Grim news.
What is most difficult to accept is that 1 in 5 people on earth choose to worship a man who was a sadistic murderer, a thief, a warmonger, a slave owner, a rapist, and a child molester.
What has humanity become?
Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest single religious denomination in the world, the Vatican said on Sunday.
Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican's newly-released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world's population and Catholics 17.4 percent.
"For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us," Formenti told Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in an interview, saying the data referred to 2006.
http://uk.reuters.com - Muslims more numerous than Catholics: Vatican
UPDATE: (04-01-08) Brian has posted a Reuters update on this story HERE.
*Second*, it's comparing all denominations/sects of muslims to one denomination of Christians. Almost certainly Catholic Christians still represent the largest population of people on the world who believe in a single set of dogma, follow a distinct set of doctrine, and look to a single living human for spiritual guidance.
When you also consider that a solid majority of muslims live in Africa, with little political, economic, or military clout, the numbers are less worrisome as well.
The truly worrisome disparity is how many Muslims are willing to fight against other beliefs versus how many Christians/Westerners are willing to defend their own beliefs.