What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionThere is exactly one God — a single source behind everything that is.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and The Urantia Movement 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 across16 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderThe Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster · 2005 CE
Turns up as24 tenets · 21 figures · 1 rite
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 — 24 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 6 faiths of this family hold it
Creation is good, and it was made out of nothing.
God made matter and pronounced it good six times before pronouncing it very good. The claim was aimed squarely at the Gnostics, who held the physical world to be the botched work of a lesser god, and it is why Christianity never produced a doctrine that the body is a prison.
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God is one being in three persons.
Father, Son, and Spirit — the Trinity is the grammar of Christian speech about God.
held by most
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God is one, indivisible, and engaged with history.
The Shema is the center: Hear O Israel — the LORD is one. This God acts in time: exodus, exile, return.
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God has no body, and no image of God is possible.
Maimonides made incorporeality the third of thirteen principles, and the Torah's outstretched arm became language stooping to be understood. The commandment is enforced hard enough that a tradition three thousand years old produced almost no religious portraiture.
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Islam
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
There is no god but God.
Tawhid: absolute unity — no partners, no images, no exceptions. The first half of the shahada.
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Nothing resembles Him.
The Quran gives God a hand, a face, a throne. Ash'ari and Maturidi theologians read those as figures of speech and refuse to picture them; the Athari and later Salafi line affirms them as stated and refuses to ask how. Each side accuses the other of the same error from opposite directions.
⚖ contested within
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God cannot be known.
Not mysterious in the sense of not yet explained — inaccessible in principle. The gap between creator and created is held to be unbridgeable from below, so nothing whatever can be truly predicated of the divine essence, and every apparent statement about God is really a statement about a Manifestation.
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G
God.
Addressed constantly and described never. Bahá'í Houses of Worship contain no image, no altar and no representation of anything; prayers use a great many names and the writings state plainly that all of them describe the worshipper's conception rather than the reality. It is one of the most thoroughgoing apophatic positions in any living religion.
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also here
The Druze Faith
Vedic Religion
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
God is one, you are not God, and the difference is permanent.
Madhva's Dvaita holds five eternal distinctions — God from soul, God from matter, soul from soul, soul from matter, matter from matter — and goes further than anyone else in Vedanta by teaching that souls differ in kind, and that not all of them are going anywhere.
⚖ contested within
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The supreme has a name, a face, and a preferred flower.
For most Hindus God is not an abstraction but a person — Vishnu, Shiva, or the Goddess — and each stream holds that its own is supreme and the others are lesser or dependent forms. The philosophical claim that they are all one is sincerely held and is not what is said inside the temple.
held by most
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Cao Đài
— one faith of this family holds it
The Divine Eye watches all.
God's Left Eye — chosen because the heart sits left — gazes from every altar and the Holy See's great globe.
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C
Cao Đài — the Supreme Being.
The one teacher behind Buddha, Laozi, Confucius, and Jesus — now teaching directly, the faith holds, through the third amnesty.
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Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
T
Tian — Heaven.
Not a person, not a maker, with no image, no biography and no myth. It is appealed to, it is said to know, and it withdraws its mandate — and Confucius, asked to explain further, said Heaven does not speak, and pointed out that the seasons turn and the hundred things are born anyway.
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Deism
— one faith of this family holds it
The design is the revelation.
Nature is the only text that was not written by a human being, cannot be mistranslated and is available in every language at once.
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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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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
B
Bondye.
He made everything, including the lwa, and then delegated. No temple, no offering, no song, no drum, no possession. Haitians will explain without embarrassment that Bondye is too great to be troubled about a specific person's rent, and that this is precisely why there are lwa.
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Mandaeism
— one faith of this family holds it
H
Hayyi Rabbi — the Great Life.
The first light, from whom every soul descends and to whom the masbuta points it home.
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Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
G
God the Parent.
Tenri-Ō-no-Mikoto, who lent humanity its bodies and waits for the children to sweep their hearts and live joyously.
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
God is one, beyond form.
Ik Onkar — the opening word of the scripture and the whole theology in a syllable.
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W
Waheguru — the One.
Formless, timeless, beyond gender and image: not worshipped through idols or avatars, but remembered — the Name repeated until it hums beneath ordinary work.
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The Brahma Kumaris
— one faith of this family holds it
S
Shiva — a point of light that is never born.
The Supreme Soul is incorporeal, has no body and takes no birth. The Brahma Kumaris distinguish this figure from the Hindu deity of the same name deliberately and at length.
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The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
— one faith of this family holds it
T
The Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Created the universe while drunk, which the Gospel offers as the explanation for its condition. He touches with a Noodly Appendage, and being touched by it is how Pastafarians describe conversion.
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The Urantia Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
T
The Universal Father.
One source, never depicted, reachable only through a described hierarchy — and simultaneously present inside every mind as a fragment of himself. The book holds both without apology.
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Yazidism
— one faith of this family holds it
Melek Taus is God's regent, not his rival.
The Peacock Angel refused to bow to Adam out of pure devotion to God — the story outsiders twisted into slander is, inside, the proof of his fidelity.
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M
Melek Taus — the Peacock Angel.
Chief of the seven, who refused to bow to Adam out of devotion to God alone — the fidelity outsiders twisted into a slander that has cost the Yazidis dearly.
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Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
Olodumare has no shrine.
The source of everything receives no sacrifice, no image, no priesthood and no festival. There is no myth about Olodumare's doings and no story in which Olodumare appears as a character with a temperament. What is worshipped is the orisha, who are near, specific and manageable.
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O
Olodumare — the source.
The owner of heaven, too vast for shrines or images: ashe flows from Olodumare, and the orisha carry it into the world.
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Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Six creations, six guardians.
The Amesha Spentas are attributes of Ahura Mazda and also persons, and each has a piece of creation in their charge: sky, water, earth, plants, cattle and humanity. Caring for those six things is therefore not stewardship in the modern environmental sense but direct service to a divine being.
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A
Ahura Mazda — the Wise Lord.
Uncreated, all-good creator of the good creation — worshipped through fire, which is his visible sign, not his image.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
Nothing resembles Him.
The Quran gives God a hand, a face, a throne. Ash'ari and Maturidi theologians read those as figures of speech and refuse to picture them; the Athari and later Salafi line affirms them as stated and refuses to ask how. Each side accuses the other of the same error from opposite directions.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
God is one, you are not God, and the difference is permanent.
Madhva's Dvaita holds five eternal distinctions — God from soul, God from matter, soul from soul, soul from matter, matter from matter — and goes further than anyone else in Vedanta by teaching that souls differ in kind, and that not all of them are going anywhere.
Go deeper — context →