Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-226878-20150710200046/@comment-24891101-20150730023959

Indeed. It seems mostly a recapitulation of the point I made earlier.

As to the numbers issue, I think it comes down to self-identification. It's not like there's a reliable way of testing personal beliefs in a way useful for demographic analysis that isn't basically a survey. And this is hardly a problem unique to counting atheists. In fact, I'd call it a general problem of idealogy demographics. Let's turn the question around, for instance. Say there are eight  self-reported Christians of a particular denomination in a population of ten. Four incontestably hold firm to the doctrine, one is actually an atheist who fears social consequence, another is doubting, and two don't particularly care enough, but grew up in it. This scenario is not meaningfully different from yours. While it might be desirable to know how many people actually hold a belief, it's something of an open question, because such things are ultimately self-reported, and trying to say that a person is not really a group member is folly; it oversimplifies the vast and nebulous web of human idealogical positions, and establishing a litmus test like that begins to reek of Scotsman, since in most cases there's not a meaningful standard. I'm not an expert in demographics, nor in the methods used to estimate such things, but given they're such complicated things, there's a lot of room for approximation. And, at the end of the day, it does not really matter whether they actually hold that position, so long as they are sufficiently similar.