What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionDivine will expressed as law — a code of conduct that is itself an act of devotion to keep.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and The Unification Church (Family Federation) 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 across18 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderThe Satanic Temple · 2013 CE
Turns up as60 codes · 22 tenets · 16 communitys · 16 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 — 53 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 30 faiths of this family hold it
Love God, love your neighbour.
Asked which command is greatest, Jesus gives two and refuses to separate them. Both are quotations from the Hebrew Bible, which the tradition tends to forget when it treats them as new.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
The Ten Commandments.
Inherited whole from Sinai — the shared moral floor of the Abrahamic house.
Go deeper — context →
also here 29 more faiths of this family hold it
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo ChurchThe Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day SaintsJudaismThe Church of the NazareneThe Malankara Orthodox Syrian ChurchThe MennonitesOrthodox JudaismReform JudaismConservative JudaismThe Jacobite Syrian Christian ChurchThe Malankara Mar Thoma Syrian ChurchThe Restoration Movement (Churches of Christ)The Amish (Old Order)The Church of the BrethrenThe Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (the Exclusive Brethren)Christian Science (the Church of Christ, Scientist)CongregationalismKaraite JudaismSeventh-day AdventismThe Ancient Church of the EastThe Branch DavidiansThe Christian Churches and Churches of ChristThe Family InternationalThe Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day SaintsThe Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of GodThe New Church (Swedenborgianism)The Salvation ArmyThe Taiping Heavenly KingdomThe Unification Church (Family Federation)
Vedic Religion
— 5 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 →
The dice game.
Yudhishthira gambles away his kingdom, his brothers, himself, and then his wife. Dragged into the hall, Draupadi asks whether a man who has already lost himself still owned her when he staked her — and the greatest jurists in the room cannot answer her.
Read it in full — context & 1 source →
Islam
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
The law is for something.
Jurists from al-Ghazali to al-Shatibi held that sharia exists to protect five things — religion, life, intellect, lineage, property — and that a ruling which serves none of them has lost its point. The maqasid argument is the main lever of modern reform, and literalists distrust it for exactly that reason.
held by most
Go deeper — context →
Zakat — the due, not the donation.
Two and a half percent of what you have held for a lunar year, above a threshold set in gold and silver. The Quran names the eight categories who may receive it, which means it is a transfer with a specified list, not a gift with a warm feeling attached.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Rectify the names.
Asked what he would do first if given a government, Confucius said he would make the words correct — because if language is disordered, nothing that follows from it can be right, and the people will not know where to put their hands and feet. It is a claim that political disorder begins as a vocabulary problem.
Go deeper — context →
What was asked of women.
Follow the father, then the husband, then the son; cultivate conduct, speech, appearance and work. None of it is from Confucius, who barely mentions women at all. It was assembled in the Han and hardened over the next fifteen hundred years into footbinding, widow chastity arches and the exclusion of daughters from the genealogy.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context →
Discordianism
— one faith of this family holds it
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.
Go deeper — context →
Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
Do not promise what you will not do.
A promise to a lwa is binding and a broken one is held to be actionable by the lwa. The standard Haitian analysis of a run of misfortune is that somebody promised something and did not deliver, and the standard remedy is a consultation to establish which promise and to whom.
Go deeper — context →
Illegal, then official.
Banned under the Code Noir, restricted after independence, prosecuted under the penal code's provisions on superstitious practices well into the twentieth century, and periodically the target of state and church campaigns. In 2003 a presidential decree recognised Vodou as an official religion of Haiti, allowing oungan and manbo to perform legally registered marriages and baptisms.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context →
Heathenry (Ásatrú)
— one faith of this family holds it
Honor is the measure.
Right action is reckoned in courage, hospitality, truthfulness, and troth — the Nine Noble Virtues in some halls, plain decency in others.
Go deeper — context →
Jediism
— one faith of this family holds it
Whether this is a religion at all is answered differently in two countries.
The Temple of the Jedi Order holds United States tax-exempt status as a church. On 16 December 2016 the Charity Commission for England and Wales refused the same body charitable registration, finding that Jediism lacks the necessary spiritual or non-secular element and could be followed as a secular belief system. Jedi themselves split the same way.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
Kegare, and staying away.
Death, blood, illness and childbirth are polluting — not wicked, polluting — and the polluted stay away from the shrine until it passes; the bereaved traditionally for around fifty days. The rules about menstruation and childbirth read now as plain discrimination, most shrines have quietly abandoned them, and a few mountains and festivals have not.
Go deeper — context →
Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
Whether Sikhs should eat meat.
The Rehat Maryada bans kutha — meat from an animal killed slowly by ritual method — and says nothing whatever about the rest. Damdami Taksal and the Akhand Kirtani Jatha hold to strict vegetarianism and every langar kitchen is meatless, while Nihangs practise jhatka and eat it, and rural Punjab never stopped.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context →
The wall at Sirhind.
The two younger sons, nine and six, were held for days and offered their lives in exchange for conversion. They refused, were bricked into a wall alive and then executed; Punjab keeps the anniversary in the coldest week of December and calls it the Shaheedi Sabha.
Read it in full — context →
Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
The gods hold offices.
They have ranks, jurisdictions, terms and paperwork, and they can be promoted, demoted, transferred or impeached. A priest addresses them by written memorial in the correct format, sealed. Chinese religion did not imagine heaven as a court by accident — it imagined it as the same court it lived under.
held by most
Go deeper — context →
The hundred and eighty precepts.
Attributed to Lord Lao and binding on clergy from the fourth century. Alongside the expected prohibitions on killing, theft and abuse of office sit clauses forbidding draining marshes, burning wild country, felling trees without cause and disturbing birds and animals in their season. They are genuinely ancient, and Taoist environmental argument has leaned on them heavily.
held by most
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
The Church of Scientology
— one faith of this family holds it
The eight dynamics — and disconnection.
Ethics is calculated across eight widening circles, from self to the Supreme Being. The same system produces disconnection: a member may be required to cut contact with a person declared suppressive, including a parent or a child.
Go deeper — context →
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
— one faith of this family holds it
The Eight I would Really Rather You Didn'ts.
The Pastafarian ethic, given by the Flying Spaghetti Monster to Mosey the pirate on a stone tablet. The best known asks its hearer not to act like a sanctimonious holier-than-thou ass when describing His noodly goodness. The Gospel records that there were ten and that two were dropped in transit, which accounts for the state of the world.
Go deeper — context →
The Missionary Church of Kopimism
— one faith of this family holds it
Three applications to the Kammarkollegiet.
The Swedish agency refused the congregation twice, in April and July 2011, on the form of the application rather than the content of the faith. The third succeeded: the decision came in December 2011 and was reported in the first days of January 2012, making Sweden the first state to register a church whose sacrament is duplication. It conferred a legal form and nothing else — no marriage rights, no state subsidy.
Read it in full — context →
The Neo-American Church
— one faith of this family holds it
United States v. Kuch.
Judith Kuch, an ordained Boo Hoo, was indicted in Washington on marijuana and LSD charges and pleaded free exercise. On 3 July 1968 Judge Gerhard Gesell found no belief in a supreme being, no religious discipline and no ritual, and read the church's motto and its two official hymns — Puff, the Magic Dragon and Row, Row, Row Your Boat — into the record as evidence of satire. The claim failed. Every later court asked whether a joke religion is a religion has started from this opinion.
Read it in full — context & 1 source →
The Neo-American Ten Commandments.
Kleps's decalogue, headed by the right of everyone to expand their own consciousness by whatever means. The rest concern honesty about what the sacrament does and refusal to sell it.
Go deeper — context →
The Satanic Temple
— one faith of this family holds it
The Seven Fundamental Tenets.
The entire creed, published in full and short enough to read in a minute. They ask for compassion in accordance with reason, justice above laws and institutions, bodily autonomy, respect for the freedom to offend, beliefs conforming to scientific understanding, and the repair of harm done.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
Your own prohibitions.
Divination gives you eewo — things you personally must not eat, wear, touch or do. They are individual, so two people in one household may have contradictory ones, and nobody else is in a position to check. Breaking one is not an offence against a rule; it is held to damage the arrangement your destiny was built on.
Go deeper — context →
Swearing on iron.
Ogun is iron, and to swear you touch or lick a piece of it. Nigerian courts and police have used it because people who will perjure themselves on a Bible or a Quran will not risk it on Ogun — which practitioners point out is a comment on which religion the swearer actually believes.
Go deeper — context →
Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Asha — truth, rightness and the order of things, in one word.
It covers the truth of a statement, the rightness of an act and the regularity of the seasons at once, because the tradition takes these to be the same thing. Its opposite, druj, is the lie — which is likewise a moral failure and a disorder in the world, not merely a false sentence.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Do not defile the elements.
Water, earth, fire and air are creations under the care of divine beings, and polluting them is a religious offence rather than a policy failure. Modern Zoroastrians point at this with some justification when environmentalism is discussed, and it is also what makes disposing of their own dead so difficult.
Go deeper — context →
Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
Marriage, and what the churches ask of it.
The common ground is fidelity; almost nothing past that is common. Rome forbids remarriage after divorce without annulment and forbids contraception, the Orthodox permit a second marriage with a penitential rite, and Western Protestant churches are currently splitting over same-sex marriage rather than agreeing about it.
Go deeper — context →
Abuse, and the reckoning.
State and church inquiries in Ireland, Australia, France, Germany and the United States have documented decades of clerical sexual abuse and of bishops moving offenders rather than reporting them. The French commission estimated 216,000 victims of clergy since 1950. No branch is clear of it; the Catholic record is the largest and the best documented.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Nahj al-Balagha.
The sermons and letters attributed to Ali, collected around 1010. The letter of instruction to Malik al-Ashtar on governing Egypt is read as a manual of just administration well outside Shia circles, and the Arabic itself is taught as a model of prose. Some Sunni scholars dispute the attribution.
Open the book — context →
The marja.
Twelver Shia follow a living senior jurist and pay khums directly to his office, which makes the marjaiyya financially independent of any government. Ali al-Sistani in Najaf is followed by tens of millions. Iran's system of clerical rule is a competing answer to the same question, and Najaf has never fully accepted it.
Go deeper — context →