According to Oxford University Press’s World Christian Encyclopedia, 84 percent of the world’s population belongs to some form of organized religion, which at the end of 2009 equals 5.7 billion people. That’s a lot of souls. Christians dominate at around 2 billion adherents (with Catholics accounting for half of these), Muslims come in at a little more than a billion, Hindus at around 850 million, Buddhists at almost 400 million, and ethnoreligionists (animists and others in Asia and Africa primarily) make up most of the remaining several hundred million believers. Worldwide, there are about
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