What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionExistence is a contest between good and evil, and every choice takes a side.
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.
Travels across13 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderThe Satanic Temple · 2013 CE
Turns up as12 figures · 11 storys · 7 tenets · 4 scriptures
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 — 16 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 4 faiths of this family hold it
S
Satan — the adversary.
A creature, not a rival god: the accuser whose defeat is already announced. Christianity keeps its dualism strictly temporary.
Meet them — context →
H
HaSatan — the prosecutor, not the enemy.
The definite article is the whole theology: ha-satan, the adversary, a job rather than a name. Isaiah has God forming light and creating darkness, making peace and creating evil — a line the daily liturgy softens to creating everything.
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Salem, 1692.
Nineteen people were hanged and one pressed to death on spectral evidence accepted by a court of Congregational magistrates advised by Congregational ministers. Five years later Samuel Sewall stood in Boston's Old South Meeting House while his confession of guilt was read out over him.
Read it in full — context & 1 source →
The fall was an act of love in the wrong order.
Eve's fall is read as a sexual relationship with the archangel, and Adam's as its consequence — which is why the movement's remedy is a correctly ordered marriage rather than a sacrifice.
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Aum Shinrikyo
— one faith of this family holds it
Armageddon, and who would be left.
From 1989 Asahara taught that a final war was coming, first in the 1990s and then imminently, and that only Aum practitioners would survive it. The doctrine shifted from surviving the catastrophe to bringing it about — a change the group never announced and its ordinary members largely did not know had happened.
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Discordianism
— one faith of this family holds it
The Original Snub.
Eris was left off the guest list for a wedding on Limbo Peak, so she rolled a golden apple marked KALLISTI — to the prettiest one — into the hall and left. The goddesses fought over it, the judgement fell to Paris, and the Trojan War followed. Discordians read it as a story about hosts, not about gods.
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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
O
Ogou.
Iron, war, machetes, rum, cigars and politics. He is the lwa of the revolution and of every Haitian government that followed it, and when he mounts someone he is furious and frequently correct — Ogou arrives to say who has betrayed whom, and Haitians take that seriously as political commentary.
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The Protestants.
Evangelical and Pentecostal churches have grown very rapidly in Haiti and, unlike the Catholic Church, demand an actual break — the lwa are identified as demons and renunciation is the condition of entry. After the 2010 earthquake some preachers publicly blamed Vodou for it, and Vodou ceremonies held for the dead were attacked by mobs.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context →
Islam
— one faith of this family holds it
Karbala.
In 680 the Prophet's grandson Husayn, with about seventy-two companions and his family, was surrounded on the plain of Karbala, cut off from the Euphrates for three days, and killed. His sister Zaynab survived, was marched to Damascus as a captive, and spoke in the court of the man responsible. Shia Islam is organised around this story.
⚖ contested within
Read it in full — context →
H
Husayn — killed at Karbala.
The Prophet's grandson refused allegiance to Yazid, rode out with about seventy companions, and was surrounded and killed on the plain of Karbala on 10 Muharram 61 AH — October 680. Shia Islam is organized around that death the way Christianity is organized around a crucifixion.
Meet them — context & 1 source →
Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
The eight-headed serpent.
Susanoo, exiled, finds an old couple weeping over the last of eight daughters. He has them brew sake eight times over and set out eight vats; the serpent puts a head in each, and he kills it while it sleeps. In its tail he finds a sword, which he sends up to his sister and which becomes one of the three regalia.
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S
Susanoo — the storm.
He wrecks his sister's fields and flays a horse into her weaving hall, which drives her into the cave, and he is exiled for it. Then he kills the eight-headed serpent, marries the girl it was going to eat, and becomes a protector against plague. The tradition does not tidy him up.
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
The sword is legitimate, and it is the last thing you reach for.
The Zafarnama sets the condition in one Persian couplet: when every other means has failed, it is lawful to take up the sword. The tradition treats this as a licence with a lock on it, and argues permanently about who holds the key.
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Hola Mohalla.
Guru Gobind Singh took the spring festival of coloured water and turned it into three days of mock battle at Anandpur Sahib. Nihangs ride bareback, fight with gatka, and split coconuts at a gallop; about a million people come, and the roadside langars run continuously.
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The Church of Scientology
— one faith of this family holds it
The OT levels are confidential.
The advanced material, including the account associated with Xenu, is released only after preparation and payment; the church says premature exposure is harmful. Courts in three countries have published it anyway.
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The Order of the Solar Temple
— one faith of this family holds it
The Earth is finished. The Transit leads somewhere else.
The order taught that ecological and spiritual collapse were both terminal and that its members had been given a way out — not a rescue of the world but an exit from it, into new bodies on a planet under Sirius.
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The Satanic Temple
— one faith of this family holds it
Baphomet at the Arkansas Capitol.
A Ten Commandments monument was installed on the Arkansas State Capitol grounds. The Temple offered a bronze Baphomet with two children looking up at it, to stand beside it, and sued when the offer was refused. The argument is always the same: a state that admits one religious monument has admitted the category.
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Transhumanism
— one faith of this family holds it
Whether the transition kills us first.
The movement contains both the people most eager to build a superintelligence and the people most alarmed about it, and frequently they are the same people. Bostrom wrote the declaration and then wrote Superintelligence.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context →
Vedic Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
The Goddess and the buffalo.
The gods, beaten, pool their energies, and what steps out of the fire is a woman holding their weapons in her ten hands. She fights the buffalo demon for nine nights and takes his head on the tenth, and the whole calendar of eastern India is built on those ten days.
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The Devi Mahatmya.
The first text to say the Goddess is not a consort but the supreme reality, and that the gods are helpless without her. Bengali households wake at four in the morning on Mahalaya to hear it on the radio, as they have since the 1930s.
Open the book — context & 1 source →
Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Ahura Mazda did not make evil.
This is the point of the whole system. Evil is not a test, not a permitted shadow and not part of a larger plan — it is an uncreated hostile intelligence that got in. The cost is that God is not omnipotent in the way later monotheisms would want; the benefit is that the problem of evil does not arise.
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Existence is a war between truth and the lie.
Asha against druj: Ahura Mazda's good creation is contested by a real adversary — and the war has a winner.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
Karbala.
In 680 the Prophet's grandson Husayn, with about seventy-two companions and his family, was surrounded on the plain of Karbala, cut off from the Euphrates for three days, and killed. His sister Zaynab survived, was marched to Damascus as a captive, and spoke in the court of the man responsible. Shia Islam is organised around this story.
Read it in full — context →
The Protestants.
Evangelical and Pentecostal churches have grown very rapidly in Haiti and, unlike the Catholic Church, demand an actual break — the lwa are identified as demons and renunciation is the condition of entry. After the 2010 earthquake some preachers publicly blamed Vodou for it, and Vodou ceremonies held for the dead were attacked by mobs.
Go deeper — context →
Whether the transition kills us first.
The movement contains both the people most eager to build a superintelligence and the people most alarmed about it, and frequently they are the same people. Bostrom wrote the declaration and then wrote Superintelligence.
Go deeper — context →