Dave
that was also my impression when looking at the figures for the Oxford
Council of Faiths -
paganism is a very small (but influential minority) - which is no bad
thing - but after a while the hyping of our numbers gets a bit
embarishing - I wonder if its Ronald Hutton who put about the idea that
it was 'UK's fastest growing religion' -
which i really do have doubts about??
Personally I do self identify as a 'pagan' but i know many others
would not go that way at the time of the at census.
bb/93
mogg
D E wrote:
> my research with the census data was to give some supporting numbers
> of pagans in the UK, but I compared that to 'straight' religions to
> give an idea of the minor scale, and the census numbers included a lot
> of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikh, atheists etc,
> and to artificially aggregate all neopagans into one lump to force
> them into number 7 on the list is, imo, duplicitous and criminal
> data-chiselling, especially when that aggregate might well include the
> 1500 or so who self-labeled as Satanists, and who would presumably
> abhor wiccans/pagans almost as much as they abhor xians.... plus a few
> thousand Druids, who in many cases are as much 'Celtic christian' as
> much as they are pagan, and a whopping 32 thousand Spiritualists,
> (ditto for nominally christian underpinnings), with only just over
> 7000 self-labeling as Wiccan
>
> with maybe (a big maybe) 120-140,000 being nominally pagan or
> something similar (this includes all the small numbers of Santeria,
> Asatru etc)
>
> and that figure is simply dwarfed by the 390,000 Jedi Knights : )
>
> dave e
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andrew Fergus Wilson"
> <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Monday, January 28, 2008 7:06 PM
> Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] [Norton AntiSpam]
> [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] Witchcraft/Nature worship talk. Midlands, England.
>
>
>> D E wrote:
>>> *suppresses laughter*
>> Well, I'm delighted to have brought happiness - suppressed or not -
>> to your your day.
>>
>>> this isn't the same census data I spent hours working with few years
>>> back, then .....
>>>
>> Did your findings vary then? It would be very useful if you would
>> share it :-)
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>
>>> /Paganism is the oldest religion in the World, dating back to the
>>> cave man. And it's still growing in popularity. At the last
>>> census (2001), Paganism was the 7th largest religion in the UK -
>>> and it's grown in popularity since then. /
>>>
>>
>
>
>
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