The Religious Diversity of Asia

The topic Religion is so vast and the scope of debate may go to any extent. But I am limiting my subject to discuss the religious features of the Asian continent. The continent carries the most versatile features on many scores. Asia stands first in population. Almost 60% of world population live in the continent. Further, one-third of the total land area of the world is in this continent. Its versatility is well reflected in languages also. But that is another topic, which I may describe later in a suitable hub.

The region we call Asia has a total area of 44,103,000 sq.km and the population is 3,879,000,000. It is an amazing figure. It means that nearly 4 billion people are living here out of the total world population of roughly 7 billion.

The largest country in the continent is China and the smallest is Maldives. The same countries share records for largest and smallest population respectively. As the topic is religion, we need to focus our attention to finding the position of each religion in each country of the content.

When we look at the religious features of the continent, we can observe that no other continent holds such a versatile features as Asia does. It has a large variety of religious followers here. The continent has the strong presence of Hindus (1 billion) & Buddhists. The number of Muslims too is so large here with the rare record of having the most two populous countries are in Asia. Indonesia holds the 1st rank and the 2nd rank holder is India. There are some other strong religions such as Confucianism, Taoism, Sikhism, Judaism & Jainism on the very land.

The table given below list out the religions (except Christianity & Islam) in each country in Asia. Since Christianity and Islam are the major religions in the world, they have a sizeable figure here too. The most speciality of the region is the presence of Hindus. Their largest presence is here. They stand top with 1 billion followers, followed by Buddhists with a figure of nearly 500 Million. Hindus share 15% of the world population and Buddhists share 7%. A lion share of this figure is from Asia itself. Among the total four major religions in the world like Christianity, Hinduism , Islam and Buddhism, Christians have the least followers in Asia.