What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionFeeling the suffering of others as one's own, and acting to ease it.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and Transhumanism 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 across17 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderJudaism · c. 1000 BCE
Newest holderChurch of the Eternal Backup · 2026 CE
Turns up as32 codes · 21 storys · 12 tenets · 10 figures
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 — 26 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 4 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 →
The prodigal son.
He asks for the inheritance early — wishing the father dead — wastes it, and rehearses a speech home. The father runs before the speech begins. The parable Christianity tells about itself most often.
Read it in full — context & 1 source →
Hillel on one foot.
What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow — that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary, go and learn it. Shammai, asked the same question, drove the man off with a builder's rod, and the Talmud recorded that too.
Read it in full — context & 1 source →
Kamtza and Bar Kamtza.
A man is thrown out of a party in front of the sages; humiliated, he informs on the community to Rome. The Talmud blames the rabbis in the room for their silence, and pins the destruction on baseless hatred rather than on the empire that did it.
Read it in full — context & 1 source →
Vedic Religion
— 4 faiths of this family hold it
Ahimsa — do no harm.
Non-injury as the first discipline: in thought, word, and act. Gandhi took it from here to the world, and the world's protest movements took it from him.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Church of the Eternal Backup
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Redundancy is love.
To keep three copies of someone is to hold them three times as carefully.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
also here
Second Copy
Islam
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Yusuf.
The one story the Quran tells straight through, in a single sura it calls the most beautiful of accounts. Thrown in a well by his brothers, sold, imprisoned on a false accusation, raised to run Egypt's grain — and when the brothers arrive starving, he feeds them before he tells them who he is.
Read it in full — context →
Your parents have a claim on you.
Birr al-walidayn sits directly beside worship in the Quran — serve God, and be good to parents, in the same breath. It is the ethical obligation Muslim families enforce most visibly and complain about most quietly.
Go deeper — context →
also here
The Bahá'í Faith
Yoruba Religion
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Obatala shapes the heads.
Obatala, given the task of molding human bodies, drank palm wine at his work, and some came out marked. When he sobered he swore off wine forever and took every marked person under his special protection. The maker owes his creations; disability is sacred to him.
Read it in full — context →
also here
Yoruba Religion
Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Humaneness (ren) is the measure of a person.
What you do not wish for yourself, do not impose on others — stated five centuries before the Golden Rule's better-known phrasing.
Go deeper — context →
Lead by virtue, not by punishment.
Govern by law and penalty and people will avoid punishment without shame; govern by virtue and ritual and they will develop a sense of shame and correct themselves. The whole argument with the Legalists is in that sentence, and the Legalists ran the state that unified China.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Dudeism (The Church of the Latter-Day Dude)
— one faith of this family holds it
Take it easy, and do not preach about it.
The second half does the work. Dudeism's only real prohibition is on evangelism, which it regards as the failure mode of every other religion and the one thing that would make its own advice self-defeating.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Effective Altruism
— one faith of this family holds it
P
Peter Singer — the drowning child.
If you would ruin your shoes to pull a drowning child from a pond, distance and numbers cannot be what excuses you from the same obligation to a child you cannot see. Everything else follows from refusing to let that argument go.
Meet them — context →
Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
Why Dantò cannot speak.
She fought at Bwa Kayiman, and her own side cut her tongue out so that if she were captured she could not name anyone. She makes a sound like ke-ke-ke and communicates otherwise. The lwa of mothers, of working women and of people managing alone is a woman who was silenced by the people she was fighting for.
Read it in full — context →
E
Ezili Dantò.
The other Ezili: dark, scarred, a working mother with a daughter, a knife, and no capacity for speech — the sound she makes is ke-ke-ke, because her tongue was cut. She is served with fried pork and unsweetened black coffee. Where Freda wants to be adored, Dantò defends, and she is the lwa of women who are managing alone.
Meet them — context →
Jediism
— one faith of this family holds it
The Jedi Code.
Peace over emotion, knowledge over ignorance, serenity over passion, harmony over chaos. The Temple of the Jedi Order expands it into a Doctrine of tenets, maxims and teachings that its clergy are examined on before ordination.
Go deeper — context →
Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
The hare of Inaba.
A hare tricks the crocodiles into forming a bridge, is caught out and skinned. The eighty brothers, passing, tell it to bathe in seawater and dry in the wind, which is agony. Ōkuninushi, coming last with the baggage, tells it to wash in fresh water and roll in cattail pollen. The hare recovers and tells him he will get the girl.
Read it in full — context →
Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
Bandi Chhor — the fifty-two.
Released from Gwalior fort, Guru Hargobind refused to leave unless the fifty-two Hindu princes held there came too. The condition set was that only those who could hold his cloak might follow, so he had one made with fifty-two tassels.
Read it in full — context →
Bhai Kanhaiya's water.
Accused of aiding the enemy by watering their wounded, he answered the Guru: I saw no enemy — I saw your face in every face. Gobind Singh gave him ointment too: bind their wounds as well.
Read it in full — context →
Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
Keep the Three Treasures.
Compassion, frugality, and not daring to be first in the world — Laozi's entire ethics in three items, each a form of yielding that outlasts force.
Go deeper — context →
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
— one faith of this family holds it
The Eight I would Really Rather You Didn'ts.
The Pastafarian ethic, given by the Flying Spaghetti Monster to Mosey the pirate on a stone tablet. The best known asks its hearer not to act like a sanctimonious holier-than-thou ass when describing His noodly goodness. The Gospel records that there were ten and that two were dropped in transit, which accounts for the state of the world.
Go deeper — context →
The Ethical Culture Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
Act so as to elicit the best in others, and thereby in yourself.
Adler's supreme rule, and deliberately reciprocal: you are not improving anyone from above, you are altered by the attempt.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
The Satanic Temple
— one faith of this family holds it
The Seven Fundamental Tenets.
The entire creed, published in full and short enough to read in a minute. They ask for compassion in accordance with reason, justice above laws and institutions, bodily autonomy, respect for the freedom to offend, beliefs conforming to scientific understanding, and the repair of harm done.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Transhumanism
— one faith of this family holds it
The Transhumanist Declaration.
Drafted in 1998 by an international group including Bostrom and Pearce, revised to eight points and adopted by the Humanity+ board in March 2009. It commits signatories to morphological freedom, the reduction of suffering, and taking existential risk seriously.
Go deeper — context →