this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2025
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@The_Picard_Maneuver@piefed.world
Whenever I see these statistics, I wonder something quite the opposite: I wonder which religions or belief systems are the smallest (as in, which religions or belief systems are the ones with the fewest to almost no followers at all).
Problem is: polls and surveys often ask one's religion from a limited, predetermined list. The person often can't even write down the name of their religion (or whatever label that closely describes it), so we end up not seeing statistics about non-mainstream religions such as Neo-Hellenism, Neo-Sumerian, Gnosticism, Thelema, among many others... Many end up picking "Non-religious" while they do practice a religion.
Then, there's the Internet, said to connect people with other people, often tossing Hapax Legomena (words that only happen once across the entire dataset, e.g. "Lilith" only appears once across the entire bible so Her name is a biblical Hapax Legomenon) into the oblivion (to be fair, it's just a byproduct of Zipf's Law so the Internet isn't really to be blamed), so we don't get to know about very unique (and likely very deep and rich) belief systems that exist out there.
Even when there's only one individual following some belief system they built themselves, it'd be really interesting to know about it.