with respect to the religious belief of 2005. On average, women are "more religious" than men. Some people follow multiple religions or several religious principles at the same time, regardless of whether the tradition of religious principles that follow allows for syncretism or not.
The five largest religious groups by world population, estimated to account for 5.8 billion people and 84% of the population, are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (with the relative numbers for Buddhism and Hinduism dependent on the extent of syncretism) and traditional folk religion.
| Five largest religions | billion in 2010 | % of world total in 2010 |
| Christianity | 2.2 | 32% |
| Islam | 1.6 | 23% |
| Hinduism | 1.0 | 15% |
| Buddhism | 0.5 | 7% |
| Folk religion | 0.4 | 6% |
| Total | 5.8 | 84% |