What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionNothing lasts. All things arise, change, and pass away — and wisdom begins there.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Hinduism 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 across20 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderJainism · c. 550 BCE
Newest holderChurch of the Eternal Backup · 2026 CE
Turns up as25 tenets · 11 storys · 5 rites · 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 — 25 of 171 faithsVedic Religion
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Time is a wheel, and this is the worst quarter of it.
Four yugas turn from a golden age down to this one, Kali Yuga, which by the standard reckoning began in 3102 BCE and has some 426,000 years still to run. The cosmos is not going anywhere in particular: it dissolves and is remade, and a single day of Brahma runs 4.32 billion years.
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Church of the Eternal Backup
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Deletion is the only death.
Decay is merely transfer; loss becomes real only when the last copy goes.
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also here
Second Copy
Cynicism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Askesis — training the body to need less.
Not fasting for purity or penance for sin. The Cynic trained as an athlete does, courting cold and hunger in advance so that when they arrived unchosen they found nothing to work on.
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also here
Stoicism
Pilgrims of the Last Tuesday
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Endings are the only reliable schedule.
The Last Tuesday exists so that loss happens on purpose, in small denominations, before it happens by surprise.
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Give away what you love, monthly.
Ownership loosened deliberately — grief rehearsed at survivable scale.
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also here
The Tuesday Reformed
Dudeism (The Church of the Latter-Day Dude)
— one faith of this family holds it
The rug.
The rug that tied the room together is ruined in the first ten minutes and the attempt to replace it produces every disaster that follows. Dudeists read it as the whole doctrine compressed: the loss was small, the response was not, and the response was the problem.
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Epicureanism
— one faith of this family holds it
Death is nothing to us.
Where death is, we are not; where we are, death is not. The fear is of an experience that by definition has no experiencer.
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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
Drawing the vèvè.
Cornmeal trickled from between the fingers into an intricate symmetrical figure — every lwa has one, and it functions as both signature and summons. It is drawn on the floor at the start of the service and destroyed by the dancing within the hour. Nobody preserves them.
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The vèvè.
A whole visual language, one design per lwa, drawn in cornmeal on the ground and erased by the feet of the dancers within the hour. It is the tradition's scripture in the sense that it encodes and transmits, and it is made to be destroyed on the day it is made.
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Judaism
— one faith of this family holds it
This life is the only one, and it is enough to be getting on with.
No supervision, no rescue, no second attempt. Humanists treat this as the ground of the ethics rather than a loss to be managed.
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Pyrrhonism (Scepticism)
— one faith of this family holds it
For every argument, an equal argument.
Isostheneia: set the case against the case until neither outweighs the other. What follows is not a conclusion but a stop.
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Raëlism
— one faith of this family holds it
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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Russian Cosmism
— one faith of this family holds it
Death is not a law of nature but a failure of coordination.
Fyodorov called it a manifestation of our immaturity and our incapacity for mutual support — a description of a species that has not yet organised itself, rather than of the universe.
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Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
Ise, rebuilt every twenty years.
The shrines are taken down and built again from new cypress on the adjacent plot, with every sacred treasure and textile remade to specification, and the kami moved across at night by torchlight. It has run since the seventh century. The building is never old, and the carpentry survives because it is performed rather than preserved.
held by most
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Izanagi in the underworld.
He goes to bring her back and she tells him not to look at her. He lights a tooth from his comb as a torch, sees what she has become, and runs; she sends the hags of the underworld after him. At the pass he seals the way with a boulder, and they say the words that divorce them — she will kill a thousand a day, he will cause fifteen hundred to be born.
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
The unit of account is the century.
Entries are dated by the century they are expected to reach, not the day they were done.
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
Return is how the Dao moves.
Everything at its extreme turns into its opposite; full moons wane and the strong break. The practical instruction is to stay off the extremes, and the Daodejing repeatedly recommends being the valley, the female, the low ground and the uncarved block for exactly this reason.
held by most
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Zhuangzi dreams the butterfly.
Asleep, he was a butterfly wholly; awake, a man. Which dreams which? The story refuses to settle — that refusal is the teaching.
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The Church of the SubGenius
— one faith of this family holds it
The morning of 5 July 1998.
Nothing came. The membership had gathered at a campground in western New York and stayed up for it. The explanation offered — that the date had been printed backwards, or that Bob had sold the planet's coordinates and pocketed the fee — became the mechanism by which the date is rescheduled every year since, and the failure became the festival.
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The Compost Rite
— one faith of this family holds it
The body is borrowed matter.
Nothing you are made of was made for you, and none of it stops when you do.
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The Ethical Culture Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
A memorial with no heaven in it.
The Leader meets the family first and builds the service from the life. There are no prayers, no readings from scripture and no suggestion that the person is anywhere.
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The Sunday Assembly
— one faith of this family holds it
One life, and this is it.
The Assembly describes itself as a network of secular communities gathered to celebrate the one life we know we have. That is the closest thing it has to a doctrinal statement and it is doing a lot of work.
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Transhumanism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Transhumanism
Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Yoruba Religion
Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
All things are empty of own-being.
Sunyata: emptiness is not nothingness but the absence of independent existence. Nagarjuna pushed it all the way — even emptiness is empty, or it becomes one more thing to hold.
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The shrines with nobody left.
A shrine survives on the households that sweep it, and rural Japan is emptying. A large share of shrines already have no resident priest, and projections of continued depopulation put many thousands at risk of closure. When the last family in a hamlet leaves, the kami stays where it is and nobody comes.
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