The festival lasts five days and the story behind the festival differs for each of the three religions. Although the group faces a great deal of criticism and gender discrimination, the women are persisting with their art and working to inspire others. I accept. Devotees try to form a human pyramid to break a clay pot, to mark the Hindu festival of Janmashtami in Mumbai. Frank Jacobs , Big Think. Take action on UpLink. Explore context. Explore the latest strategic trends, research and analysis.
At a glance, this map shows both the size and distribution of world religions. See how religions mix at both national and regional level. There's one country in the Americas without a Christian majority — which? Image: Carrie Osgood. Christianity blue dominates in the Americas, Europe and the southern half of Africa. Islam green is the top religion in a string of countries from northern Africa through the Middle East to Indonesia. India stands out as a huge Hindu bloc dark orange. Buddhism light orange is the majority religion in South East Asia and Japan.
This may be one reason that the Druze, while participating actively in the politics and affairs of their home nations, shield their customs and practices from the eyes of outsiders. Today, there are between , and one million Druze adherents, nearly all of them concentrated in the Middle East.
A term adapted in modern historical discourse, gnosticism concerns the variety of religious systems and beliefs in the ancient world that emerged from the Judeo-Christian tradition. These belief systems held that emanations from a single God were responsible for the creation of the material world and that, as such, all humans carried the divine spark of God.
Emerging in the first century CE — in close concert with the emergence of Christianity — gnosticism is perhaps best understand as the intermediary set of ideas shared by portions of the world as Christianity gradually eclipsed Judaism in size and scope. During this period, — BCE, civilization transitioned from tribal and pastoral living into settled and agricultural living.
From this emerged social classes, state-entities, and monarchies. The primary texts retelling this period of history are called the Vedas and would significantly inform the so-called Hindu Synthesis. The Hindu Synthesis was a period of time, roughly BCE to CE, in which the precepts of Hinduism solidified from multiple intertwining strands of Indian spiritual and cultural tradition, emerging from a broad range of philosophies to share a unifying set of concepts. Critical among these concepts is the theme of the Four Purusarthas , or goals, of human life: Dharma ethics and duties , Artha prosperity and work , Kama desires and passions , and Moksha liberation and salvation.
Other important concepts include karma, which asserts a universal relationship between action, intent, and consequences; samsara, the Hindu concept of rebirth; and a wide range of Yogic practices merging the body, mind, and elements.
Though no one figure or group is credited with its founding, Hinduism is the third largest religion in the world today. Islam is a monotheistic religion that — like Christianity and Judaism — traces its roots to the Garden of Eden, Adam, and the prophet Abraham. Islam teaches that Allah is the only God and that Muhammed is his messenger. Islam holds that God spoke to Muhammed through the archangel Gabriel some time around CE, delivering the revelations that would form the Quran.
This primary text of the Islamic faith is believed by adherents to contain the exact words of God and therefore provides a full and nonnegotiable blueprint for how to live. The Quran and the Islamic legal code known as Sharia inform every aspect of life, from ethics and worship to family matters and business dealings. In the centuries to follow, Islam would simultaneously produce countless wars of succession and a growing sense of spiritual unity within the Arab World.
This dichotomy between internal conflict and cultural unity remains a presence in the Islamic faith today. This dichotomy would also give way to a division between the two dominant sects of Islam, Sunni and Shia. With more than 1. Jainism is an ancient Indian religion that — according to its adherents — can be traced through a succession of 24 sagely teachers.
The first of these teachers is thought to have been Rishabhanatha, who lived millions of years ago. These and other concepts are outlined in the Acaranga Sutra, the oldest of the Jainist scriptures. As one of the earliest extant religious traditions to emerge from the spiritually fertile Indian subcontinent, Jainism both shares with and diverges from features of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions that also emerged there.
Like Hindu and Buddhism, Jainism teaches the doctrines of karma, rebirth, and monastic as opposed to theistic spiritual practices. Jainists believe the soul is an ever-changing thing, bound to the body only for a lifetime, which differs from Hindu or Buddhist ideas about the soul as part of an infinite and constant universe.
This focus on the corporeal also extends to the Jainist caste system, which, not unlike Hinduism, requires adherents eschew social liberation in favor of spiritual liberation. Judaism is one of the oldest monotheistic world religions, among the first ethnoreligious groups to move away from idolatry or paganism and toward the recognition of a single deity. Judaism is said to have begun with the figure of Abraham, a man living in the Land of Canaan — a geographical expanse likely encompassing portions of Phoenicia, Philistia, and Israel.
In the Tanakh — the body of Jewish scripture which includes a foundational text called The Torah , and later supplemental texts call the Midrash and the Talmud — it is said that God spoke to Abraham and commanded him to recognize the singularity and omnipotence of God. Abraham accepted, becoming the father not just of Judaism but of the various monotheistic or Abrahamic religions that followed.
Thus, Abraham is seen not just as the first prophet of Judaism, but also of the Christian and Islamic faiths that sprung from the Judaic tradition. The Jewish faith is based upon a covenant between Abraham and God in which the former renounced idolatry and accepted the latter as the only divine authority. To seal the covenant, Abraham became the first recipient of the ritualistic circumcision. This circumcision is still performed today on every newborn Jewish male as a symbol of that covenant.
Historians observe that while Abraham almost certainly lived more than 3, years ago, literary liberties taken with the scriptures make it impossible to ascertain exactly when he lived. But his influence would loom large in the ancient world, with the rabbinic moral codes of Judaism and its model of ethical monotheism both significantly informing the formulation of law and religion in western civilization.
With roughly Rastafarianism is a newer religious movement that follows in the Abrahamic tradition of monotheism, referring to the singular deity as Jah. Rastafari hold the Christian Bible as their primary scripture but offer an interpretation highly connected to their own political and geographical realities.
The religion has no founder, and is a synthesis of many different Indian religious traditions. The religion waxed and waned in competition with Jainism and Buddhism throughout Indian history, before seeing a huge resurgence after the medieval period. Thereafter it became the dominant religion on the Indian subcontinent. Hinduism isone of the most geographically concentrated of the major world religions?
The sheer number of practitioners, however, makes Hinduism the world's third largest religion. Buddhism is a religious tradition founded by Gautama Buddha in the early s BCE, drawing from or opposing many of the same Vedic traditions that inform Hinduism.
Buddhists engagedHindus and Jains in religious dialogues for centuries, developing mutual competing traditions and beliefs. Buddhism flourished in India, receiving support from several powerful leaders,before declining during the medieval period. Buddhism continued to grow and develop in East Asia, having a profound impact on the cultural landscape of the entire region. Buddhism is today the fourth largest religion in the world, being the majority religion of many countries in Southeast Asia, and with nearly million practitioners in China.
If you're interested in learning more about Buddhism on a personal level, you can also check out our list of the best books on Buddhism. Jainism is an ancient religious tradition from India; per its practitionersJainism is eternal, or at least older than Hinduism, but many historical estimates will place it contemporary with Buddhism as a Classical offshoot of old Vedic tradition. Like Buddhism, Jainism received varying degrees of support or opposition from powerful sponsors, and was in constant dialogue with India's other religious traditions.
Unlike Buddhism, Jainism didn't spread far outside of its home in India, and today the vast majority of the world's million Jains live in India.
The Jain community enjoys a large profile, however, due to their high literacy rates and the esteem Mohandas Gandhi professed for Jain teachings and beliefs. Guru Nanak was raised as a Hindu in the Muslim-ruled Mughal Empire, but he rejected both dominant faiths and began preaching his ownreligion. A community formed around him. Over the next two centuries, the Sikhs would be led by nine more gurus.
The last living guru named the Sikh holy book, Guru Granth Sahib, as his successor, and there has since been no single leader of the Sikh community. Despite being a religious minority, the Sikhs overthrew the Mughals and founded a major empire in Northern India in the s.
By different definitions Sikhism is either the fifth or eighth largest religion in the world, mostly concentrated in their home region of Punjab. Confucianism, it must be said, is not a religion in a strict sense. Estimates of the global size of these faiths generally come from other sources, such as the religious groups themselves. By far the largest of these groups are Sikhs, who number about 25 million, according to the World Religion Database.
For more information, see Spotlight on Other Religions. If everyone alive in lined up from youngest to oldest, the person in the middle the median would be 28 years old. The new data suggest a slightly different religious landscape than the estimate made by this study for the broader United Kingdom England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland , which is based primarily on the Annual Population Survey carried out by the U.
In China, the belief in God statistic measures belief in God, gods, spirits, ghosts or Buddha. About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research.
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Research Topics. Geographic Distribution The geographic distribution of religious groups varies considerably. Defining the Religious Groups This study is based on self-identification. In order to obtain statistics that are comparable across countries, the study attempts to count groups and individuals who self-identify as members of five widely recognized world religions — Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims and Jews — as well as people associated with three other religious categories that may be less familiar: Folk or Traditional Religions Folk religions are closely tied to a particular people, ethnicity or tribe.
The Religiously Unaffiliated The religiously unaffiliated population includes atheists, agnostics and people who do not identify with any particular religion in surveys.
Roadmap to the Report These and other findings are discussed in more detail in the remainder of this report, which is divided into eight sections — one for each of the major religious groupings, in order of size: Christians Muslims Religiously Unaffiliated Hindus Buddhists Folk Religionists Other Religions Jews To discuss the geographic distribution of religious groups, this report divides the world into six major regions: Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, North America and sub-Saharan Africa.
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