Re: Name this country

Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 20:02:13 +0000 (UTC)
Newsgroups: soc.history.what-if
Size: 1,789 bytes

In article <email-address-deleted>,
David Tenner <email-address-deleted> wrote:
>email-address-deleted (bgarid) wrote in news:4f2dc1d.0307210803.207ef056
>@posting.google.com:
>
>> "The poll showed that 25,1% of all respondents belong to the Russian
>> Orthodox Church, 24,7% are Lutherans, 21,2% Catholics, 2,7% Orthodox
>> Old Believers, 2,6% Baptists, 0,3% Adventists and 0,1% confess
>> Judaism. Only two persons described themselves as Pagans and one
>> turned out to be a Buddhist.
>>
>> Another 9,3% consider themselves believers, but do not belong to any
>> particular confession. The remaining 11,9% are atheists."
>>
>> Name the country in which this poll took place.
>
>Latvia?
Gotta be Latvia. Since you have the Orthodox Christians, and not just
any Orthodox (as in Greek Orthodox or Georgian Orthodox) but Russian
Orthodox, it has to be a country somewhere not far from Russia, but
neither Georgia nor Armenia nor Romania or other Balkan country.
Could not be Manitoba or Saskatchewan either, 'cause they ain't
countries (and they have to have more Anglicans). The near-absence of
Muslims or Buddhists means that the country in question can't be in
Asia, and the number of Lutherans is way too high for Ukraine (post-1941) or
Belarus. Estonia and Finland have to have much higher share of
Lutherans, while Lithuania and Poland are mostly Catholic.
I was surprised to see that the poll showed almost as many [Roman or
Greek] Catholics as Lutherans, but in fact there is a substantial RC
population in Latvia:
http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/country/sc1.html
The small number of observant Jews was surprising too, but I guess
that most of those who have survived the Holocaust, and their
descendants, are now in Israel or Brooklyn. --vld.