The term religious generally refers to those who have a type of religion that is recognized by the world as being a religion, for example Christianity, or Buddhism. While the term nonreligious refers to a very diverse, and very large portion of society. Nonreligious as an overall term refers to people who view religion through passive eyes, and neither deny or affirm the existence of a god, and these people are often referred to as agnostics. While the term atheist, instead refers to a person who actively denies the existence of god(s). This name is generally the name for all of those who have no religion, while this is indeed not the case. Estimates for atheism alone range from 200 million to 240 million, however most of these estimations come from China and Russia alone, where communist takeovers have often changed the cultures and religious affiliations of the peoples. However this number could be much more because all of those people polled for their religious affiliations, people often answer that they have no religion, because the majority of this group is not aligned with any kind of membership organization or church. Most of these figures come from census data, which most countries conduct only infrequently. However the highest figure that there is for "nonreligious" is 20% of the world population, or about 1.2 billion: "over 20 percent of the worlds population does not claim any allegiance to a religion. Most are agnostics. Others are atheists, who deny the existence of god." (O"Brien, Joanne & Martin Palmer. The State of The Religion Atlas. Simon & Schuster: New York (1993). Pg 41.) The use of the term religious or nonreligious refers to those people who believe in nontraditional religions. An interesting parallel can be made to real life that people who have an absence of traditional religions create the same behavioral, social, and psychological phenomena associated with traditional religious cultures, but in association with secular, political, ethnic, commercial or other systems of nontraditional religions.
