What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionWork done for others as worship — the hands as instruments of belief.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and Twin Flames Universe 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 to live
Travels across26 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderDave Stevism · 2026 CE
Turns up as43 codes · 24 communitys · 20 storys · 17 tenets
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 — 64 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 30 faiths of this family hold it
Washing feet.
The Thursday of Holy Week, twelve pairs of feet, the bishop on the floor. Popes had washed the feet of twelve priests for centuries; Francis did it in a juvenile prison and included women and Muslims, and the rubric was formally changed in 2016 to allow it.
held by most
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The towel and the basin.
On the last night he takes off his outer clothes, ties a towel round himself, and washes their feet — including the feet of the one about to sell him. Peter refuses and is told he can have no part in this. Then: do as I have done.
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also here 29 more faiths of this family hold it
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day SaintsJudaismThe Syro-Malabar ChurchThe Maronite ChurchThe Church of the NazareneThe MennonitesThe Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo ChurchUnitarian UniversalismThe Chaldean Catholic ChurchThe Syro-Malankara Catholic ChurchThe Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)The Syriac Catholic ChurchThe Church of the BrethrenThe Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (the Exclusive Brethren)The BruderhofThe Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing)Christian Science (the Church of Christ, Scientist)Jehovah's WitnessesLa Luz del MundoMethodismPeoples TempleQuakerism (Religious Society of Friends)Secular HumanismShekinah ChurchThe Brethren in ChristThe Christian Churches and Churches of ChristThe Moravian Church (Unitas Fratrum)The New Church (Swedenborgianism)The Salvation Army
Vedic Religion
— 5 faiths of this family hold it
Hanuman leaps the strait.
Reminded of a strength he had forgotten he had, Hanuman grows vast and crosses the ocean in one leap, carrying Rama's ring to Sita. The tradition's image of what remembering your own capacity looks like.
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The guest is God.
Atithi devo bhava — the stranger at the door is treated as divinity arriving unannounced. Hospitality as theology, practiced at the household scale.
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Sikhism
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Work honestly, and share what you earn.
Kirat karo, vand chhako — labor and generosity as worship.
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The sarovar at Amritsar.
Four doors, steps leading down rather than up, a marble walkway, and a tank people bathe in at any hour of the night. The langar there feeds somewhere upward of fifty thousand people a day and more on festivals, and it has never charged or checked anyone.
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Islam
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Command the right, forbid the wrong.
The duty that produced both the market inspector checking a grocer's scales and the man who thinks he may burn the grocer's shop. Classical jurists hedged it hard: do not act where the harm outweighs the good, and never act on a question the scholars are still arguing about.
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Adab — the courtesies.
Greet first, honor the elder, begin with the right hand, speak well or be silent: a civilization's manners codified as devotion in miniature.
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also here
The Bahá'í Faith
Pantheism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
The Earth is not a resource, because it is not separate from you.
The World Pantheist Movement asks members to take an Earth pledge and funds habitat conservation, which is what happens when reverence has no other object.
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also here
Pantheism
Shinto
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Sweep it.
The parish keeps the grounds — weeding the approach, washing the stone, clearing the leaves, on a household rota. It is the most concrete obligation in the tradition and the first to fail: a shrine nobody sweeps is a shrine closing, and rural Japan has a great many of them.
held by most
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Take your turn.
The unit of obligation is the household, not the individual — a house belongs to the parish and owes it labour, money and a body under the mikoshi. People who move away often keep paying, and people who move in and decline are noticed.
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also here
Tenrikyo
Aum Shinrikyo
— one faith of this family holds it
Pay the victims, and file the reports.
Compensation to victims of the sarin attacks runs through a court-supervised scheme. Twice-yearly reporting of members, assets and premises is a legal obligation under the observation disposition, and further restrictive dispositions have followed failures to comply.
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Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
The morning greeting.
Greet your parents when you rise, settle them at night, ask after their health, and do not go far without telling them where. Filial piety in the classical texts is overwhelmingly about living parents rather than dead ones, and this is what it looks like on an ordinary Tuesday — which is also what urban work and migration have made hardest to keep.
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Mencius's mother moves house.
She lived near a cemetery and the boy played at funerals; near a market and he played at trading; she moved next to a school and he played at ritual, and there she stayed. Later, when he came home from lessons early, she cut her half-finished weaving off the loom and asked him how this was different.
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Deism
— one faith of this family holds it
Doing good is the whole of worship.
With ritual obligation removed, the entire religious duty is conduct — which Paine spelled out as justice, mercy, and trying to make other creatures happy.
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Effective Altruism
— one faith of this family holds it
The same money saves twenty lives or one, and which it does is findable.
The founding observation is about variance rather than generosity: interventions differ in cost-effectiveness by orders of magnitude, so the choice of where to give matters more than the decision to give.
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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
The dead are the first obligation.
Lemò come before the lwa in most household practice. The family dead are fed, spoken to, and expected to look after their descendants, and the funeral is not the end of the arrangement but the beginning of a new stage of it.
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To serve is the religion.
Sèvis: the lwa are fed, saluted, danced, and honored — and in return they hold up the lives of those who serve.
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Jediism
— one faith of this family holds it
The Jedi Code.
Peace over emotion, knowledge over ignorance, serenity over passion, harmony over chaos. The Temple of the Jedi Order expands it into a Doctrine of tenets, maxims and teachings that its clergy are examined on before ordination.
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Love Has Won
— one faith of this family holds it
The Ground Crew served Mother God's mission.
The First Contact Ground Crew supported Carlson’s mission through online projects, spiritual services, fundraising and outreach.
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Russian Cosmism
— one faith of this family holds it
The museum is the first instrument.
Fyodorov's working life was the reading room, and in his system that is not incidental: the archive holds the traces from which the dead are to be recovered, so cataloguing is the beginning of the resurrection.
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N
Nikolai Fyodorov — who gave his salary away.
He lived in a rented corner, slept on a chest, ate almost nothing, refused promotion and declined to publish. The most ambitious project ever proposed for the human species was worked out by a man who owned one coat.
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The Brahma Kumaris
— one faith of this family holds it
He handed it to the young women, and never took it back.
In 1937 Lekhraj Kripalani vested his entire fortune in a trust of eight women, most of them under twenty-five. The organisation has been administered by women continuously since, which is close to unique among world religions.
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The Church of Scientology
— one faith of this family holds it
The Sea Organization signs for a billion years.
Founded in 1967 aboard three ships, the Sea Org is the religious order that staffs the senior organisations. Members sign a symbolic billion-year contract, wear uniforms and work under naval-style ranks.
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The Compost Rite
— one faith of this family holds it
Giving it back well is the last ethical act.
Burial that feeds something is not a preference about funerals. It is the final entry in a life of taking.
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The Ethical Culture Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
They built the institutions and then let them go.
A free kindergarten and a workingman's school from 1878, district nursing, Legal Aid, a children's hospital in 1891, the first Planned Parenthood clinic on the Upper West Side in 1950. Founders of the NAACP and the ACLU came out of the same rooms.
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Act so as to elicit the best in others, and thereby in yourself.
Adler's supreme rule, and deliberately reciprocal: you are not improving anyone from above, you are altered by the attempt.
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The Missionary Church of Kopimism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Missionary Church of Kopimism
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 Sunday Assembly
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Sunday Assembly
Transhumanism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Transhumanism
Twin Flames Universe
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Twin Flames Universe
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 tithe.
Ten percent, taught as an obligation in most Pentecostal and evangelical churches and as an aspiration elsewhere. It funds a global network of churches with no state support, and it is also the mechanism prosperity preaching uses, which is why the practice is defended and attacked from inside the same tradition.
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Mission.
It travelled with empire, and honest church historians say so. It also built the schools and clinics, translated several hundred languages into writing for the first time, and produced churches that now send more missionaries than they receive — Korean, Nigerian and Brazilian boards operating in Europe.
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