Google's Geographies of Religion

“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds”
Susan Sontag

Following up on the earlier discussion of the user-created geographies of religion, the following maps simultaneously display all four religious references (Allah, Buddha, Hindu, Jesus) in order to visualise distinct religious cyberscapes. Below we see the data on a global scale. This map clearly mirrors many of the expected religious geographies of the offline world: references to Allah being most prominent in the Middle East, references to Buddha being most prominent in East Asia, references to Hindu being most prominent on the Indian subcontinent and references to Jesus being prominent in Europe and much of the Western Hemisphere.

Interestingly, there are are no large-scale homogeneities in the data and this reflects the sometimes scattered nature of religious practice in the world. Looking at the below map of user-created religious references in Europe, it can been seen are a significant number of places (e.g. parts of Switzerland, Germany, the UK) in which there are more references to Buddha than any other religious terms. Likewise there are parts of Belgium and France with a dominant number of references to Allah, and parts of the UK with a dominant number of reference to Hindu. (The cluster of Hindu references on the Estonian islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa is tied to a village named Hindu rather than religious practice). Also of note is the transition of religion as one moves eastward and southward with references to Allah becoming more prevalent in Muslim North Africa and Turkey. However, one can also see how this is far from monolithic with references to Jesus also sprinkled throughout this region as well as strong clusters in Israel/Palestine as well as within Armenia.

In Asia a similar amount of diversity can be seen. The United Arab Emirates is a particularly interesting example. While officially a Muslim country, Indians make up the largest demographic presence and the dominance of references to Hindu (rather than Allah) is likely a reflection of this fact. Likewise the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago (particularly the island of Java) illustrate the complexity of religious practice in this region. References to Buddha, Allah and Hindu are all in evidence on Java. Other examples include the predominately Buddhist nation of Sri Lanka with some Hindu areas to the North and the difference between Pakistan (more Allah) and India (more Hindu).



Finally, it is informative to include one additional map with this set. Here we included placemarks that reference the word ("sex"), a popular and international used term with very different connotations than the religious keywords used earlier. The purpose of including this term is to compare user interest in religion to user interest in sex. If (as some say) the three topics to avoid in polite conversation are religion, sex and politics it seems only right that this Internet blog (the antithesis to polite conversation if there every was one) takes on the question. Sadly, the inclusion of politics will have to wait until another day.

In Asia there are very few places where there are more references to sex than Allah, Buddha, Hindu or Jesus.

Constrasting this is Western Europe (especially the UK and Scandinavia) and North America (especially the East and West Coasts) there are more references to sex than any of the four religious terms that we searched for. The distribution in the U.S. mirrors our early maps of the virtual bible belt and church-bowling-firearms-strip clubs. There are, however, exceptions such as the Iberian countries of Spain and Portugal which continue to show more references to Jesus.

So it would seem that Susan Sontag's observation has some merit, at least in the European and North American context.