What's a good estimate of believing Christians?

[This is the beginning of reposts from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions and their subtexts are not mine.]

Q: What's a good estimate of believing Christians?
The official number is around 2 billions but for example in my family we are all (6) baptized but only 50% are real Christians, the other 50% are atheist but still nominal Christians.


A: My rule of thumb, about any religion or none, is about 10% really know, understand and assent to the fullness of their nominal faith. Of those, probably none live out such beliefs perfectly. Augustine of Hippo, bishop, scholar and saint, wrestled with this question when he compared the visible ecclesiastical community with the communion of saints, dead and alive, known only to God.

As for Christian statistics in particular, there are many problems. First, different denominations count members in different ways. Many Protestant denominations count only confirmed members. Catholics and Orthodox count baptized people. That already distorts the number.

Sociologists of religion tend to prefer, as a yardstick, behavior indicating adherence. Here again, there is the problem of finding measurable behavior. A common, if imperfect yardstick, is attendance or participation in ritual services or events beyond major holidays. People who go to church one a month throughout the year, for example, are likely to be more seriously committed to a belief (regardless of whether they succeed at meeting the faith’ s ethical demands) than people who go just for Christmas and Easter.

What happened to the high ideals of the Declaration of Independence?

We are all moved by those eloquent words penned by Thomas Jefferson, but not only did the Founding Fathers borrow and misrepresent their intentions in the Declaration of Independence, the United States government has not lived up to the stated original goals.

Take the opening sentence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The Second Treatise Of Government by John Locke, published in 1690, states that the premise of all political power is “equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection.”

Was that really true for the United States?

We know than there was no thought given, implicitly or otherwise, to the equality of women (indeed, Southern lawmakers added “sex” as a protected class under the Civil Rights Act being debated in 1964, partly as a poison pill, partly as a joke). So let’s stick to men.

In what sense were the male African slaves or Indians equal? Or how about white indentured servants? Or was the point that the Creator endowed them with equality and certain rights, but hell if the Founding Fathers were going to follow suit?

This is not to mention the Jeffersonian claim in the Declaration that 

whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Here Jefferson went well beyond the Lockian writ. In effect, Locke had considered the question as follows:

May the commands then of a prince be opposed? may he be resisted as often as any one shall find himself aggrieved, and but imagine he has not right done him? This will unhinge and overturn all polities, and, instead of government and order, leave nothing but anarchy and confusion. To this I answer, that force is to be opposed to nothing, but to unjust and unlawful force; whoever makes any opposition in any other case, draws on himself a just condemnation both from God and man; and so no such danger or confusion will follow.

In fact, Locke’s views are reflected in the work of U.S. lawmakers over time.

In 1798, Congress passed four Alien and Sedition Acts that made it illegal for any person “with intent to oppose any measure … of the government” to “print, utter, or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government. Citizens or foreigners were barred from opposing the execution of federal laws, preventing a federal officer from performing his or her duties, engaging in aid “any insurrection, riot, Unlawful Assembly, or combination” or make any defamatory statement about the federal government or the president.

The Sedition Act of 1918 added willfully employing “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language”  about the U.S. form of government, the Constitution, the flag, or U.S. military or naval forces.

In 1940 the Alien Registration Act allowed the government to detain any national of a country at war with the United States without trial.

These laws were used against Federalists, southern secessionists and more recent political dissenters including socialists, anarchists, pacifists and labor leaders. Not to mention foreigners.

Arguably, the democratic experiment has some ways to go.

Make War No More

I was going to write a new jeremiad against war today, to protest the Memorial Day militarism and the propaganda schmaltz to help the $800 billion annual orgy of war-profiteering, which has not prevented the United States from losing every war since World War II.

Still, they keep sending Johnny marching off to kill and be killed. It's time to stop.

Here are some of my posts from other occasions on this subject:

A Greatful Nation

Dulce et Decorum Est

War is the fault of all the soldiers who wage it

Let's not forget: Osama had a point

Defying militarism

Turn the other cheek and love ISIS

While I don't agree with violence of any kind and I deplore what happened in Paris, this is an object lesson that I suspect will be ignored. Certainly, after September 11, I heard calls for revenge even in church (and from an Irish priest), despite Jesus' clear teaching to turn the other cheek and love our enemies.

I don't expect anyone in France to remember the deeply embedded hatred of Muslims in France and the mistreatment of all Arabs by the French. I'm sure few in France or elsewhere recall how France provided a major Western example of kidnapping, torture and murder without trial in Algeria in the late 1950s.

That didn't count in Western eyes, after all, in European eyes they were just Muslim brown people, rather than pseudo-Christian whites.

Paris, France was a fitting target for Muslim desperadoes. It wasn't just random. I don't approve of it, but I recognize it for what it is.

No one in the West ever thinks about these things, much as no one considered how decades of depredations of Western oil interests affected Muslims and the Arab world. Osama bin Laden's 1998 fatwah, although unquestionably a turgid rant, didn't come out of nowhere.

There's the tyranny of the House of Saud in the Arabian peninsula and the other various emirates ruled by princes selling out their people for oil revenues. There's the Mossadegh coup in Iran, the efforts against Nasser in Egypt, the Soviet/Russian alliance of convenience with the tyrannical Al Assads in Syria.

Then there's the elephant in the room: the 2 million Arab Palestinians many of whose families have lived as refugees in their own land since 1948.

The lesson is clear: let's find a peaceful way out of this situation. Let's open our doors to refugees and share our bounty with the world that has provided us fuel.

Let's lead, not with more war and money by the barrel to war-profiteering companies, but with peace and food and help for those who suffer in the Middle East.

Sure, the agents of violence must stop. But perhaps we should show them the way by example. Let's practice what we preach.

Let's not turn this into a perfect excuse to militarize our societies, shred what little is left of democracy in the West and start World War III.

Let's start, instead, World Peace I.

How I met Josh Radnor ...

Driving through minty green fields in my small boxy European car, I was looking for a lot to buy on an island. After I found one, my companion took me in her car back to the mainland.

She looked familiar. She was a twenty-something woman with long brown hair; I knew her, but try as I might I could not remember her name.

We went to meet some folks she said would be interested in my ideas. We waited for them for an enormously long time, looking out the window to the wintry narrow Oslo streets from a messy third-floor apartment. Inside, the lighting, which came from an unknown source, suffused the furniture with a dark gray hue that was set off only by a flat reflection of the walls' white paint.

When everyone gathered, they showed me several thumb-sized dongles that looked like plug extensions, except they had no pins. A blond guy in a suit, a serious but soft-spoken young man, explained that they were building a "skyryx."

I asked what a Skyryx was, but he couldn't explain it to me.

Every time he tried, others intervened to say that such-and-such a function was not yet proven to work. Somehow, it would connect or communicate or transform or control wifi channels and all sorts of peripherals from outside a computer or from other devices.

I got stuck on the name because it didn't mean anything. However, the group vociferously rejected verbs such "switch" or "connect" or "control" to describe what the new gadget would do. But that's what it does or might do, I argued, to no avail.

Suddenly, they realized they were late for something else and left in a hurry without saying goodbye. Even my companion left me alone. I fell asleep and later woke up in the disturbing grayish apartment.

Near me were the dongles and a dark rectangular cardboard box about the size of a piano-bench seat. In it were blueprints and instructions. I put all the dongles in the box and walked out with everything to find my car, which was back on the island.

My island had meanwhile been plowed and built up, with beautiful little farmhouses here and there dotting neatly plowed fields. As I became familiar with the terrain, it came to me that a magnate was buying up all the land on the island, almost leaving mine locked off the road.

Looking around, I realized that my plot had no path from the main road to my newly built farmhouse, near which was my car.  So I began to trudge through fields to get there. The island had unnaturally minty green plants that stood up like wheat stalks. Fortunately, they were not stiff, so I could easily push my way through as they waved in a gentle breeze.

The field in which I was walking was about a person's height higher than my field, but I came across a downward sloping rutted dirt path. I just knew it led to my car and started down that way.

Then, as I was almost at my car, I heard loud voices from the field from which I had just come. They were calling out to someone who, because he was on the higher field, I couldn't see. I left my stuff in the car and went to help.

Retracing my steps, I came to close to where he was and recognized one of the guys who showed me the gadget. He was carrying a thermos, which kept him from gripping plants to steady his way down the path without slipping.

"Give me the thermos and I'll help you," I said to the youngish man.

As he passed me the thermos, he turned his attention to me and recognized me. "Hey, a lot of people are looking for you. Do you know where the stuff we showed you is?" he said.

"I have it in the car," I replied. "If I'm going to name the thing, I have to understand it, so I took it to study it."

Turns out I hadn't understood that I wasn't on the project yet; the encounter had been a job interview and they hadn't decided on me.

"It's an 'outboard nexus,' "I said.

"What?"

"We should call it an Outboard Nexus," I repeated, explaining the name by way of recalling the engine off a small fishing boat.

We drove back to the mainland in my car. Back at the grayish apartment they all argued with me.

Then I realized. The guy with the thermos was Josh Radnor. I knew I knew that face.

Josh Radnor, who played protagonist Ted
Mosby in the TV show "How I Met Your Mother"

That's when I woke up and trudged to the bathroom. It was 5 am.

Every human being is unique, but maybe you are more unique than others

One of the things I learned in grand jury duty is that they were not my peers. Could I be fairly judged anywhere? Is each of us so unique that we are peerless?

A friend offered the phrase in the title as a response: Every human being is unique, but maybe you are more unique than others.

Ever since the 1960s, after which everyone had to be "creative"* and, of course, of such individuality as to be unique, people have been going around saying idiotic, self-contradictory things such as "everyone is special" (said by a Special Education teacher, in front of a crowd that included a politician whose kid was in her class). I loved the 1960s and would not reverse them by any means, but some things got misunderstood.

One of them is this business of uniqueness. Saying everyone is unique is a way of saying no one is.

Of course, our fingerprints and DNA are, at some cellular and micro-molecular levels, unique. However, let's not get too carried away by that. Because we all have DNA and fingerprints, and in that respect we are universally like one another.

We are, if we think of the Creator as a painter and the elements of our being the colors of a palette, variations or hues from the same range of possibilities. In the beginning, She painted one person tall and one person short, one fat, one skinny, one dark, one more pale and so forth.

Of course, given 7 billion** people, the number of possibilities is pretty large.

I applied the numbers to myself. I belong to a number of people in our era who, as a result of parents' background and peripatetic jobs, were born in the 1950s as part of a cultural fusion, anticipating by decades the effects of globalization and instant global communication (the Internet). In my case the mix was unlikely, as the two particular national cultures included that of Argentina and of the United States.

There are 41.3 million Argentines, or 0.59% of the world's population and 312.8 million Americans, 4.47% of the world's human beings. A probability calculation yields a 2.65% of the world's population that has the same two cultural components.

I am male, so I must pare that down by half (1.33% of all people). I am part of the post-World War II "baby boom" generation, which represents roughly 17% of the population (down to 0.07% of all people).

That's pretty unique, you'll say. And I haven't counted other distinguishing characteristics: hair and skin color, height and weight, languages spoken, education attainment and so on and so forth.

There remains the fact that the science of medicine that applies to other people applies to me. My liver may function differently from yours, but we both have livers and the medicine to cure mine will more than likely cure yours.

Indeed, if we were truly unique, we could not have language and communication (yes, most people are very bad at this) nor any kind of collective characteristics.

Still, perhaps I tend to be rare because I speak two languages with an identical and very high proficiency, plus a few others only a smattering, or just enough for etymology, history or exegesis, all hobbies of mine.

Among Argentine-Americans (of whom I know only my half-siblings), I am among the half (mathematical odds) that chose to fight the unaccepting social environment of one part of my culture, rather than flee the conflict.

I became the contrarian whose musings populate this blog by the force of habit. I almost expect people to disagree with me and vice versa.

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* To create still means to make something from nothing, to originate the existence of something. No human being is creative; we are, at best and hope the crick don't rise, innovative in our arrangement of what there is.

** All population figures are for 2012 for comparability.