I was thinking about this today about the number of hours spent each day and "coincidentally" the Bureau of Labor and Statistics released a report summary of the American Time Use http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm. Basically this survey looks at the American population and shows a breakdown of the number of hours spent doing activities each day by the average American. I would like to look more at the data later, but for now there were a couple of interesting findings that caught my attention.
The average male spends about 3.10 hours per day watching T.V. and 0.12 hours in "Religious and Spiritual Activities". That is for all surveyed, of course not all people engage in watching TV or Spiritual Activities, but this does say a lot about our society. This table is really interesting and deserves a look, but another interesting fact is that only 7% of the male population surveyed participated in any "Spiritual Activities", but nearly 83% spent some time watching T.V.
Here is the table of data from the BLS: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t01.htm. Its actually really interesting even for non-data folks :).
From the survey notes:
"Religious activities include those
normally associated with membership in or identification with specific
religions or denominations, such as attending religious services; parti-
cipating in choirs, youth groups, orchestras, or unpaid teaching (unless
identified as volunteer activities); and engaging in personal religious
practices, such as praying."
