What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionGiving to those in need is obligation, not generosity — a debt the fortunate owe.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and The Sunday Assembly are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
ShelfHow to live
Travels across21 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderDave Stevism · 2026 CE
Turns up as29 codes · 13 tenets · 11 rites · 10 communitys
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 35 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 10 faiths of this family hold it
Love of God and neighbor is the whole law.
The double commandment — the ethic every branch, whatever else it disputes, shares.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Whatever you did to the least of these.
The judgment scene in Matthew 25 sorts people by six practical acts — food, drink, welcome, clothing, care, visiting the prisoner — and neither group knew what it had been doing at the time. Doctrine is not mentioned.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Sikhism
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Work honestly, and share what you earn.
Kirat karo, vand chhako — labor and generosity as worship.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Langar — the free kitchen.
Anyone eats, everyone sits on the same floor, volunteers cook and serve — equality made edible.
Go deeper — context →
Vedic Religion
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Merit is real, and it can be given away.
Punya accumulates through giving, restraint and practice — and the ordinary Buddhist act is to make merit and then dedicate it to someone else, usually the dead. The philosophy is upstairs; this is the religion most people live in.
held by most
Go deeper — context →
The alms round.
Monks walk with bowls; households give food and receive merit — the economy of the sangha in one gesture.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Islam
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Zakat — the due, not the donation.
Two and a half percent of what you have held for a lunar year, above a threshold set in gold and silver. The Quran names the eight categories who may receive it, which means it is a transfer with a specified list, not a gift with a warm feeling attached.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
The two Eids.
Eid al-Fitr breaks the month of fasting with feast and alms; Eid al-Adha remembers Abraham's ram with a sacrifice shared three ways — family, friends, poor.
Go deeper — context →
also here
The Bahá'í Faith
Aum Shinrikyo
— one faith of this family holds it
Pay the victims, and file the reports.
Compensation to victims of the sarin attacks runs through a court-supervised scheme. Twice-yearly reporting of members, assets and premises is a legal obligation under the observation disposition, and further restrictive dispositions have followed failures to comply.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Church of the Eternal Backup
— one faith of this family holds it
Back up anyway.
The copy is a gift to the people who outlive you, not a lifeboat for you. That is a reason, and it is enough of one.
Go deeper →
Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Who pays.
The charitable estate — land bought by a successful official, given to the lineage, and never divided. Fan Zhongyan founded the model one in 1050 and it operated for eight hundred years. The rents paid for the school, for promising boys' examination expenses, for dowries and funerals and relief. One man's success became a family's advantage for centuries, by design.
held by most
Go deeper — context →
Deism
— one faith of this family holds it
Doing good is the whole of worship.
With ritual obligation removed, the entire religious duty is conduct — which Paine spelled out as justice, mercy, and trying to make other creatures happy.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Effective Altruism
— one faith of this family holds it
The same money saves twenty lives or one, and which it does is findable.
The founding observation is about variance rather than generosity: interventions differ in cost-effectiveness by orders of magnitude, so the choice of where to give matters more than the decision to give.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
The Pledge.
You commit publicly to giving away at least ten per cent of your income for the rest of your working life, and your name goes on a list. 11,153 people from 118 countries have done it.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Epicureanism
— one faith of this family holds it
E
Epicurus — the man who left money for a dinner.
His will freed slaves, provided for the children of a dead colleague, and paid for the school to keep eating together once a month. It is a strikingly institutional document for a philosophy about withdrawing from institutions.
Meet them — context →
Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
Feed the dead, and feed whoever comes.
The ancestors are fed before anyone else and the household is expected to feed visitors. In the diaspora this becomes a logistical problem — the graves are in Haiti and the family is in Brooklyn — and remittances sent home for ceremonies are a real and substantial category of Haitian money transfer.
Go deeper — context →
Mandaeism
— one faith of this family holds it
Baptize, marry, give alms.
Mandaean ethics is emphatically this-worldly for a Gnostic faith: celibacy is forbidden, marriage and children are duties, and the river is never far.
Go deeper — context →
Pantheism
— one faith of this family holds it
The extremes of wealth and poverty must be abolished.
Not wealth as such — the faith is explicitly not communist and defends private property and profit. What is targeted is the extremes at either end, through graduated taxation, profit-sharing, and a mandated floor. Voluntary charity is held to be insufficient and structural remedy is called for.
Go deeper — context →
Pilgrims of the Last Tuesday
— one faith of this family holds it
Give away what you love, monthly.
Ownership loosened deliberately — grief rehearsed at survivable scale.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
The seventh month.
The gates open and the dead come up for thirty days. Food is left at roadsides for the ones nobody feeds, street braziers burn all month, and opera is staged with the front row of seats deliberately left empty. People avoid swimming, weddings, house moves and new cars for the duration, including people who say they believe none of it.
Go deeper — context →
Who pays.
Incense money in the box, candles and paper goods sold at the door, per-household subscriptions when a jiao is held, and fees for funerals, house blessings and talismans. A lay committee holds the money and hires the priests — in Taiwan and Fujian those committees are locally powerful and often politically connected.
Go deeper — context →
The Ethical Culture Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
They built the institutions and then let them go.
A free kindergarten and a workingman's school from 1878, district nursing, Legal Aid, a children's hospital in 1891, the first Planned Parenthood clinic on the Upper West Side in 1950. Founders of the NAACP and the ACLU came out of the same rooms.
Read it in full — context →
The Missionary Church of Kopimism
— one faith of this family holds it
Release what you make.
The whole ethic. Kopimists publish under terms that permit copying, prefer the remix to the original, and treat the encryption of shared information as a compromise rather than a virtue.
Go deeper — context →
The Religion of Humanity
— one faith of this family holds it
Vivre pour autrui — live for others.
Comte coined the word altruism to name it, and built the entire ethic on the claim that the self is a debtor from birth.
Go deeper — context →
The Sunday Assembly
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Sunday Assembly
Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Yoruba Religion
Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Zoroastrianism
Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
The tithe.
Ten percent, taught as an obligation in most Pentecostal and evangelical churches and as an aspiration elsewhere. It funds a global network of churches with no state support, and it is also the mechanism prosperity preaching uses, which is why the practice is defended and attacked from inside the same tradition.
Go deeper — context →
Who pays.
The plate, mostly. Germany is the exception worth knowing: a church tax of eight to nine percent of income tax, collected by the state and handed over, which gives the German churches enormous budgets and gives Germans a bureaucratic way to leave — a few hundred thousand file the form each year.
Go deeper — context →
Who holds the property.
The Bombay Parsi Punchayet is the custodian of the fire temples, the Towers of Silence and a very large stock of subsidised housing in one of the most expensive cities on earth. Its elections are fiercely fought, and control of housing allocation has been an instrument in the argument about who counts as a Parsi.
Go deeper — context →