What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionA text stands as the final measure of truth and practice.
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.
ShelfHow truth arrives
Travels across22 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderVedic Religion · c. 1500 BCE
Newest holderEffective Altruism · 2011 CE
Turns up as82 scriptures · 41 tenets · 21 rites · 21 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 — 66 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 35 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 midweek study.
Eight people, a front room, one passage, and the assumption that ordinary readers can handle the text. It is the engine of Protestant practice and the reason literacy campaigns and missions travelled together — and the reason lay readings sometimes outrun what the clergy would prefer.
⚖ contested within
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also here 34 more faiths of this family hold it
ProtestantismAnglicanismThe Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day SaintsJudaismThe Coptic Orthodox ChurchThe Armenian Apostolic ChurchThe Syro-Malabar ChurchOrthodox JudaismReform JudaismConservative JudaismThe Malankara Mar Thoma Syrian ChurchThe Restoration Movement (Churches of Christ)RastafariThe Assyrian Church of the EastThe Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)The Church of the BrethrenThe ChristadelphiansCalvinism (the Reformed tradition)Christian Science (the Church of Christ, Scientist)CongregationalismKaraite JudaismPresbyterianismRemnant Fellowship ChurchSamaritanismSecular HumanismThe Branch DavidiansThe Christian Churches and Churches of ChristThe Family InternationalThe Moravian Church (Unitas Fratrum)The New Church (Swedenborgianism)The Plymouth BrethrenThe Taiping Heavenly KingdomThe Twelve TribesTraditionalist Catholicism
Vedic Religion
— 6 faiths of this family hold it
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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Six ways of arguing, and all six are orthodox.
Nyaya took logic, Vaisheshika atoms, Samkhya the inventory of what exists, Yoga the discipline, Mimamsa ritual and language, Vedanta the Upanishads. They contradict each other on nearly everything and were taught side by side, and a student was expected to state his opponent's case better than the opponent before refuting it.
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Islam
— 5 faiths of this family hold it
The Quran is the speech of God.
Recited, not authored — revealed in Arabic and preserved as revealed.
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The book cannot be imitated.
The text dares its critics to produce one sura like it, and the tradition treats the fact that nobody did as the standing miracle. It is close to the only one Islam claims: the Quran declines to give the Prophet the sort of wonders it gives Musa and Isa.
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Shinto
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
The Engishiki.
A fifty-book administrative code completed in 927, and book eight contains twenty-seven norito — the oldest sustained liturgical Japanese in existence. Its register of shrines is still how a shrine demonstrates it is ancient, and priests today read prayers descended from these texts.
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The Fudoki.
In 713 the court ordered every province to report its produce, soil, place-name origins and old stories. Only the Izumo report survives close to complete, with fragments of four others. It is the counterweight to the Kojiki — the provinces describing their own kami before the capital edited them into a single family tree.
held by most
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also here
Tenrikyo
Cao Đài
— one faith of this family holds it
The Compilation of Divine Messages.
A canon received in real time: séance transcripts, dated and archived — revelation with minutes kept.
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Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Study as devotion.
The Analects begin with the joy of learning; the examination hall was a temple of its own.
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Reciting before understanding.
Children chant the Analects or the Three Character Classic aloud, in unison, years before anyone explains it, on the theory that a text in memory can be understood later while a text understood once cannot be recalled. Denounced as feudal for most of the twentieth century and revived from the 1990s, now with weekend academies and phone apps.
held by most
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Cynicism
— one faith of this family holds it
Whether you can keep the ethics after dropping the physics.
Modern practitioners mostly take the exercises without the providential cosmos. Traditional Stoics answer that "live according to nature" is empty if nature is not rational, and the argument runs live in the same conference hall.
⚖ contested within
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The Meditations was never meant for you.
Its Greek title is Ta eis heauton, "to himself". Marcus wrote it on campaign, repeated himself, contradicted himself, and never published; the text survives by luck through a single thin manuscript tradition.
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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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Discordianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Belief is optional, and discouraged.
The fifth commandment of the Pentabarf prohibits a Discordian from believing what he reads, which includes the Pentabarf. Discordians who take this seriously do not agree on whether taking it seriously is permitted.
⚖ contested within
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The Principia Discordia.
Typed, hand-lettered, rubber-stamped and pasted together, then photocopied. It carries no copyright — the notice reads ALL RITES REVERSED, REPRINT WHAT YOU LIKE — which is why it survived without a publisher and why no edition is authoritative.
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Eckankar
— one faith of this family holds it
Where the teaching came from.
Twitchell described an ancient order rediscovered. David C. Lane traced his membership in Kirpal Singh's Ruhani Satsang and hundreds of passages taken from Julian Johnson. Eckankar and its historians have not converged.
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Effective Altruism
— one faith of this family holds it
Show the working.
The distinguishing demand is not generosity but auditability: a claim about doing good is expected to come with an estimate, a source and a stated uncertainty.
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Epicureanism
— one faith of this family holds it
Forty doctrines, and a library being read out of the ash.
The Kyriai Doxai were meant to be memorised. The rest of the Epicurean library is in the carbonised scrolls of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, which are now being read without being opened.
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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
Ainsi parla l'oncle, and after.
Jean Price-Mars published it in 1928, telling a French-educated Haitian elite that despising the peasantry's religion was a form of collective self-hatred. It changed the terms of every Haitian argument about Vodou since. The other indispensable books — Maya Deren's, Karen McCarthy Brown's Mama Lola — are outsiders' and are treated as such.
⚖ contested within
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Heathenry (Ásatrú)
— one faith of this family holds it
The lore guides; it does not bind.
Eddas and sagas are the record of the old ways, read seriously — but Heathenry has no scripture and wants none.
held by most
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The Eddas.
The old myths survive because a Christian Icelander wrote them down two centuries after conversion — Heathenry rebuilds from sources it knows are secondhand, and says so.
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Mandaeism
— one faith of this family holds it
The Ginza Rabba.
The Great Treasure: the last complete Gnostic scripture in continuous use, split into a Right Ginza for the living and a Left Ginza for the soul's road out.
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
Woman is not lesser, and the scripture says so in one line.
Why call her bad, from whom kings are born — Nanak, in Asa ki Var. Sikh reformers have been quoting that line back at their own institutions for two hundred years, with uneven results.
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The Guru now lives in the book and the body.
Guru Gobind Singh ended the human succession in 1708: authority passed jointly to the Guru Granth Sahib — the scripture as living Guru — and the Guru Panth, the community itself.
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
Laozi at the pass.
Disgusted with the state of things, he rode west on an ox to leave China altogether. The keeper of the frontier pass recognised him and refused to raise the gate until he wrote his teaching down. He produced five thousand characters, handed them over, and went through. Nobody knows what happened after that.
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The Daozang.
The canon — the 1445 Ming edition alone runs to 1,476 titles across more than five thousand volumes, containing liturgy, alchemy, pharmacology, geography, biography, meditation manuals and blank administrative forms for addressing heaven. Very little of it is read outside the priesthood, and whole sections have never been translated into any Western language.
held by most
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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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The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
— one faith of this family holds it
The Urantia Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Urantia Movement
Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Yoruba Religion
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 midweek study.
Eight people, a front room, one passage, and the assumption that ordinary readers can handle the text. It is the engine of Protestant practice and the reason literacy campaigns and missions travelled together — and the reason lay readings sometimes outrun what the clergy would prefer.
Go deeper — context →
Whether God's speech was ever made.
If the Quran is God's eternal attribute it was never created; if it was created, God once was without it. The Mu'tazila said created, the caliph al-Ma'mun made that state doctrine in 833, and Ibn Hanbal was flogged for refusing to say it. Sunni orthodoxy settled on uncreated. Twelver theology, which kept Mu'tazili rationalism, generally says originated.
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The four books.
Al-Kafi, Man la yahduruhu al-Faqih, Tahdhib al-Ahkam and Al-Istibsar — the Twelver Shia hadith corpus, compiled in the ninth to eleventh centuries. Much of the content overlaps the Sunni collections; almost none of the chains do, because the two traditions disagree about which of the first generation to trust.
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Nahj al-Balagha.
The sermons and letters attributed to Ali, collected around 1010. The letter of instruction to Malik al-Ashtar on governing Egypt is read as a manual of just administration well outside Shia circles, and the Arabic itself is taught as a model of prose. Some Sunni scholars dispute the attribution.
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