The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease: Myths About Atheism and Christianity

Third, the international polling outfit WIN-Gallup International has released a new global survey that shows atheism is on the rise, but 59 percent of the world's population still describes itself as "religious."

Taken together, the results seem to debunk two persistent myths about global religion:

• Atheism is mostly a Western phenomenon. Instead, Asia is by far the world's most atheistic continent, with China alone home to two-thirds of the roughly 900 million atheists on the planet.
• Christianity is in decline relative to other world religions, especially Islam. Instead, nine of the world's 10 most religious nations are majority Christian, and people who self-identify as Christian are more likely to describe themselves as "religious" than Muslims (81 percent to 74 percent).

A few of John Allen's cogent observations about myth and reality as exposed in the latest poll results released about international religion.

Western atheists are the loudest and Islamic terrorists are the loudest. And we let them define truth for us oftentimes.