Not near as many as you might suspect.
Ray Comfort preaches Evangelical Fundamentalism
According to surveys by the Barna Group-
"Born again Christians" were defined in these surveys as people who said they have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in their life today and who also indicated they believe that when they die they will go to Heaven because they had confessed their sins and had accepted Jesus Christ as their savior.
"Evangelicals" are defined as individuals who meet the born again criteria; say their faith is very important in their life today; believe they have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians; acknowledge the existence of Satan; contend that eternal salvation is possible only through God's grace, not through good deeds; believe that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; and describe God as the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who created the universe and still rules it today.
This classification model indicates that only 8% of adults are evangelicals. Barna Research data show that 12% of adults were evangelicals a decade ago, but the number has dropped by a third as Americans continue to reshape their theological views.
ONLY 8%!
The US has an adult population of approx 229,000,000.
Eight percent of that population is just over 18 million.
Ray's extreme brand of religion is almost unheard of outside the US, so worldwide, Evangelical Christian Fundamentalism represents less than 0.3% of the population.
So, according to Ray Comfort, 99.7% of the world is condemned by God to eternal torture in Hell.
Take heart atheists, non-believers, and rational theists - A hundred years from now our descendants will look at Ray Comfort's Sin & Salvation show as comically as we view those who preached to the Wright Brothers "If God wanted man to fly, He would have given us wings".
Belief in Evangelical Christianity has decreased by a third in the past decade. Education and rationality can only continue to make it obsolete. The key is - don't argue with creationists, educate them!
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BF,
ReplyDeleteThose numbers are consistent with what I have read on this.
People want more out of life than to be told to sit still, send money to Ray Comfort, then get to heaven.
Joel Osteen and others are proving that.
I would have guessed, solely on the content of his writings, that Ray's in the minority. It's clear that he doesn't believe everything he's evangelizing, let alone expecting others to do so.
ReplyDeleteAFAIK, evangelism itself contains a tiny fraction of the world's Christians - and a disproportionately large fraction of the nut jobs.
Here's an article about a recent Baylor survey that has far more people believing than I expected.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.baylor.edu/pr/news.php?action=story&story=41678
And here's the survey itself
http://www.isreligion.org/research/surveysofreligion/surveysofreligion.pdf
Glancing through the numbers, they are pretty much in line with the other surveys. Reading the authors in the the MSM articles, you'd have thought atheism was dying out.
Sweet.
ReplyDeleteThe Confirmation Text on my last post was "NOGODR"
Fitting for this blog & talk like a pirate day!