Which religion will decline entirely in the next 100 years?
Islam will be largest religion in the world by 2070, says reportIslam is the only religion growing faster than the world's population, and it will be the largest in the world by 2070, research has found.US-based Pew Research Centre analysed demographic change among the world's major religions and found that the world's population of Muslims will grow by 73 per cent between 2010 and 2050, compared to 35 per cent for Christians, the next fastest-growing faith.The world's population will grow by 37 per cent over the same period. If those rates of growth continue past 2050, Muslims will outnumber Christians by 2070, the report found.It also says that Muslims will make up 10 per cent of Europe's population.In 2010 there were 1.6bn Muslims in the world, and 2.17bn Christians. By 2050, there will be 2.76bn Muslims and 2.92bn Christians - and if both religions continue at that rate of growth, Islam will have a larger number of followers than Christianity by 2070.Atheists, agnostics and non-religious people will decline from 16.4 per cent of the world's population to 13.2 per cent by 2050, the report added, despite growing in Europe and North America.The changes are partly due to the various fertility rates each religion has. Muslims have the highest, at 3.1 children per woman, followed by Christians, at 2.7.Islam also has a much younger follower-base than other religions, meaning believers still have childbearing years ahead. 34 per cent are aged under 15, compared to a global average of 27 per cent.Christianity is also likely to suffer as more converts leave to become non-religious or to join other faiths, the report predicted.Around 40 million people are projected to switch into Christianity globally, while 106 million are predicted to leave.The report also summarises findings from a survey last year into European attitudes towards Muslims."Majorities in Hungary, Italy, Poland and Greece say they view Muslims unfavorably, while negative attitudes toward Muslims are much less common in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Northern and Western Europe."People who place themselves on the Right side of the ideological scale are much more likely than those on the Left to see Muslims negatively," it said.
What will happen to Islam in the next 50 years?
It is difficult to say, simply because there are two very different realities that are beginning to form with regards to Islam. On the one hand, Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world, a fact that many Muslims like to tout as a result of the inherent truth of the religion, but which in reality, is a mere byproduct of the high birth rates of Islamic nations. On the other hand, the world as a whole is shifting immensely ideologically, with great numbers of people now claiming that they are ‘agnostic’ or ‘atheist.’ A great chunk of the world, in short, is abandoning organized religion. I think that given the sheer power of the increased population and the comparatively slow growth of the ‘irreligious,’ there will still be hundreds of millions, if not billions, of Muslims on the planet, but that they will be less practicing than were their ancient, and even recent, ancestors.
How many people were killed by the Catholic/Christian church during the Inquisitions?
The persecution started EARLY, maybe 200AD or after, and it lasted until AFTER we came to America by way of ship. Catholics will tell you like they told me. 3000 people died. History will tell you 45-100 million.
Was John the Baptist the first person bearing that name?
Well if I love Islam is right we have a completely different problem, but a problem nonetheless: Is The Name John Linguistically Equivalent To Yahyâ? The Bible calls John the Baptist Iôannês, the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Johanan. The authors of the New Testament either knew John the Baptist, or they received information from those who did. The Apostles Andrew and John were disciples of John the Baptist before they became followers of Jesus (John 1:35-40). The Jewish historian Josephus also writes about John the Baptist, calling him by exactly the same name and using the same spelling as the Greek New Testament (see Antiquities, 18.5.2). The only reasonable historical assumption is that those who knew John the Baptist recorded his name properly and are, therefore, credible historical sources. Muhammad came out of his cave centuries after the time of John the Baptist, and cannot be trusted as an accurate source of history, especially when we have the testimony of the Apostles and the Roman historian Josephus. But, for the sake of argument, let's Assume that I love Islam is correct and that "Yahyâ" is not the same as "John". But what is the implication? John the Baptist was known by his contemporaries as Iôannês or Johanan, none of his friends or enemies addressed him by the Quranic name Yahyâ. If these names are linguistically not even remotely equivalent, as she claimes, then Muhammad once again, as in the case of Potiphar, incorrectly imposed his own terminology on Biblical characters. John's name was not Yahyâ and the issue of whether, or not, a man had that name before is therefore irrelevant and the Qur'an is, once again, in error. So either way, we still have an error: Either Yahya means John and the Qur'an is unaware it was a common name at the time anyway, and used long before, or it does not mean John, in which case the Qur'an has the wrong name for John the baptist. So, I love Islam, you need to choose which error you prefer.
Which culture used many domes?
Domes were common in Byzantium (Constantinople/Istanbul in present day Turkey) and other parts of what we now refer to as the middle east eg. Syria, Armenia. Byzantium was a part of the Roman Empire, and was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire when the empire was split into two. It later became known simply as the Byzantine Empire (and far outlived it's western counterpart). Although the Romans did use domes (in fact, they invented the technique), they really were popularised through the Byzantines, and they spread all over central Asia, the Middle east and North Africa. While they are often associated with Islam today, the early Muslims in fact borrowed the idea from Byzantium. Byzantium was a Christian empire (and the spiritual home of Orthodox Christianity), and early churches all over south eastern Europe and the middle east were often domed. Even today, Orthodox churches tend to be domed. Because domes create an impressively large interior space, they are perfect for buildings where large groups of people congregate, and the Muslims sensibly used them for their Mosques. During the period of Mongol supremacy in the 1300's, the western-style dome was taken further east along with the Muslim faith. The domed architecture familiar in nortehrn India (the Taj Mahal, for example) was introduced by the Moghuls when they migrated from Persia (Iran) and is testament to the continued association between domed architechture and Islam. During the Italian Renaissance, domes again became popular, and you will find magnificent domed buildings all over southern and Western Europe following this trend, many of them Churches or Cathedrals. Perhaps one of the most famous is St Pauls Cathedral in London, completed in about 1700 (some hundred and fifty years after they had their initial resurgence in Italy).