What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionBearing witness at the cost of one's life — a death that testifies.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and The Twelve Tribes 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.
ShelfThe carriers
Travels across14 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderThe Satanic Temple · 2013 CE
Turns up as49 storys · 21 figures · 5 tenets · 5 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 — 35 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 18 faiths of this family hold it
The cross did something — and no council ever said what.
Ransom paid to death, a debt settled to God's honour, the penalty borne in our place, the powers publicly defeated, love demonstrated past argument. Christianity defined the Trinity at Nicaea and the two natures at Chalcedon, and left the meaning of the crucifixion undefined for two thousand years.
⚖ contested within
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Turn the other cheek — and the argument about war.
The historic peace churches read the Sermon on the Mount as forbidding violence outright and have paid for that reading in every conscription since. The rest of the tradition uses just war doctrine, which permits force under conditions it then finds ways to satisfy. Both sides quote the same chapter.
⚖ contested within
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The Shoah broke something, and no answer has held.
Richard Rubenstein concluded that the God of history could not be maintained. Eliezer Berkovits answered with hester panim, the hiding of the face. Emil Fackenheim proposed a 614th commandment — not to hand Hitler a posthumous victory — and the Satmar Rebbe blamed Zionism in print while survivors were still counting their dead.
⚖ contested within
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Tisha B'Av — sitting on the floor.
The three weeks before it are a mourning period and the last nine days drop meat and wine. Israeli secular culture largely ignores the day and Israeli law closes the restaurants anyway, which is itself one of the country's standing arguments.
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The twenty-one on the beach.
In February 2015 Islamic State published a video of twenty-one men in orange jumpsuits beheaded on a Libyan shore; twenty were Egyptian Copts working as labourers, and the twenty-first, Matthew Ayariga, was Ghanaian and would not separate himself from them. The Coptic Synod added them to the Synaxarium within a week. In 2023 the Catholic Church put them in the Roman Martyrology — the first saints the two churches have recognised together since the fifth century.
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A martyr is not a defeat.
The Coptic calendar counts its years Anno Martyrum, from the accession of Diocletian in 284, so every date a Copt writes is a reference to persecution. The ethic that follows is not a search for death but a refusal to trade the confession for safety — and a refusal to leave.
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also here 15 more faiths of this family hold it
The Armenian Apostolic ChurchThe Maronite ChurchThe MennonitesThe Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo ChurchThe Syriac Orthodox ChurchThe Chaldean Catholic ChurchThe Amish (Old Order)The Assyrian Church of the EastThe Syriac Catholic ChurchThe HutteritesThe BruderhofThe Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing)The Armenian Catholic ChurchThe Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day SaintsThe Twelve Tribes
Islam
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Ashura, and the forty days to Arbaeen.
Ten days of recitation of the killing of Husayn until the room weeps, then processions, then forty days later the walk to Karbala. Recent Arbaeen counts have run above twenty million, fed the whole way by volunteers with tents, which makes it among the largest annual gatherings of people anywhere on earth.
⚖ contested within
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Musa and Pharaoh's magicians.
The magicians are brought in to out-perform Musa, watch what he does, and convert on the spot. Pharaoh threatens to cut off their hands and feet and crucify them, and they answer that he can only decide this life. The Quran gives them the best lines in the scene.
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Karbala is the wound that teaches.
Husayn against the empire: better to die standing. Mourned annually at Ashura.
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Ashura.
Karbala mourned in processions and passion plays — grief as an engine of justice.
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also here
The Bahá'í Faith
Vedic Religion
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
The fire, and then the exile.
Recovered after a war fought for her, Sita is asked to prove her chastity by fire. She does — and is later banished anyway, pregnant, because a subject was overheard doubting her. At the end she asks the earth to take her back, and it opens.
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The pegs in his ears.
A cowherd left his cattle with the meditating Mahavira, came back to find them gone, and drove iron pegs into his ears with a stone. He did not move. Later a merchant and a physician recognised what had been done and pulled them out, and the account says he cried out. The tradition kept the cry in.
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The mountain, and the fast, in court.
In 2015 the Rajasthan High Court ruled santhara a criminal offence; the Supreme Court stayed it within weeks after nationwide protest, and the case is still open. In 2022 Jharkhand designated Sammed Shikharji an eco-tourism site, and the response — mass rallies across India, monks taking sallekhana in protest — forced a central government reversal in January 2023.
⚖ contested within
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also here
Ananda Marga
Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
The burning of the books.
In 213 BCE the Qin ordered the historical records of the conquered states and privately held copies of the classics destroyed, and the following year, by Sima Qian's account, scholars were executed. Whatever the exact numbers — historians argue about them — it fixed for two thousand years the Confucian view of what government without ritual looks like.
⚖ contested within
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Remonstrate.
The duty to tell power it is wrong — a minister to a ruler, a son to a father. The Classic of Filial Piety says a father who has a son who will argue with him will not fall into wrong, and that obeying a father's every command is not filial. Chinese officials submitted memorials knowing what it would cost, and the tradition counts them among its saints.
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Deism
— one faith of this family holds it
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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Effective Altruism
— one faith of this family holds it
November 2022.
FTX collapsed, and with it the largest funder the movement had ever had. What followed inside effective altruism was a year of public self-examination that its own writers described in the language of a crisis of faith.
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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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The indemnity.
In 1825 France sent warships and demanded 150 million francs in compensation for the loss of its colony and its slaves as the price of recognition. Haiti borrowed from French banks to pay it and finished settling the debt in 1947. Every account of Haitian poverty that omits this is incomplete, and Haitians never omit it.
⚖ contested within
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Pantheism
— one faith of this family holds it
The cherem of 1656.
Amsterdam's Portuguese Jewish community expelled Spinoza at twenty-three in terms of unusual violence, forbidding anyone to speak with him or read anything he wrote. It has never been lifted.
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Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
Yamato Takeru.
A son too violent for his father, sent east to conquer in the hope he would not return. Caught in a grass fire, he cuts a firebreak with the sword from the serpent's tail. He wins everything he is sent to win, dies of exhaustion and illness far from the capital, and becomes a white bird. It is the tradition's clearest story about being used.
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State Shinto, and Yasukuni.
From 1868 the government reclassified shrine attendance as civic duty rather than religion, so it could be required of Christians and Buddhists; merged and destroyed tens of thousands of village shrines; and taught the descent from Amaterasu as history. The occupation dissolved the system in 1945. Yasukuni, which enshrined fourteen Class A war criminals in 1978, is why the Emperor has not visited it since, and why every ministerial visit is an international incident.
⚖ contested within
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
Maghi at Muktsar.
Mid-January, freezing, and hundreds of thousands bathe in the tank at Sri Muktsar Sahib where the forty deserters died fighting. Attached to it is one of the largest cattle and agricultural fairs in Punjab, which nobody finds contradictory.
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The founding of the Khalsa.
Vaisakhi 1699: five volunteers offer their heads; a community of the committed is born.
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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.
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The Satanic Temple
— one faith of this family holds it
S
Satan, as a figure of speech.
The rebel of Paradise Lost and of Anatole France, not the adversary of scripture. The Temple uses him because the argument only works when the applicant is the one nobody wants to accommodate.
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Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
Shango at Koso.
A king who could pull down lightning, who used it and killed his own household, and who walked out of his city in disgrace and hanged himself from a tree. His followers went out afterwards insisting the king did not hang — oba ko so — and that sentence is now one of his praise names and the name of a town.
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Moremi and her son.
Ife was being raided by figures in raffia that the town believed were spirits. Moremi promised the river Esimirin whatever it asked if she could save the town, let herself be captured, discovered the raiders were men in costume, escaped and told her people how to burn them. The river then asked for her only son, and she paid.
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Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Ten years, one convert.
His first success was his cousin. He reached the court of Vishtaspa and was jailed there on the accusation of hostile priests. The tradition says the king's favourite horse then went lame, its legs drawn up into its body, and Zarathustra healed it one leg at a time in exchange for four conditions — including the king's conversion.
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Alexander the Accursed.
Only Zoroastrian sources call him that. The Middle Persian books say he burned the master copy of the Avesta at Persepolis and killed the priests who carried the rest by heart, and that what survives is a fraction reassembled from memory centuries later. Historians treat the account with caution and it is what the tradition itself believes about its own losses.
⚖ contested within
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
The cross did something — and no council ever said what.
Ransom paid to death, a debt settled to God's honour, the penalty borne in our place, the powers publicly defeated, love demonstrated past argument. Christianity defined the Trinity at Nicaea and the two natures at Chalcedon, and left the meaning of the crucifixion undefined for two thousand years.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Turn the other cheek — and the argument about war.
The historic peace churches read the Sermon on the Mount as forbidding violence outright and have paid for that reading in every conscription since. The rest of the tradition uses just war doctrine, which permits force under conditions it then finds ways to satisfy. Both sides quote the same chapter.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Ashura, and the forty days to Arbaeen.
Ten days of recitation of the killing of Husayn until the room weeps, then processions, then forty days later the walk to Karbala. Recent Arbaeen counts have run above twenty million, fed the whole way by volunteers with tents, which makes it among the largest annual gatherings of people anywhere on earth.
Go deeper — context →
Karbala.
In 680 the Prophet's grandson Husayn, with about seventy-two companions and his family, was surrounded on the plain of Karbala, cut off from the Euphrates for three days, and killed. His sister Zaynab survived, was marched to Damascus as a captive, and spoke in the court of the man responsible. Shia Islam is organised around this story.
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