What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionEvery person stands equal; no rank, caste, or birth holds before the divine.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity 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 to live
Travels across24 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderDave Stevism · 2026 CE
Turns up as37 storys · 33 tenets · 27 figures · 26 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 — 57 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 27 faiths of this family hold it
The good Samaritan.
Asked who counts as neighbor, Jesus made the hero of the story a heretic the audience despised — and ended not with an answer but an instruction: go and do likewise.
Read it in full — context & 1 source →
The towel and the basin.
On the last night he takes off his outer clothes, ties a towel round himself, and washes their feet — including the feet of the one about to sell him. Peter refuses and is told he can have no part in this. Then: do as I have done.
Read it in full — context & 1 source →
also here 26 more faiths of this family hold it
ProtestantismJudaismThe Maronite ChurchThe Church of the NazareneThe Malankara Orthodox Syrian ChurchReform JudaismConservative JudaismThe Restoration Movement (Churches of Christ)RastafariUnitarian UniversalismThe Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)The Church of the BrethrenThe ChristadelphiansThe BruderhofThe Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing)Peoples TempleQuakerism (Religious Society of Friends)Reconstructionist JudaismSecular HumanismThe BaptistsThe Moravian Church (Unitas Fratrum)The Old Catholic ChurchThe Plymouth BrethrenThe Salvation ArmyThe Taiping Heavenly KingdomThe Twelve Tribes
Vedic Religion
— 4 faiths of this family hold it
Birth does not decide worth — and the tradition has argued about that for three thousand years.
The Gita says the four varnas were made by quality and action; the dharmashastras say they are made by birth, and set the penalties accordingly. Every reformer from the Buddha to Basava to Ambedkar has hit this seam, and the ones who stayed inside argued from the tradition's own scriptures.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Holi — the festival of color.
Winter's end celebrated by abolishing dignity for a day: powder in the air, hierarchy suspended, everyone dyed the same dozen colors.
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Cynicism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Hipparchia chose the cloak.
A wealthy young woman of Maroneia refused every suitor and threatened to kill herself unless she could have Crates. She put on the same cloak and lived with him in public.
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Parrhesia — speak, and do not soften it.
Asked by Alexander what he wanted, Diogenes is said to have asked him to stop blocking the sun. The story survived two thousand years because it is the whole method in one line.
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also here
Stoicism
Islam
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
No inherited sin, and nobody in the doorway.
Adam disobeyed, repented, and was forgiven, and nothing was passed down. There is no fall to be rescued from, no sacrament that must be administered, and no office authorized to stand between a person and God. This is the structural reason Islam has scholars and not priests.
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Ghusl, kafan, janazah.
Washed by relatives of the same sex, wrapped in three plain white sheets, prayed over standing, buried on the right side facing Mecca, usually within a day and usually without a coffin. The shroud is identical for everyone, which is the argument the rite is making.
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also here
The Bahá'í Faith
Sikhism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
All human beings are equal.
Caste is refused outright; the langar seats prince and pauper on the same floor.
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Woman is not lesser, and the scripture says so in one line.
Why call her bad, from whom kings are born — Nanak, in Asa ki Var. Sikh reformers have been quoting that line back at their own institutions for two hundred years, with uneven results.
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also here
The Ledger of Small Kindnesses
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
Anyone can become a sage.
Not by birth, not by blood, not by revelation — by study and practice. This is the tradition's most consequential claim, because it made a moral aristocracy that anyone could in principle enter, and then built an examination system on the premise.
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One word to practise for a lifetime.
Asked for a single word that could serve as a rule for life, Confucius gave shu — reciprocity — and glossed it as not imposing on others what you would not choose yourself. It is the Golden Rule in its negative form, and it predates the positive one by several centuries.
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Deism
— one faith of this family holds it
T
Thomas Paine — who lost everything for the last book.
Common Sense sold in the hundreds of thousands; The Age of Reason made him unemployable. He died in New York in 1809 with almost no one at the funeral.
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Discordianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Ordination as Pope.
The Principia prints a card certifying that the bearer is a genuine and authorized Pope of Discordia, with instructions to reproduce and distribute it freely. There is no examination, no fee and no higher office. Handing one to a stranger is the whole rite.
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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.
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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
Bwa Kayiman.
August 1791, a clearing in the woods in the north, a ceremony led by Boukman and a manbo, a black pig sacrificed and an oath sworn. Within days the northern plain was burning. Thirteen years later Haiti was independent, and it remains the only slave revolt in history that produced a state — which Haitians attribute to the religion that was in the clearing.
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Bwa Kayiman.
On a stormy August night in 1791, a ceremony in the woods — a prayer, an oath, a sacrifice — opened the Haitian Revolution. However historians parse the details, Vodou holds the memory: freedom began as a religious act.
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Jediism
— one faith of this family holds it
The census of 2001.
A chain email claimed, wrongly, that a religion recorded by enough people would win official recognition. In England and Wales 390,127 wrote Jedi, making it the fourth largest answer to the religion question; New Zealand recorded the highest share anywhere. No agency counted it as a religion. The figure fell to 176,632 in 2011, and for 2021 the Office for National Statistics filed Jedi Knight under No religion.
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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.
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The open temple.
Egalitarian service, patrilineal descent recognized, interfaith families welcomed — belonging drawn wide on purpose.
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Pilgrims of the Last Tuesday
— one faith of this family holds it
You tell one person that you did it.
The parent line practises alone. The Reformed require a single witness, named in advance, told afterwards.
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The telling.
After the giving and the walk, one phone call to the person named in advance. Ninety seconds is a full observance.
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Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
The priests, and the miko.
Training is at Kokugakuin in Tokyo or Kogakkan in Ise, and a great many priests inherit the shrine from a father anyway. Women were admitted to the priesthood after 1945 and are now about a tenth of it. The miko in red and white are usually students on short contracts — a job, not an office, though the role descends from something older and stranger.
held by most
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
S
Sun Buer.
She left a husband and three children to follow Wang Chongyang and became one of the Seven Perfected. The tradition says she poured hot oil on her own face and scarred it so that she could travel and beg without being molested, and that she is the origin of the separate literature on womens internal alchemy.
⚖ contested within
Meet them — context →
The Brahma Kumaris
— one faith of this family holds it
He handed it to the young women, and never took it back.
In 1937 Lekhraj Kripalani vested his entire fortune in a trust of eight women, most of them under twenty-five. The organisation has been administered by women continuously since, which is close to unique among world religions.
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The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
— one faith of this family holds it
Pirates cooled the earth, and there are fewer of them now.
The letter includes a chart of global average temperature against the estimated number of pirates since 1800, showing an inverse relationship, and concludes that the decline in piracy is the cause of global warming. It is the clearest demonstration of correlation mistaken for causation ever put in front of a school board.
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The letter to Kansas.
Written in 2005 while the Kansas State Board of Education was deciding whether to teach intelligent design in science classes. It asked for one third of class time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, on the stated grounds that if intelligent design is not faith but science, the same must be true of this. The board never replied.
Read it in full — context →
The Ethical Culture Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Ethical Culture Movement
The Missionary Church of Kopimism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Missionary Church of Kopimism
The Satanic Temple
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Satanic Temple
The Sunday Assembly
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Sunday Assembly
The Urantia Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Urantia Movement
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
Women and ordination.
The Church of England ordained women priests in 1994 and bishops in 2014; most mainline Protestant churches did so earlier. Rome holds the question closed. The Orthodox churches are re-examining the ancient order of deaconesses, which existed and then stopped, and nobody quite agrees why.
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Women in the mosque.
A hadith forbids preventing women from going, and a great many mosques in South Asia and the Gulf have no space for them at all. The argument is running now: Morocco has trained and posted women preachers, the murshidat, since 2006; campaigns in Britain, India and Indonesia are pushing on access, and the counter-argument is almost always about the building rather than the text.
Go deeper — context →
Birth does not decide worth — and the tradition has argued about that for three thousand years.
The Gita says the four varnas were made by quality and action; the dharmashastras say they are made by birth, and set the penalties accordingly. Every reformer from the Buddha to Basava to Ambedkar has hit this seam, and the ones who stayed inside argued from the tradition's own scriptures.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
S
Sun Buer.
She left a husband and three children to follow Wang Chongyang and became one of the Seven Perfected. The tradition says she poured hot oil on her own face and scarred it so that she could travel and beg without being molested, and that she is the origin of the separate literature on womens internal alchemy.
Meet them — context →