ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), one of the great psychologists of the twentieth century, wrote that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.1 If this is so, the world is filled with something like five billion neurotic individuals. As I type these words, in sheer numbers there are roughly two billion Christians, consisting of Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox; there are well over a billion Muslims, close to 80 percent of whom are Sunni and 20 percent Shiite; there are over a billion Hindus; roughly 350 million Buddhists (Theravada and Mahayana); approximately 350 million adherents of the Chinese traditions of Confucianism and Daoism; about 300 million adherents of African traditional religions (Animists, Shamanists, etc.); 25 million Sikhs; 14 million Jews; 7 million Baha’i; 4 million Jains, and the list goes on (see Figure 1.12). And the religious traditions are not limited to geographic regions. Western religions have migrated East and Eastern religions have traveled West. As a case in point, Diana Eck – Director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University – has pointed out that the formerly “Christian country” of the United States has now become the most religiously diverse nation in the world, with millions of adherents of Eastern as well as Western religions.3 Worldwide, nonreligious people are clearly in the minority, making up only about 15 percent of the world’s population.
