What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionThe choice is genuinely yours — nothing compels the soul's answer.
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 across26 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderThe Satanic Temple · 2013 CE
Turns up as41 tenets · 16 storys · 14 codes · 12 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 — 48 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 19 faiths of this family hold it
There is a judgment, and something is at stake in it.
Eternal conscious punishment is the historic majority position. Annihilationists hold that the lost simply cease. Universalists hold that everyone is finally restored, a reading Gregory of Nyssa held openly and a version of which was condemned in 553. The question is louder now than it has been in centuries.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
The garden and the fruit.
A command, a serpent with a question, a piece of fruit, and the first recorded instance of blaming someone else. What the West built on it — inherited guilt — is Augustine's reading; the Greek churches read the same chapter and got mortality instead.
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also here 18 more faiths of this family hold it
JudaismThe Church of the NazareneThe MennonitesUnitarian UniversalismThe Assyrian Church of the EastThe Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)The International Churches of ChristThe ChristadelphiansAnabaptismCongregationalismKaraite JudaismMethodismReconstructionist JudaismSecular HumanismThe BaptistsThe Christian Churches and Churches of ChristThe Family InternationalThe Unification Church (Family Federation)
Vedic Religion
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Savitri follows Death, and argues.
Warned that her husband will die within the year, she marries him anyway, and when Yama carries off his soul she walks after him. She flatters him into granting boons and then traps him with one — that she bear children — which he cannot deliver without giving Satyavan back.
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Cynicism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Custom is counterfeit currency.
Nomisma means both the money and the convention — property, rank, marriage, citizenship, the shame that keeps people indoors. All of it was struck by someone, and none of it is worth its face value.
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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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God decreed it, and you will answer for it.
Both halves are asserted, and reconciling them is the oldest fight in Islamic theology. The Ash'ari answer is kasb — God creates the act, the human acquires it. The Mu'tazila and the Twelver Shia rejected that as making God the author of injustice, and hold human acts genuinely free.
⚖ contested within
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also here
The Bahá'í Faith
Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Human nature is good — or it is not.
Mencius says the four sprouts of virtue are innate and that anyone seeing a child about to fall into a well feels alarm before calculating anything. Xunzi says nature is crooked and that ritual and teaching are the steaming and bending that straighten it. Mencius won the orthodoxy; Xunzi has the better account of why education is necessary.
⚖ contested within
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The Mencius.
Where the Analects gives fragments, this argues — for innate goodness, for the four sprouts, and for the proposition that a ruler who ruins the people is no longer a ruler and killing him is not regicide. The first Ming emperor had that passage struck from the official edition, which is the best evidence of how the book reads.
Open the book — context & 1 source →
Deism
— one faith of this family holds it
God does not intervene, so there is nothing to ask for.
No miracle, no prophecy, no answered petition. This is the doctrine that empties the building, and it is why deism has almost no practice.
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The Age of Reason went to prison with its author.
Paine was writing it in Paris as the Terror closed on him. The standard account has him handing the finished first part to Joel Barlow on the way to the Luxembourg prison in December 1793.
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Discordianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Belief is optional, and discouraged.
The fifth commandment of the Pentabarf prohibits a Discordian from believing what he reads, which includes the Pentabarf. Discordians who take this seriously do not agree on whether taking it seriously is permitted.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
The Pentabarf.
Five commandments discovered by the apostle Zarathud, including the requirement to eat a hot dog alone on a Friday in protest against the dietary laws of five other religions, and the prohibition on hot dog buns, which honours the Original Snub.
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Eckankar
— one faith of this family holds it
Your karma is your own bookkeeping.
The teaching declines to blame parents, society or God. The Master may take on some of the burden of an initiate; the account stays in the initiate's name.
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Effective Altruism
— one faith of this family holds it
Show the working.
The distinguishing demand is not generosity but auditability: a claim about doing good is expected to come with an estimate, a source and a stated uncertainty.
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Epicureanism
— one faith of this family holds it
The gods exist, and they are not thinking about you.
A blessed and indestructible being has no business with anger or favour. Prayer is therefore not wicked but pointless, and the fear of divine punishment is the largest avoidable source of human misery.
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Pantheism
— one faith of this family holds it
B
Baruch Spinoza — the lens grinder.
He turned down a chair at Heidelberg to keep his freedom to write, published almost nothing under his own name in his lifetime, and died at forty-four in rented rooms in The Hague.
Meet them — context →
Pyrrhonism (Scepticism)
— one faith of this family holds it
Say how it appears, not how it is.
The sceptical phrases — no more this than that, perhaps, I suspend judgement — are reports of a state, not claims about the world. Sextus is explicit that they do not even assert themselves.
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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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There is no god and no soul, and that is the good news.
The movement is atheist by its own insistence. What survives death is the genetic code, which can be recorded and re-expressed — which is why cloning became the movement's public cause.
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
The world is real, and it is where the work happens.
Nanak kept the vocabulary of maya and refused its usual conclusion: creation is the One at play, not an error to escape. The householder is the model, not the renunciant — Sikhs who left for the forest were sent home to their fields.
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The ninth Guru's stand.
Kashmiri Hindus facing forced conversion appealed to Guru Tegh Bahadur; he told the emperor: convert me first. He was beheaded in Delhi. Sikhs cite it as martyrdom for another people's right to practice.
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The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
— one faith of this family holds it
He built the world to look older than it is.
The letter's central move: every measurement that contradicts the creation account was altered at the moment of measuring, by a Noodly Appendage. The claim is unfalsifiable on purpose, and it is unfalsifiable in exactly the way its target is.
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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 Church of the SubGenius
— one faith of this family holds it
Slack has been stolen from you, and it can be got back.
Slack is the church's name for unearned ease — time, freedom, luck, the absence of obligation. The Conspiracy is whatever took it: work, normality, the demand that a life be justified. Everything else in SubGenius doctrine is scaffolding for that one distinction.
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The Ethical Culture Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
F
Felix Adler — the rabbi who did not become one.
He was raised to inherit Temple Emanu-El, came back from Germany unable to take it, and spent fifty-seven years leading a congregation that asked him for no theology at all.
Meet them — context →
The Missionary Church of Kopimism
— one faith of this family holds it
What the laws of physics permit should not be restrained by the laws of states.
The church's founding principle and its political argument in one sentence. Kopimists are precise that this is a claim about what ought to be, not a defence in law — no Kopimist has successfully pleaded the faith against a copyright charge.
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The Neo-American Church
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Neo-American Church
The Rajneesh Movement (Osho)
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Rajneesh Movement (Osho)
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
Transhumanism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Transhumanism
Wicca
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Wicca
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
There is a judgment, and something is at stake in it.
Eternal conscious punishment is the historic majority position. Annihilationists hold that the lost simply cease. Universalists hold that everyone is finally restored, a reading Gregory of Nyssa held openly and a version of which was condemned in 553. The question is louder now than it has been in centuries.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
God decreed it, and you will answer for it.
Both halves are asserted, and reconciling them is the oldest fight in Islamic theology. The Ash'ari answer is kasb — God creates the act, the human acquires it. The Mu'tazila and the Twelver Shia rejected that as making God the author of injustice, and hold human acts genuinely free.
Go deeper — context →
Human nature is good — or it is not.
Mencius says the four sprouts of virtue are innate and that anyone seeing a child about to fall into a well feels alarm before calculating anything. Xunzi says nature is crooked and that ritual and teaching are the steaming and bending that straighten it. Mencius won the orthodoxy; Xunzi has the better account of why education is necessary.
Go deeper — context →
Belief is optional, and discouraged.
The fifth commandment of the Pentabarf prohibits a Discordian from believing what he reads, which includes the Pentabarf. Discordians who take this seriously do not agree on whether taking it seriously is permitted.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →