There is an international group called the Atheist Alliance International, who is currently running a census via the Internet, to count the number of atheists and similar thinkers world-wide. This is a project to collect demographic information of the world's atheists. They aim to build a picture of atheists in the world, what their education is, where they are, what genders and ages they are, and other information. This information will be used to demonstrate the presence of atheists in the world's societies.
This project, Atheist Census, is run by Atheist Alliance International, which is a global collection of various atheist/freethinker groups and people. They run the website www.atheistalliance.org
The data counted is aggregated by country, so that atheists can see how their way of viewing reality is progressing in their own countries. Of course, the Atheist Alliance International is willing to entertain other forms of usage for this collected data, and they can be contacted at the email address, info@atheistcensus.com for general information, and media@atheistcensus.com for media requests.
To validate your entry into the database, you are required to confirm your entry with an email address, which is used to limit duplication of data, and yes this is not a fool proof system, but then we are talking about a generally honest set of humans, atheists, so this should not be a problem.
This census started on the 7 December 2012, and it was fully active for around 17 hours, before a denial of service attack forced the site offline. During that first 17 hours of operation, over 8 800 confirmed entries were made, with another 2 300 entries waiting to be processed. No data was lost and the Atheist Census came back online again on the 16 December 2012. This attack says something about the fear that atheism is having in the minds of the faithful.
The Atheist Census holds the position that atheism is a reasoned position, and as such had determined to only accept entries from people of 15 years or older. This is not to say that young people cannot be atheists, but for the purposes of the census, only those of this age will be recognized as atheists.
The current data available has some interesting things to say about the numbers of atheists in the world, one of which is the interesting ranking that the Islamic Republic of Iran holds, which is No.8 with around 2 494 atheists confirmed. South Africa on the other hand has 1 131 confirmed atheists, and this will change as the census gains more popularity. The world wide total of confirmed atheists is 132 079 and counting.
So if you are an atheist, freethinker, non religious, or secularist take a scroll to http://www.atheistcensus.com/ and make your mark to free thought.
Atheist Alliance International - Welcome!
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