Religious ignorance runeth amok

OK, I guess this is one reason to break the Sunday blogg'n break. This is all over the place today.

Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest single religious denomination in the world, the Vatican said on Sunday.

Nice headline --

Muslims more numerous than Catholics

-- if you are a complete ignoramus.

Islam has as a breakout into denominations just as Christianity and to a lesser extent Judaism has. I am not just talking Sunni and Shi'ite. Both of those are broken into all little bits - to include the funky Alawite sect that runs Syria.

But .... they knew that - they just wanted the headline. Vatican, MSM, and "other" are all using this to get traffic. They describe teh stoopid nature of this breathlessness later on,

"For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us," Formenti told Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in an interview, saying the data referred to 2006.

He said that if all Christian groups were considered, including Orthodox churches, Anglicans and Protestants, then Christians made up 33 percent of the world's population -- or about 2 billion people.

The Vatican recently put the number of Catholics in the world at 1.13 billion people. It did not provide a figure for Muslims, generally estimated at around 1.3 billion.

Formenti said that while the number of Catholics as a proportion of the world's population was fairly stable, the percentage of Muslims was growing because of higher birth rates.

He said the data on Muslim populations had been compiled by individual countries and then released by the United Nations, adding the Vatican could only vouch for its own statistics.

You could also say the Muslim numbers are low-balled as where in the West you can say you are not a practicing Christian and no one really cares if you are some average Joe/Juan/Jean - try saying something like that as a citizen of Saudi Arabia or Iran.

Bleche on all of you. The world is fine. Peas be upon you all.