What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionGod speaks through chosen messengers who carry the word to their people.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity 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 across10 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderTerasem · 2004 CE
Turns up as24 figures · 18 tenets · 13 storys · 2 rites
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 — 25 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 11 faiths of this family hold it
Scripture is God-breathed.
Every branch says the words; none agrees on the mechanics. The Chicago Statement of 1978 made inerrancy on every subject a Protestant boundary marker. Vatican II limited the guarantee to what God wanted put down for the sake of our salvation. The Orthodox read the text only inside the Fathers and the liturgy, and find the question oddly framed.
held by most
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The Damascus road.
He was travelling with warrants to arrest Christians. Light, voice, three days blind, and then a Christian named Ananias is sent to heal him and openly argues with God about the assignment first.
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The heavens are open — revelation continues.
A living prophet leads the church and the canon is not closed: restoration means the line to God carries a signal again.
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J
Joseph Smith — the restorer.
A farm boy who asked which church was true and reported that the answer was none of them — restoration, not reformation, followed.
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M
Miriam — the prophetess with the drum.
The Talmud counts her among seven prophetesses, and links the wilderness water supply to her personally — a very large thing to say about a woman the text gives eleven verses.
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M
Moses — our teacher.
Liberator at the sea, lawgiver at the mountain, and still the humblest of men: the prophet by whom all others are measured.
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The coronation.
Marcus Garvey had said: look to Africa, where a Black king shall be crowned. In 1930 the newspapers carried the photographs from Addis Ababa — and in the yards of Kingston, readers of scripture recognized what they saw.
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Moses is the only prophet.
One lawgiver, one law; the Taheb — a restorer like Moses — will come to set all things right.
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Islam
— 5 faiths of this family hold it
Six things are asked of belief.
God, His angels, His books, His messengers, the Last Day, and the decree — the good of it and the bad of it. A stranger walked into the mosque, asked the Prophet to define faith, and got exactly that list. The stranger was Jibril.
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Muhammad is the seal of the prophets.
The final messenger in a line that runs back through Jesus and Moses to Abraham.
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The sunna patterns the whole of life.
The Prophet's example, preserved in hadith, reaches from prayer to table manners.
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Follow the Prophet's pattern.
The sunnah — how he ate, greeted, judged, forgave — is the lived commentary on the Quran; the four law schools are four careful readings of one life.
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Leadership belongs to the Prophet's house.
Ali was designated at Ghadir Khumm; the Imams carry the trust.
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The Imam is a living proof of God.
Divinely guided, sinless, and — for the Twelvers — one day returning.
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The promised renewal has come.
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as the awaited messiah and renewer — the claim the mainstream rejects.
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Bai'at — the pledge.
Ten conditions accepted, hand to hand (or by letter, worldwide) with the living Caliph: initiation into the one Muslim community with a single global head.
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also here
The Bahá'í Faith
Transhumanism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
M
Martine Rothblatt.
She founded the satellite radio company that became Sirius, then a biotechnology firm to treat her daughter's pulmonary hypertension, then a religion about not dying. The through-line is not obscure.
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N
Nick Bostrom — who wrote both documents.
Co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association and co-author of the 1998 Declaration; author, sixteen years later, of the book that made existential risk from artificial intelligence a mainstream concern.
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Church Universal and Triumphant
— one faith of this family holds it
The masters dictate, and someone writes it down.
Ascended beings are held to speak through a trained messenger. Mark Prophet held that office from 1958, Elizabeth Clare Prophet after 1973, and no one has held it since.
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Deism
— one faith of this family holds it
T
Thomas Paine — who lost everything for the last book.
Common Sense sold in the hundreds of thousands; The Age of Reason made him unemployable. He died in New York in 1809 with almost no one at the funeral.
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Heaven's Gate
— one faith of this family holds it
T
Ti and Do.
Nettles and Applewhite named themselves after notes in a scale and refused any other title. They insisted they were staff rather than saviours, and the group's materials are notably free of the language of worship — which did not stop the class from taking their instructions as final.
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Mandaeism
— one faith of this family holds it
John the Baptist is the great teacher.
Yahya Yuhana — honored above all prophets; Jesus, in the Mandaean telling, departed from his teaching.
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Y
Yahya Yuhana — the Baptist.
The teacher at the river: Mandaeism holds him, not Jesus, as the true prophet of the light.
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Raëlism
— one faith of this family holds it
13 December 1973, at the crater.
Raël says a craft descended beside the Puy de Lassolas outside Clermont-Ferrand and a small humanoid asked him to write down a message. Every claim the movement makes rests on that afternoon.
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The Church of Scientology
— one faith of this family holds it
L
L. Ron Hubbard — the Founder.
Pulp writer, naval officer, and author of the whole technical corpus. He withdrew from public life in 1980 and died in 1986; no one may alter what he wrote.
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Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
At the river, at dawn.
He was thirty, fetching water for a festival, and coming up the bank he saw a shining figure nine times human size — Vohu Manah, Good Purpose — who took his soul to the assembly of Ahura Mazda. The Gathas do not narrate this; they assume it, and argue from it.
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The complaint of the ox.
In one of the oldest religious texts anywhere, the soul of the ox goes up to heaven and complains: it is being beaten, herded and slaughtered, and it wants a protector with power. The assembly answers that the only man found is Zarathustra, who has a weak voice. The ox says, in effect, that this is not what it asked for.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
Mawlid.
The Prophet's birthday, kept with poems, processions, lights and sweets in most of the Muslim world, and refused as an unwarranted innovation by Salafis and in Saudi Arabia. It began about three centuries after the Prophet, which both sides agree on and read in opposite directions.
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Killed at the altar.
At seventy-seven, praying at the fire, he was cut down by a soldier during an invasion. The tradition preserves the prophet's death as violent, ordinary and unavenged — no ascension, no vindication, no last words that change anything.
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The letters carried the authority.
For four decades the group was governed by mailed letters treated as current revelation. Members read the newest one and changed their lives that week; critics and former members describe the same mechanism.
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Koresh said he was the Lamb who could open the seals.
He argued it from Revelation 5: someone has to be found worthy to open the scroll, and he claimed to be that person — a sinful man, not a divine one, which is the distinction members repeated to reporters and to negotiators. The claim also underwrote his taking other men's wives, including girls under the age of consent.
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