Burkina Faso beliefs

Burkina Faso is said to have no atheists (too low to be statistically reported as non-zero percentage) - but to have mutilated over 70% of all females (girls and women subjected to genital mutilation.) Is the margin of error significant for ones grasp of these two facts ?

What distinguished the remaining 24-29% ? Parental education ? Standard of living ? Level of education ?  Access to internet ?

UN Report on FGM and FGC

Religion stats

Do you have more recent numbers ?

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Secular Religion

We are just in from a great performance of Haydn's "Seasons" here in Fred'ton.  The work was performed in a large wooden church which may have inner buttresses causing acoustic issues.

Regardless, I got to wondering about how many of us miss choirs.  Here was a piece which could be performed on Sundays through the year: Spring for 3 months, then Summer and so forth.

The problem is with the arrangement for the close of Winter.  At my age, it is already striking in how the work moves inevitably to this end.  The finale is a trio with double choir.  It begins with the baritone/bass and then the tenor and finally the soprano. The Trinity.  No question.

The Trinity, like physical ascension, like Divinity of a man - all of these are deal-breakers.  Not to mention the virtuous maidens, the plowman in the furrow. But, oh, that verdant Spring, verdure and then praise of Sun and praise of Wine !  And ending with the traveller, salvation, and the final Amen.

Just think what a small city Vienna was in 1801 !  Not even the Vienna of Musil's Ulrich and the suburbs.  So it is sad to think that even in Papa Haydn's work, a work so close to nature, the secular cannot quite find even seasonal anthems and processionals and recessionals and some more regular occasion for the diapasons, the dithyrambs, the recitations, high, piercing clarabellas - all of which we miss in secular life - between concerts.

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Jaspers on magical medecine

Compared to the reading of Ricoeur by those looking for a re-birth of tradition in China, one can read comments of Jaspers in his letters:

1) the tradition in China was suppressed but does not need to be re-born; quite the contrary

2) Falun-Gong can be viewed as yet another perversion of the core of the teaching of the Dao as best can be reconstructed by hermeneutics.

3) The real political issue will be the extent access will be allowed to missionaries (yet again)

Heidegger and Ricoeur both lacked any scientific background.

notes to follow: Confucian revival and current PRC demographics; Buddhism in China; Islam west of the Han empire