What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionTruth admits many approaches; different paths can climb the same mountain.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Islam and Transcendental Meditation 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 truth arrives
Travels across21 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderDave Stevism · 2026 CE
Turns up as36 tenets · 15 communitys · 7 storys · 6 codes
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 — 38 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 9 faiths of this family hold it
The movements.
Roughly fifteen million Jews — about seven million in Israel, six in the United States, and the rest scattered through France, Canada, Britain, Argentina, Russia and Australia. In Israel the denominational map barely applies at all.
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Vedic Religion
— 7 faiths of this family hold it
Hinduism is a name that came from outside.
No founder, no creed, no council, no single book. The word comes from the Persian for the people living beyond the Sindhu river, and the -ism was added by British administrators who needed a column to count subjects in; what the traditions inside it call themselves is sanatana dharma, vaidika dharma, or simply the name of their own sampradaya.
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Six ways of arguing, and all six are orthodox.
Nyaya took logic, Vaisheshika atoms, Samkhya the inventory of what exists, Yoga the discipline, Mimamsa ritual and language, Vedanta the Upanishads. They contradict each other on nearly everything and were taught side by side, and a student was expected to state his opponent's case better than the opponent before refuting it.
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Islam
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
The People of the Book are not idolaters.
Jews and Christians get a category of their own — their food lawful, their women marriageable, their scripture partly acknowledged, their churches protected. Historically that came bundled with dhimmi status: protection, a poll tax, and legal subordination. What replaces the category inside a modern state is being argued out right now.
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Translation, and the argument about it.
Most of the world's Muslims do not read Arabic, and the tradition holds that the Quran in another language is not the Quran — the standard title is an interpretation of the meanings. So the book people actually read is a rendering with the Arabic beside it, and which rendering carries real theological weight.
⚖ contested within
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Pantheism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Whether this is religion or atheism with better manners.
Spinoza's contemporaries called him an atheist; he denied it, and so do modern pantheists. The word has been an accusation for as long as it has existed.
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also here
Pantheism
Cao Đài
— one faith of this family holds it
All great teachers taught one God.
Buddha, Laozi, Confucius, Jesus, Muhammad — three revelations, one source: Cao Đài is the third and unifying amnesty.
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Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Is it a religion.
Jesuits argued the ancestral rites were civil honours a Christian convert could keep. Rome ruled against them in 1704 and 1742, the Kangxi emperor expelled the missionaries in response, and the Catholic Church reversed itself only in 1939. The underlying question — religion, philosophy, or the operating system of a civilisation — has never been settled, and every answer has had political consequences.
⚖ contested within
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Cynicism
— one faith of this family holds it
Whether you can keep the ethics after dropping the physics.
Modern practitioners mostly take the exercises without the providential cosmos. Traditional Stoics answer that "live according to nature" is empty if nature is not rational, and the argument runs live in the same conference hall.
⚖ contested within
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Dudeism (The Church of the Latter-Day Dude)
— one faith of this family holds it
The philosophy is old; only the packaging is 1998.
Dudeism claims descent from Laozi, Epicurus, the Zen masters, Montaigne and Whitman, and treats The Big Lebowski as a restatement rather than a source. Its founder makes this argument at length and it is the reason the church resists being read as a film-fan club.
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Effective Altruism
— one faith of this family holds it
Whether the far future outweighs everything happening now.
The longtermist argument is that the number of people who could exist dwarfs the number who do, so reducing existential risk beats treating malaria. It split the movement and the split has never closed.
⚖ contested within
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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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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
The saints and the lwa share images.
Ogou is Saint James on a horse; Danbala is Saint Patrick because of the snakes; Ezili Dantò is the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, whose lithograph reached Haiti with Polish soldiers who deserted to the revolution. Whether this began as camouflage or as recognition is argued about, and practitioners generally decline the question.
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Vodou is not the word.
In Haiti the word names a particular dance and rhythm; the religion is what you do, and people say they serve the lwa. Voodoo in English is an American invention of the occupation years and means something Haitians do not recognise, which is why the spelling of the word is itself a political position.
⚖ contested within
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Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
Eight million kami — meaning uncountable.
Yaoyorozu no kami. The number is a figure of speech for too many to list, and the category is open: a mountain, a waterfall, a fox, a sword, a dead scholar, a rice field and a company founder can all be kami, and new ones are still being made.
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No founder, no scripture, no conversion.
There is nobody whose teaching this is. The Kojiki is a court chronicle rather than a revelation, no text is binding, and there is no procedure for joining or leaving. The word Shinto itself was coined to distinguish the native practice from Buddhism after Buddhism arrived.
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
The Guru's door is open; the Khalsa's door has a threshold.
Anyone may walk into a gurdwara, eat in the langar and sit through kirtan without converting, declaring anything, or being asked their religion. Amrit is a separate act with a written discipline attached, and most Sikhs alive have not taken it.
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Sikhi is its own religion, not a Hindu reform movement.
The Singh Sabha settled this inside the Panth by about 1900; Indian law did not follow. Article 25 of the constitution still files Sikhs under the Hindu heading for personal law, and Sikh bodies have objected in writing since the constituent assembly.
held by most
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
The temple on the street.
A committee of local men manages the god's money, hires the opera troupe, organises the procession and decides who carries what. This is the real unit of Chinese popular religion, and it does not sort neatly — the same committee will engage Taoist priests, Buddhist monks and a spirit medium for different jobs without any sense of inconsistency.
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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 Ethical Culture Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
Deed before creed.
Adler's wager was that agreement about conduct does not require agreement about God, and that a congregation can be built on the first without ever settling the second.
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The Rajneesh Movement (Osho)
— one faith of this family holds it
Sannyas, and no successor.
Initiation gives a mala and a name and asks for nothing you have to leave. When he died in 1990 he named no heir, which is why there is a foundation and an archive rather than a church.
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The Sunday Assembly
— one faith of this family holds it
Whether a congregation with no doctrine can hold together.
Part of the New York branch split off wanting a harder atheist line, and the movement has lost roughly half its chapters since its peak. This is the open question and the Assembly is the experiment.
⚖ contested within
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Transhumanism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Terasem
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
Translation, and the argument about it.
Most of the world's Muslims do not read Arabic, and the tradition holds that the Quran in another language is not the Quran — the standard title is an interpretation of the meanings. So the book people actually read is a rendering with the Arabic beside it, and which rendering carries real theological weight.
Open the book — context →
Shinto and Buddhism were one system for a thousand years.
Shinbutsu-shūgō: kami were understood as local manifestations of buddhas, temples and shrines shared compounds, and priests served both. The state forcibly separated them in 1868, destroying a great deal in the process. Most Japanese people still use both and see no problem.
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What crossed the ocean.
The religion travelled in the memories of people in the holds of ships, and survived in Cuba and Brazil by being practised behind Catholic saints — Shango behind Santa Barbara, Osun behind Our Lady of Charity — because that was the only way it could be done in the open. It then came back: Cuban and Brazilian priests initiate in Nigeria now, and Nigerians travel to Havana and Bahia to learn what exile preserved better than home did.
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A minority at home.
Yorubaland is now overwhelmingly Christian and Muslim, often within the same family, and Pentecostal churches campaign against the orisha directly — shrines have been burned and objects destroyed. Yet the naming ceremony persists, babalawo are consulted quietly by people who would deny it, and Osun Osogbo draws crowds who describe their attendance as cultural.
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