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Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

Mainstream media regularly publishes anti-religious articles, but I wonder how many HN readers actually know and regularly converse with religious people.

In my shoestring travels around the U.S., I'd say most of the help I received was from people who identified as Christian.

I also observed that most charity work like feeding people regularly is done by Christians and other religious/spiritual groups.

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Only ~7% of the population is atheist or agnostic. ~70% is Christian.

You would expect the majority of pretty much anything to be Christian.

The ownership of the media, or any other industry, is hardly representative of the overall population.

My conversations with Americans were on reddit exclusively, so those statistics are very surprising.

Good to remember that Reddit is not reality. Twitter is not reality. HN most certainly is not reality.

I've found HN to be the closest to reality of the three you cited.

It depends on the dimension you’re interested in. If you extrapolate population tech-literacy from here, you’re in for a world of disappointment.

>It depends on the dimension you’re interested in.

Distance between what's written in the comments and the reality I personally observe, is the dimension I was thinking of.

Visiting my wife’s extended family is quite difficult for me because out of the dozens of them, not one of them has high speed internet. The internet is just emails to them. All of them are very active in their communities.

The internet, and Reddit especially, are a self selected group that don’t represent the majority of the 330M people living here at all.

While the statistic on atheist or agnostic self identification is fairly accurate, I think it is misleading. There is a lot of stigma against these terms in the U.S., and many people who hold beliefs inline with what would generally be considered atheist or agnostic do not self identify as such.

A 2017 Pew Research survey found that 18% of Americans consider themselves "neither religious nor spiritual" and that a further 27% consider themselves "spiritual but not religious" [1]. In total, roughly 45% of Americans consider themselves "not religious". Given the historical trends in the U.S., I suspect these numbers are even higher now.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/06/more-americ...

If you define Christian to mean someone says “yeah I’m a Christian I guess,” then perhaps. If you define it to mean someone actually studies the teachings of Christ and tries to live by them, there’s no way it’s more than 10-20%. If you go to church you’ll find most people there come infrequently as a purely social thing and don’t really listen or care about the philosophy much.

> In my shoestring travels around the U.S., I'd say most of the help I received was from people who identified as Christian.

Most people in the U.S. identify as Christian.

most of america is christian, most people here doing anything will be christian

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