What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionPrescribed action — gesture, word, and timing — carrying meaning the way language carries thought.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and Vedic Religion 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 practices
Travels across38 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderVedic Religion · c. 1500 BCE
Newest holderAnalog Sabbath · 2026 CE
Turns up as232 rites · 44 tenets · 17 scriptures · 10 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 — 118 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 58 faiths of this family hold it
The bread is the body.
Rome says the substance changes and the appearances do not. Orthodoxy says it changes and declines to explain the mechanism. Luther said Christ is in, with and under the bread; Zwingli said the meal remembers him. No other Christian sentence has got more people killed.
⚖ contested within
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Sunday.
The first day of the week, kept because that is the day the tomb was found empty. Everything else in the practice hangs off it — the calendar, the working week of most of the planet, and the one hour a large minority of humanity still gives to something it cannot prove.
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also here 57 more faiths of this family hold it
CatholicismProtestantismEastern OrthodoxyAnglicanismLutheranismOriental OrthodoxyThe Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo ChurchThe Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day SaintsJudaismThe Armenian Apostolic ChurchThe Syro-Malabar ChurchThe Maronite ChurchThe Church of the NazareneThe Malankara Orthodox Syrian ChurchReform JudaismThe Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo ChurchThe Syriac Orthodox ChurchThe Restoration Movement (Churches of Christ)Unitarian UniversalismThe Syro-Malankara Catholic ChurchThe Amish (Old Order)The Church of the EastThe Assyrian Church of the EastThe Syriac Catholic ChurchThe HutteritesThe Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (the Exclusive Brethren)The ChristadelphiansThe BruderhofThe Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing)Calvinism (the Reformed tradition)Christian Science (the Church of Christ, Scientist)CongregationalismHasidismJehovah's WitnessesKaraite JudaismLa Luz del MundoMethodismOrdinary TimePresbyterianismQuakerism (Religious Society of Friends)Reconstructionist JudaismRemnant Fellowship ChurchSamaritanismSecular HumanismSeventh-day AdventismThe Ancient Church of the EastThe Armenian Catholic ChurchThe BaptistsThe Christian Churches and Churches of ChristThe Eastern Catholic ChurchesThe Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day SaintsThe New Church (Swedenborgianism)The Salvation ArmyThe Taiping Heavenly KingdomThe Twelve TribesThe Unification Church (Family Federation)Traditionalist Catholicism
Vedic Religion
— 14 faiths of this family hold it
Dharma sustains the cosmos; to live rightly is to live in accord with it.
Order is not imposed on the world — it is the world; conduct, ritual, and law participate in it.
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The Vedas were not composed by anyone.
Apaurusheya — not of human authorship, and without beginning: heard rather than written, and preserved by sound long before sense. Accepting their authority is the classical test of orthodoxy, which is why almost every Hindu affirms it and almost none has read them.
held by most
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Islam
— 4 faiths of this family hold it
The adhan.
Seven lines, five times a day, and in a Muslim-majority city you cannot be outdoors and not hear it. Bilal, an enslaved Ethiopian, was chosen to be the first to call it, which the tradition tells as a deliberate reversal of who gets to speak for a city.
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Salat — the five daily prayers.
Dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset, night: the day itself is shaped around remembrance.
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Sikhism
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Ritual without the heart is theatre.
Asa ki Var takes apart the sacred thread, the ritual bath, the pilgrimage and the fast in turn, and asks what any of them actually changed in the man performing them. The tradition then built rites of its own, and has spent five centuries arguing about which of them went the same way.
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Kirtan Sohila — the last five hymns.
Said lying in bed at the end of the day, and said again over a body before it is burned. A Sikh hears the same words at the close of every day of their life and then once more, which is the tradition's entire theology of death in a scheduling decision.
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Church of the Eternal Backup
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
The Sunday sync.
Journals, photographs, genomes — whatever holds pattern is copied and verified. Verification is the liturgy; checksums are the amen.
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also here
Second Copy
Shinto
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Purity is restored, not earned.
Misfortune and wrongdoing are pollution (kegare); water, salt, and rite wash the slate — harae, the great reset.
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Tsumi is pollution, not sin.
What separates a person from the kami is a state — contact with death, blood, illness, disorder — and it is washed off with water rather than repented of. There is no confession, no absolution and no permanent stain, which is why the vocabulary of guilt barely appears in the tradition.
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also here
Tenrikyo
The Deep Water People
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Immersion.
Enter, stay past the gasp, come out changed by two degrees.
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also here
The Salt Line
Transhumanism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
10th@10.
The movement gathers by video call on the tenth of each month at ten in the morning Eastern time to share art and poetry and to talk through the core concepts. It is called a satsanga, borrowing the Sanskrit.
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Building a mindfile.
The actual daily practice: uploading video, writing, photographs and questionnaire answers into a personal archive, continuously, for decades, against the possibility of later reinstantiation.
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also here
Transhumanism
Yoruba Religion
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
The saints' faces kept the orisha alive.
Syncretism was strategy: Santa Barbara's feast fed Shango for centuries. The masks can now come off, and often do.
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Kariocha — the seating of the orisha.
Seven days of seclusion, the head crowned, a year in white to follow — the making of a priest.
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also here
Yoruba Religion
Aum Shinrikyo
— one faith of this family holds it
Meditation at the centre.
Seated practice, sutra recitation and yoga in an ordinary rented hall. There are around thirty such facilities across fifteen prefectures, and the state knows where each of them is because the law requires Aleph to say.
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Cao Đài
— one faith of this family holds it
The four daily ceremonies.
At six, noon, six, and midnight: incense, offerings of tea and flowers, prayers before the Divine Eye.
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Church Universal and Triumphant
— one faith of this family holds it
Decrees, spoken fast and out loud.
Not silent prayer: a decree is repeated aloud at increasing speed, sometimes for hours, and is held to focus light on a named condition. It is the practice outsiders find strangest and members find most useful.
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Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Ritual propriety (li) carries the culture.
Bow correctly, mourn correctly, pour tea correctly — the forms are not empty; they are how respect travels between generations.
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Ritual is not empty form.
Li shapes what it enacts. Standing correctly, speaking in the right register and bowing at the right depth are not expressions of an inner state but the training that produces one — which is why the tradition spends so much attention on things that look, from outside, like manners.
held by most
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Cynicism
— one faith of this family holds it
Stoic Week.
A free seven-day course run each October since 2012 by Modern Stoicism, with a public conference, Stoicon, alongside it — online in recent years, and scheduled for 17 October in 2026.
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Discordianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Ordination as Pope.
The Principia prints a card certifying that the bearer is a genuine and authorized Pope of Discordia, with instructions to reproduce and distribute it freely. There is no examination, no fee and no higher office. Handing one to a stranger is the whole rite.
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Epicureanism
— one faith of this family holds it
The Eikas — dinner on the twentieth.
Epicurus endowed it in his will: money set aside for a monthly gathering of the school in memory of himself and Metrodorus. It is the oldest continuously named observance in Western philosophy and it is still kept.
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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
The sèvis.
Drums call the rhythm of the lwa being served, vèvè drawn in cornmeal, songs in order — until the lwa arrives in person.
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Drawing the vèvè.
Cornmeal trickled from between the fingers into an intricate symmetrical figure — every lwa has one, and it functions as both signature and summons. It is drawn on the floor at the start of the service and destroyed by the dancing within the hour. Nobody preserves them.
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Heathenry (Ásatrú)
— one faith of this family holds it
Blót and sumbel.
The offering shared with the gods, then the horn passed three rounds — to the gods, the ancestors, and the oaths. Words spoken over the horn are binding.
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Love Has Won
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Love Has Won
Mandaeism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Mandaeism
Pantheism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Pantheism
Pilgrims of the Last Tuesday
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Tuesday Reformed
Raëlism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Raëlism
Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Taoism
The Church of Scientology
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Church of Scientology
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
— one faith of this family holds it
The Church of the SubGenius
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Church of the SubGenius
The Compost Rite
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Compost Rite
The Ethical Culture Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Ethical Culture Movement
The Missionary Church of Kopimism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Missionary Church of Kopimism
The Neo-American Church
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Neo-American Church
The Order of the Solar Temple
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Order of the Solar Temple
The Rajneesh Movement (Osho)
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Rajneesh Movement (Osho)
The Religion of Humanity
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Religion of Humanity
The Satanic Temple
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Satanic Temple
The Sunday Assembly
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Sunday Assembly
Wicca
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Wicca
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
The bread is the body.
Rome says the substance changes and the appearances do not. Orthodoxy says it changes and declines to explain the mechanism. Luther said Christ is in, with and under the bread; Zwingli said the meal remembers him. No other Christian sentence has got more people killed.
Go deeper — context →
The descent, and the three things.
Amaterasu sends her grandson Ninigi down onto a peak in Kyushu with a mirror, a sword and a curved jewel, and the imperial house descends from him. Between 1890 and 1945 this was taught in Japanese schools as history. The regalia still exist, no one alive has seen the mirror and the jewel, and the accession rite still uses them.
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Doing it without believing it.
Around three-quarters of Japanese people report no religion, and a similar share visit a shrine at New Year. From outside this looks like hypocrisy or cultural residue. From inside it is not a contradiction: the tradition asks for correct practice and never asked for assent, so there is nothing to be insincere about.
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The commandments are how the covenant is lived.
613 mitzvot pattern life — how binding halakha remains is the live argument between the movements.
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