What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionScripture is not finished — the heavens still speak, and the canon stays open.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Buddhism and The Urantia Movement 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 truth arrives
Travels across13 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderJudaism · c. 1000 BCE
Newest holderThe Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster · 2005 CE
Turns up as14 tenets · 9 scriptures · 7 figures · 6 storys
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 — 24 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 12 faiths of this family hold it
The heavens are open — revelation continues.
A living prophet leads the church and the canon is not closed: restoration means the line to God carries a signal again.
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The First Vision.
A fourteen-year-old asked God directly which church was true — and, Latter-day Saints testify, the Father and the Son answered in a grove of trees.
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Torah came from Sinai.
Torah min haShamayim. Orthodoxy holds the written text was dictated to Moses and the oral law given alongside it; Conservative Judaism reads revelation as real and humanly recorded; Reform reads it as Israel's response to encounter rather than its transcript. This one sentence is the fault line between the movements.
⚖ contested within
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The midrash.
Abraham smashing his father's idols is not in the Bible; it is midrash. The genre works by treating a gap in the text as an invitation rather than a defect.
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Revelation is not sealed.
Six sources feed the tradition — prophets, world religions, reason and science, earth-centered wisdom — and the canon stays open by design.
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The Era of Manifestations — when the dead started sending things.
From 1837 young sisters at Watervliet began receiving messages, songs and drawings from Mother Ann and from spirits, and for fifteen years the communities were flooded with gifts: thousands of songs, secret written languages, and the gift drawings that are now in museums.
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A
Ann Lee — Mother Ann, who buried four children and then said the flesh was the root of it.
Illiterate, married against her will to a blacksmith, she lost all four of her children in infancy and after imprisonment in Manchester in 1770 preached that the lust of the flesh was the original sin. She was beaten by mobs in New England, and Shakers insist to this day that she never claimed to be Christ.
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The fall on the ice at Lynn.
On a February evening in 1866 Eddy slipped on ice, was carried to a house and, on the third day, read the healing of the palsied man in Matthew 9 and got up. The attending physician later disputed how badly she had been hurt, and the argument over that disputed fact has run for a hundred and fifty years.
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M
Mary Baker Eddy — Discoverer, Founder and Leader.
A poor, chronically ill New England widow who at forty-five was a patient of the mental healer Phineas Quimby, at fifty-four published Science and Health, and by her death in 1910 had built a church, a publishing house and a newspaper, and had written a book of by-laws that still governs it from beyond her grave.
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The church dates its restoration to 1926.
La Luz del Mundo teaches that God called Eusebio Joaquín González to apostleship on April 6, 1926, gave him the name Aarón, and restored Christ's church through his mission.
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Cao Đài
— one faith of this family holds it
Heaven has a bureaucracy, and it answers.
Revelation arrived by séance, formally recorded; the canon of saints ranges from Sun Yat-sen to Victor Hugo.
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The Compilation of Divine Messages.
A canon received in real time: séance transcripts, dated and archived — revelation with minutes kept.
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Church Universal and Triumphant
— one faith of this family holds it
The masters dictate, and someone writes it down.
Ascended beings are held to speak through a trained messenger. Mark Prophet held that office from 1958, Elizabeth Clare Prophet after 1973, and no one has held it since.
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Islam
— one faith of this family holds it
Revelation has not stopped, and it has not sped up.
Each Manifestation brings what the age can carry, so religious truth is relative to its moment and the differences between faiths are matters of timing and social context. But Bahá'u'lláh set a floor: no further Manifestation for at least a thousand years, and anyone claiming otherwise before then is to be rejected.
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Love Has Won
— one faith of this family holds it
Earth was moving from 3D into 5D consciousness.
Love Has Won taught that humanity and Earth were entering a fifth-dimensional state, described as New Earth or Heaven consciousness.
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Raëlism
— one faith of this family holds it
Life here was designed, in a laboratory, by people.
Not created and not evolved without help: the Elohim, a species from another world, engineered terrestrial life and recorded the work. Raëlism reads Genesis as a lab notebook.
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13 December 1973, at the crater.
Raël says a craft descended beside the Puy de Lassolas outside Clermont-Ferrand and a small humanoid asked him to write down a message. Every claim the movement makes rests on that afternoon.
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Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
The Ofudesaki.
Seventeen volumes of verse in Nakayama Miki's own hand — the rare scripture whose autograph manuscript exists, written by its foundress over thirteen years.
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
Whether the Dasam Granth is the tenth Guru's.
Three of its compositions — Jaap Sahib, Tav Prasad Savaiye, Benti Chaupai — sit in the daily Nitnem and in the amrit ceremony itself, and nobody disputes those. Whether Guru Gobind Singh wrote the rest, in particular the Charitropakhian, has divided scholars and jathebandis since the nineteenth century and still does.
⚖ contested within
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The hukamnama — opening the book at random.
The scripture is opened without looking and the hymn at the top of the left page is read as the order of the day. Gurdwaras post it every morning, families take one before a journey or a wedding, and the Golden Temple's is broadcast worldwide before dawn.
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
T
Taishang Laojun.
Laozi, deified — and the deification is roughly five hundred years after the book, complete with a doctrine that he appears in every age to hand down the teaching again. He is said to have descended on Heming Mountain in 142 to commission Zhang Daoling, which is where the religion dates itself from.
held by most
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The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
— one faith of this family holds it
The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Published by Villard in 2006, a year after the letter. It supplies what the letter left out — a creation account, the commandments, a pirate history and a heaven containing a beer volcano — and it is the document courts have read when deciding what Pastafarianism actually claims.
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The Urantia Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
The universe is inhabited and administered.
Not empty and not unsupervised: the book describes orders of beings, jurisdictions and a chain of command, in a level of organisational detail that is its most distinctive feature.
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The Urantia Book — 2,097 pages, no author.
196 papers, said to be composed by named celestial orders and transmitted through a sleeping subject between 1924 and 1955. The subject's identity was never disclosed and has never been established.
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Transhumanism
— one faith of this family holds it
God is technological.
Not a being who made the world, but one that does not yet exist and is being assembled as intelligence and compassion spread. Worship is participation in the construction work.
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The Truths are interrogatives.
Terasem states that its Truths are revisited by participants every four years at a quadrennial convocation. A religion with a scheduled revision cycle written into it is a genuinely unusual object.
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Vedic Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
The Lotus Sutra.
The sutra that claims to supersede everything before it: there was only ever one vehicle, the earlier teachings were skillful lies to get you moving, and the Buddha never actually died.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
Whether the Dasam Granth is the tenth Guru's.
Three of its compositions — Jaap Sahib, Tav Prasad Savaiye, Benti Chaupai — sit in the daily Nitnem and in the amrit ceremony itself, and nobody disputes those. Whether Guru Gobind Singh wrote the rest, in particular the Charitropakhian, has divided scholars and jathebandis since the nineteenth century and still does.
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The Dasam Granth.
The second book, attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, and the sharpest textual argument in the tradition. It is never installed as Guru in a mainstream gurdwara, yet three of its banis are recited every morning and are stirred into the amrit itself.
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Torah came from Sinai.
Torah min haShamayim. Orthodoxy holds the written text was dictated to Moses and the oral law given alongside it; Conservative Judaism reads revelation as real and humanly recorded; Reform reads it as Israel's response to encounter rather than its transcript. This one sentence is the fault line between the movements.
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The letters carried the authority.
For four decades the group was governed by mailed letters treated as current revelation. Members read the newest one and changed their lives that week; critics and former members describe the same mechanism.
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