Cahaya’s Rants

VATICAN CITY - Islam has surpassed Roman Catholicism as the world’s largest religion, the Vatican newspaper said Sunday.”

For the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us,” Monsignor Vittorio Formenti said in an interview with the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. Formenti compiles the Vatican’s yearbook.

He said that Catholics accounted for 17.4 percent of the world population — a stable percentage — while Muslims were at 19.2 percent.

“It is true that while Muslim families, as is well known, continue to make a lot of children, Christian ones on the contrary tend to have fewer and fewer,” the monsignor said.

Formenti said that the data refer to 2006. The figures on Muslims were put together by Muslim countries and then provided to the United Nations, he said, adding that the Vatican could only vouch for its own data.

When considering all Christians and not just Catholics, Christians make up 33 percent of the world population, Formenti said.

Source: MSNBC

That bit of news made a big splash around the world when it came out on March 30. I am pretty sure that bit of news was a big boost to the morale of Muslims the world over. It confirms their belief that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world.

But the fact is there are still more Christians in the world - 33 percent Christians compared to 19.2 percent Muslims.

And the other fact not mentioned in the belief that Islam is the fastest growing religion is the number of people leaving Islam. In Iran it has been reported that in the last five years about 1 million Iranians have left Islam for evangelical churches. This has alarmed the Iranian Parliament so much that a death penalty has been proposed to punish those who leave Islam.

In November 2005, Interfax news agency reported that in Russia, 2 million ethnic Muslims left Islam and were baptised.

In June 2004, International Antioch Ministries reported that 50,000 Iraqi Muslims embraced Christianity as a result of their satellite TV broadcast.

The London Times estimates that about 200,000 Muslims living in the UK have left Islam. In Malaysia, the Mufti of Perak estimates that about 250,000 Muslims have abandoned Islam.

These are just a small sample of Muslims leaving the fastest growing religion in the world. On leaving Islam Magdi Allam, the most recent apostate of Islam, writes that he “has been freed from the obscurantism of an ideology that legitimizes lies and deception, violent death that leads to homicide and suicide, blind submission to tyranny, permitting me to join the authentic religion of Truth, Life, and Liberty”.