What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionTruth arrives in installments, each messenger suited to their age.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: The Bahá'í Faith 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.
ShelfHow truth arrives
Travels across6 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderThe New Church (Swedenborgianism) · 1787 CE
Newest holderTranshumanism · 1998 CE
Turns up as6 tenets · 4 storys · 3 scriptures · 3 figures
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 — 7 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
The Last Judgment, 1757, in the world of spirits.
Swedenborg reported witnessing the Judgment through the year 1757 — not on earth but in the intermediate world, where accumulated false heavens were broken up. The Second Coming, on this reading, is the opening of the internal sense of the Word, which is why the New Church dates itself from a revelation rather than an event in the sky.
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Dispensations — and the Scofield Bible that carried them everywhere.
C. I. Scofield put Darby's scheme into the notes and cross-references of a reference Bible published by Oxford University Press in 1909. Millions of American Protestants who had never heard of Darby learned his system as though it were part of the text.
Open the book — context →
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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Islam
— one faith of this family holds it
Religion is one story told in chapters.
Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Báb, Bahá'u'lláh — one God educating one humanity through successive teachers.
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One line of teachers.
Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Báb, Bahá'u'lláh — and others whose names are lost. They are not incarnations and not merely inspired men: the image the faith uses is a mirror, which shows the sun perfectly without the sun ever entering the glass.
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Raëlism
— one faith of this family holds it
T
The Elohim — those who came from the sky.
The movement reads the Hebrew plural as a plural: not God, but the people who made us, and to whom an embassy is owed. They are owed hospitality, not worship.
Meet them — context & 1 source →
The Urantia Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
The universe is inhabited and administered.
Not empty and not unsupervised: the book describes orders of beings, jurisdictions and a chain of command, in a level of organisational detail that is its most distinctive feature.
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Transhumanism
— one faith of this family holds it
A biologist coined it, and meant something gentler.
Julian Huxley proposed transhumanism in 1957 for the species consciously transcending itself — through education and culture as much as anything. The word was later picked up for a programme he did not propose.
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