Norwegians 'do not believe in God' in country's history

According to the report, Norwegians do not believe in God has reached an all-time record and eclipsed those who do believe for the first time ever. Answer found by 4,000 Norwegians on the base of annual survey, revealed that those replying "no" or "don ' t know" to the query "Do you believe in God?" now comfortably outweighed those who said "yes". According to report, around 40 per cent people said "no" when asked whether they believed, compared to 37 per cent who said "yes", while the remaining 23 per cent said they did not know. When the question was first asked in 1985, a full 50 per cent said they believed in God while only one-fifth said they did not. And Jan-Paul Brekke of Ipsos Norway, who led the survey, said that since they started asking 30 years ago "the percentage of those who said they aren ' t sure has been about the same". In the country ' s capital, Oslo, only 29 per cent said they were believers, while the sparsely-populated county of Vest-Agder in the north-west had the most believers at 44 per cent. Mr Brekke noted that not all religious groups were strongly represented in the country-wide assessment, and that "God" was not defined in the question. It could be the Christian god, an independent god or one from other faiths," he said. "There are quite a few immigrants included, but the majority of them come from Western religious traditions. We have only a few Muslims in our material." Only two in five British people now identify as Christian, meanwhile, according to a two-year inquiry which recommended that state ceremonies and the House of Lords needed to be more representative of the country.