Infoplease is here to help with our overviews of nine of these classical religions. You can learn more about religion in the United States on our main religion page, as well as information about atheism, agnostic people, and the religiously unaffiliated.
Judaism is a strictly monotheistic religion practiced by the Jewish people, an ethnic and religious nation descended from the historic peoples of Israel and Judah. Judaism as it would be recognized today originated in the Middle East in at least the s BCE, although certain religious traditions or beliefs can be traced back much further. Its adherents have long faced persecution fromdominant religious groups around them.
Through to the modern day, Jews have been the victims of intense violence and discrimination. All the same, Judaism has persisted and remains one of the most visible and widely practiced religions in the world. Learn more. Christianity is a monotheistic religion centered around the personage of Jesus of Nazareth, or Jesus Christ. Christianity arose in the 30s? Early Christianity rejected many of the social, cultural, and religious institutions of Judaism and pursued radically different strains of spiritual thought.
Within a centurya recognizableChurch was founded. The texts of the faith and its most important creeds were codified in the s CE. Despite persecution, Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire and all of its inheritors, and in the timesince the different Christian denominations have collectively become the largest faith in the world by a wide margin. Islam is a strictly monotheistic faith founded by the prophet Muhammad in the year in present-day Saudi Arabia.
His teachings, collected in the Quran, claim common descent with many Jewish and Christian beliefs. Muhammad preached monotheism in the city of Mecca despite opposition from local polytheists, and quickly built a religious community of early Muslims. The Islamic community was forced to relocate to Medina in , after which the group codified and began their expansion across the Arabian peninsula.
Nearly all of Arabia converted to Islam by , the year of Muhammad's death, and in the years since it has grown to become the world's second largest religion, mostly concentrated in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Baha'i is the youngest major world religion, founded in by the prophet Bah'u'llh. Baha'i grew out of the earlier religion of Babism, whose founder the Bab presaged the coming of another great prophet like the coming of Muhammad.
Baha'i originated in Iran, although its current center is in Haifa, Israel. Religions of the World. Hinduism embraces universalism by conceiving the whole world as a single family that deifies the one truth, and therefore it accepts all forms of beliefs and dismisses labels of distinct religions which would imply a division of identity.
Beyond the community of place, however, the three faiths represent in many aspects a continuing tradition that begins with the Old Testament of the Bible.
They will spend eternity in paradise on Earth. They also refrain from eating such things as blood sausage and blood soup. They refrain from saluting the flag of any country or singing nationalistic songs, which they believe are forms of worship, although they may stand out of respect. Hinduism is considered dharma, or way of life. It originated on the Indian subcontinent and is widely practiced throughout Southeast Asia.
The four main denominations are Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Shaktism, and Smartism. Unsurprisingly, India has the largest Hindu population but not the highest percentage of Hindus. There are an estimated 1. Nepal has the second-highest Hindu population at Buddhism also originated in India and is based on the teachings of Buddha. Buddhists have unique traditions, values, and beliefs, such as reincarnation. About million people practice Buddhism worldwide.
China has the largest Buddhist population with Cambodia has the highest percentage of Buddhists at In some nations, traditional Chinese religions, including Confucianism and Taoism, are practiced.
This is most frequently seen in the following nations:. The French Revolution was driven by the prioritization of human reason over the abstract authority of religion.
This prompted a period of skeptical inquiry, one in which atheism became an important cultural, philosophical, and political entity. Many who characterize themselves as atheists argue that a lack of proof or scientific process prevents the belief in a deity. Some who refer to themselves as secular humanists have developed a code of ethics that exists separate from the worship of a deity. Polling around the world has produced an extremely wide variance, with the largest rates of atheism generally seen in Europe and East Asia.
Instead, agnosticism argues that the limits of human reasoning and understanding make the existence of god s , the origins of the universe, and the possibility of an afterlife all unknowable. Like atheism, the term emerged around the fifth century BCE and was contemplated with particular interest in Indian cultures.
It gained more popular modern visibility when coined by English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley , who in recognized that incapacity of humans to truly answer questions regarding the divine.
To Huxley, and the agnostic and athiest thinkers who followed, theistic or gnostic religions lack scientific basis, and therefore, should be rejected.
Today, Babism exists with a few thousand adherents, concentrated largely in Iran, and standing separately from the Islamic ideologies that surround it. Buddhism is both a religion and philosophy. The traditions and beliefs surrounding Buddhism can be traced to the original teachings of Gautama Buddha, a sagely thinker who is believed to have lived between the fourth and sixth centuries BCE.
The Buddha lived and taught in the eastern part of ancient India, providing the template for a faith based on the ideas of moral rectitude, freedom from material attachment or desire, the achievement of peace and illumination through meditation, and a life dedicated to wisdom, kindness, and compassion.
Though its scriptures and traditions inform countless subsequent sects and ideologies, Buddhism is largely divided into two branches: Theravada — the goal of which is to achieve freedom from ignorance, material attachment, and anger by practicing the Noble Eightfold Path, all in pursuit of a sublime state called Nirvana; and Mahayana — the goal of which is aspire to Buddhahood by practicing the Zen principles of self-control, meditation, and expression of the insight of Buddha in your daily life, especially for the benefit of others, all to the end of achieving bodhisattva, or an ongoing cycle of rebirth by which you can continue to enlighten others.
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Christianity teaches that Jesus is the Son of God and the Messiah the savior of humanity foretold in the Torah, the primary scriptural doctrine of the Jewish faith.
Christian scripture incorporates both the Torah referred to by Christians as the Old Testament with the story of Jesus, his teachings, and those of his contemporaneous disciples the New Testament.
These form the Bible , the central text of the Christian faith. This idea and its adherents spread rapidly through ancient Judea around the first century CE, then throughout the ancient world.
Christians believe Jesus successfully met and completed all the requirements of the Old Testament laws, took upon himself the sins of the world during his crucifixion, died, and rose to life again so that those who place their faith in him are forgiven their sins, reconciled to God, and granted grace for daily living.
Christians maintain that heaven with God awaits them after bodily death, whereas eternal separation from God in hell awaits those who neither received forgiveness for their sins nor acknowledged Jesus as Lord. Christianity has seen countless reformation movements, which spawned innumerable sects and offshoot denominations.
Combined, Christianity is the largest religion in the world, with roughly 2. Its impact on the shape of world history and on present-day world culture is incalculable. Confucianism was a dominant form of philosophy and religious orientation in ancient China, one that emerged from the teachings of Chinese philosopher Confucius, who lived — BCE. Confucius viewed himself as a channel for the theological ideas emerging from the imperial dynasties that came before him.
With an emphasis on family and social harmony, Confucianism was a distinctly humanist and even secularist religious ideology. Confucianism had a profound impact on the development of Eastern legal customs and the emergence of a scholar class and with it, a meritocratic way of governing.
As Buddhism became the dominant spiritual force in China, Confucianism declined in practice. And with the emergence of communism and Maoism in the 20th century, the mainstream practice of Confucianism was largely at an end. However, it remains a foundational ideology and force underlying Asian and Chinese attitudes toward scholarly, legal, and professional pursuits. Indeed, the strong work ethic advocated by Confucianism is seen as a major catalyst for the late 20th century rise of the Asian economies.
Today, there are various independent Confucian congregations, but it was only in that congregation leaders in China gathered together to form the Holy Confucian Church. Druze refers to an Arabic ethnoreligious group that originated in and still largely inhabits the Mountain of Druze region in southern Syria. Despite a small population of adherents, the Druze nonetheless play an important role in the development of their region known in historical shorthand as the Levant.
The Druze view themselves as the direct descendants of Jethro of Midian, distinguished in Jewish scripture as the father-in-law of Moses. As such, the Druze are considered related to Judaism by marriage. Like their in-laws, the Druze are monotheistic, professing faith in only one God.
Druze ideologies are something of a hybrid though, drawing from the cultural teachings of Islam, but also incorporating the wisdom of Greek philosophers, such as Plato, and concepts of reincarnation similar to those in Hindu canon. Indeed, its present-day scriptures and community remain somewhat insular.
The close-knit communities rooted in present day Syria, Lebanon, and Israel have long been subject to persecution, particularly at the hands of Islamic theocracies.
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