A Fourth Estate Christmas Story

The Fourth Estate Guardians (FEGs) are practitioners of free thought. We enjoy the fact that we can allocate our minds to whatever viewpoint is preferable to us, season ideas with logic and reason, add some vital statistics, mix with variance and congruency, to serve up quantifiable compilations where we take into account the broad spectrum of human understanding. Christmas is a season that is devoted to the Christian epic and story of Christ. It has also been rendered a mystical season where snowmen dance, reindeer fly, a Saint dons gifts and goodies, elves work for us, trees become centerpieces, candles and incense are hued in every household, and generosity is the epitome of belief.

In that context, the mystical context, Christmas can be determined to be for every human being. The magic of dancing snowmen, flying reindeer, Saints baring gifts, homes filled with incense and candles is certainly welcomed. Everyone appreciates generosity and magic. As a FEG thoughts of religious variations and politically correct presentations in this season came to light. What happens to the Zoranstrianism household during Christmas? What do the Chinese traditional families experience when they go to the mall in December? Do Scientologists practice Christmas? How about Hinduism followers? Do Islamists follow the theme of the Christ child?

There are two billion Christians in the world. Christian denominations maintain the highest statistics within the world populations or approximately 40% of the world population. Within Christianity alone there are thousands of variant denominations whose faith center on teachings from the Bible. In a study conducted by the National Science Foundation representative statistics on each denomination of Christianity are presented, along with the range of each classification, are the scope of weight the Bible holds as their gospel.

Contemporary figures for the Islamic tradition are between 900 million and 1.3 billion, with 1 billion being a figure frequently given in comparative religion texts. The largest and best-known branches of Islam are Sunni and Shi'ite. Many Muslims (and some non-Muslim) observers claim that there are more practicing Muslims than practicing Christians in the world. We have no reason to dispute this, but we would point out that there are different opinions on the matter since a Muslim may define "practicing" differently than a Christian.

There are over 4,200 religions, churches, denominations, religious bodies, faith groups, tribes, cultures, movements, ultimate concerns, etc. in existence today. Of these groups the major demarcative religions are as follows:

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