Talk:Irreligion in South Korea

Reverted so as to remove 'The latter statement is a contradiction -- it cannot be true.'
The 'latter statement' is demonstrably true, as can easily be checked in the Gallup International poll's pdf source document (See Religion-wise subsection of Table 8 on Pages 24 and 25, and also 'Interesting Variations Among the Believers' on page 4, brief discussion plus table, which I have now added as precise citations in the article). You may think that those who say they are Christian or Muslim, etc, but 'not a religious person' (usually about 12 to 20% in the quoted tables, but over 50% for Jews) are contradicting themselves, and even more so if they say they are convinced atheists (usually about 1 to 3% in the quoted tables), but it does not follow that these respondents think they are contradicting themselves. They may simply have a different understanding of what the relevant words mean (all discussion of both religion and irreligion suffers from the lack of agreement on the meaning of the words being discussed). For instance, a TV programme promoting Humanism once included a self-described 'Christian atheist' who said he did not believe in God but did believe that Christ was a great moral teacher. Others may regard a 'religious person' as somebody who goes to Church on Sunday or to the Mosque on Friday, but a Christian or Muslim as somebody who believes in the truth of some bits of the New Testament or the Koran. Nor is there any agreement about the meaning of words like atheist, agnostic, believe, God, gods, etc, even in English, let alone in a multilingual and multi-cultural international survey. And respondents may have difficulty expressing the subtleties of their positions in something as unsubtle as 'please tick one of these boxes'. And so on ad infinitum.

In any case Wikpedia rules such as WP:NOR and WP:NPOV means that you can't simply write 'The latter statement is a contradiction -- it cannot be true.' in a Wikipedia article - you should put that sort of opinion here in the Talk page for discussion, ideally along with constructive suggestions on how to modify the article to improve it by fixing the problem that you think you have identified (or you can attempt such fixes yourself, and let others revert and/or modify and/or discuss them if they disagree). In my view, a fix would involve saying something similar to what I have just written, but finding a suitable citation to support this is not necessarily easy, as the quoted survey doesn't seem to discuss the issue. I may be able to find a relevant quote regarding the problems caused by different understandings of the meanings of words which I remember reading somewhere here about ten years ago, but this probably involves a bit of work which I hope to remember to get round to doing, but possibly not today. Tlhslobus (talk) 05:27, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

I have now added to the article a sentence as described above. Tlhslobus (talk) 06:23, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

To user 108.184.46.3, thanks, in spite of our earlier disagreements (and probably also because of them), I feel you have helped to significantly improve the article including both the data you have now added, as well as the sentences and references added by me as a result of your objections. Once again, thanks. Tlhslobus (talk) 14:33, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

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