Table 4 shows that when asked about the existence of God less than 70 percent of Americans now believe in the traditional theological concept of a personal God.
The Oxford English Dictionary is one of my trusted sources.
I turn 30 next month, so be nice, people!
When the sample is 1000 people 69.5% is less than 70%. i.e. you can have more than one whole person less than exactly 70% of the sample.
Table 4 shows that when asked about the existence of God less than 70 percent of Americans now believe in the traditional theological concept of a personal God.
It takes a human to pollute the purity of numbers. Beware contextual rounding!
Is that the rule or a preference?
I agree. There may well be a perception bias revealed in the phrasing
I turn 30 next month, so be nice, people!
Never knew I was supposed to be narcissistic, special little snowflake.
Max, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but we'll just have to agree to disagree. As I said, I trust the OED and hold it in higher esteem than other dictionaries, and that goes double for anything beginning in "Wiki".
As to the debate on rounding, I think that ColoradoGuy's chart on page one was pretty illuminating, and rounded or not, there was a distinct pattern. Why is it that more people are claiming no religion?
This study is also being discussed in Politics and Current Events. As I mentioned over there, I think that the actual numbers of people who are practicing Christians, Catholics, and Jews are probably lower than the ones who claim these religions..."Christian in Name Only" is a title I've seen people give themselves, and I know people who claim a religion but don't live it and can't even really answer questions about it--it's just how they were raised.
So if they're claiming the religion of their parents, but they don't go to church or practice their religion--or, in many cases, even fully understand it--what are their children going to claim? I suspect that we'll see the rates of agnostics, atheists, deists, and alternative religions growing at a steady pace for a while, until we get to a point where people who claim a religion are primarily the ones who actually practice it and aren't just claiming the religion they were born into.
Forgive me if this is too private a question, and of course you aren't compelled to answer, but how would you have answered the survey?
I would bet that as children, the millennials were less likely to attend church regularly, or to receive religious education.
As with all such age-based graphs, it's hard to separate cohort effects from age. If the eighteen year-olds were surveyed in ten years' time, would they look like today's 28 year-olds, or much like they do now?Here's another recent snapshot, showing percentage by age of Americans identifying as Protestant, Jewish, Catholic, or none. The age range is 18 (far left bar) to 89 (far right bar).
ETA: Where do they get off calling "self-described pagans" a New Religious Movement?
full article said:The 2008 findings confirm the conclusions we came to in our earlier studies that Americans are slowly becoming less Christian and that in recent decades the challenge to Christianity in American society does not come from other world religions or new religious movements (NRMs) but rather from a rejection of all organized religions.
The Taxonomy of the Religious Traditions
...
11. New Religious Movements and Other Religions: Scientology, New Age, Eckankar, Spiritualist, Unitarian-Universalist, Deist, Wiccan, Pagan, Druid, Indian Religion, Santeria, Rastafarian.
Adherents of New Religious movements, inc luding Wiccans and self-described pagans, have grown faster this decade than in the 1990s.