This is very inaccurate. It invents splits in Judaism (for example) that simply don't exist.
For example it has a bizarre split of Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai and even more bizarrely continues the lines to modern times as if there are actually two separate branches.
When the parts that I know best are inaccurate, it seems likely to me that everything else will be just as bad.
It seems to be attempting to list the church organisations rather than the faiths -- for instance, the Anglicans and Presbyterians have an entry for each country. If you were to list the faiths, you would have something very much smaller.
Even so, the part on Judaism (about which I have the most knowledge) is still highly inaccurate: marking divisions that do not exist, branching in the wrong places, over-branching in some places, under-branching in others.
It seems like an compelling idea undertaken by somebody vastly under qualified to implement it properly. (Which is not altogether surprising given the enormity of the task)
There's a similar thing going on with other traditions -- with Eastern Orthodoxy, a lot of the various national jurisdictions (Russian, Greek, etc) are listed out separately even though (most) of them are in full communion with one another.
It is cool to see all the "branches" laid out like this but it does lend itself to presenting more divisions than are actually there because that's what we naturally think of when we see a tree structure.
Is Greek / Roman / Norse mythology (basically everything Western that isn't Christianity) not considered religion? Because maybe I'm just blind but I can't seem to find those anywhere in the tree.
It seems to be incomplete and inaccurate in a lot of ways.
For example, Christianity borrows elements of Zoroastrianism and Judaism is actually derived from ancient Babylonian polytheism. Maybe I just didn't see it, but Confucianism seems to be missing too.
Maybe not derived from, but certainly descended from.
Yahweh was the national god of the Israelites, who were part of the Canaanite polytheistic system. In the context of Yahweh being a warrior deity in a polytheistic system, the phrase "there are no other gods like our god," and also the crusades against neighboring settlements seem to take on more meaning.
Yahweh is clearly at a level "above all gods", i.e. on his own level as omnipotent creator of all things. Angels and fallen angels (aka demons/ heavenly hosts and other "gods") are on a second level of power/influence, and then earthly creations below that.
As such, Yahweh doesn't "compete" against other (lower-case) gods, because they're not omnipotent creators and he is.
Although the Israelites were pretty famous for rejecting him and worshiping lower-case gods, (and subsequently incurring Yahweh's wrath), there's never a question that he is the I AM and not any derivation.
I'm talking about the historical and anthropological record, not the Hebrew mythology. Of course the religion's modern texts would paint themselves in an infallible light.
So yes, Judaism is descended and evolved from Canaanite religion.
Your own links don't support such a strong claim. At best the strongest claim you can make is that the name might have some correspondence with the name of Canaanite Gods, but you have zero information on the direction of the influence.
Your own links make no claim at all that the religion itself has any relationship with the Canaanite religions.
Regarding the direction, do not forget that Abraham was very active in the region, and proselytized extensively. It is hardly surprising if the Canaanites took some concepts from him.
That article has been restructured quite a bit after it was made part of the Judaism portal, compared to when I first found it and then looked into the subject a couple of years ago. Just because one wikipedia article is incomplete doesn't mean it's not an accepted fact.
Whoah. Be careful slinging around the F-bomb, bro.
When talking about causation of events where there is no data, much less reproducible data, you certainly have room to disagree with some evidence and prefer others, but it goes too far to claim "Judaism is actually derived from ancient Babylonian polytheism" is unassailable fact.
That may your belief--and you may interpret some evidence to support your belief--but as you'll be quick to point out to others, having a belief doesn't mean it's true.
The bar for something being a fact is higher than that.
I understand that you are simply repeating what you learned, but you learned inaccurate information.
It's possible your mistake is because there are some that believe that the Canaanite religions and Judaism were practiced in parallel by the same peoples, but one is not descended from other.
Basically it lacks everything which is not a part of some "mainstream" religion today, for which it has, conversely, very impressive list of local (sometimes even hardly distinguishable) denominations. I cannot find any animistic religions, no shamanism, virtually no polytheistic religions outside of hinduism.
But it isn't really because the map isn't "complete enough", I'd say the whole taxonomy is a bit weird. It makes it look like there were several "major" religions like "Chinese folk Taoism" and "Japanese Mythology" which produced everything else, when if fact they are not "major" at all: it would be more accurate to start from general spiritual cults, where every concrete local religion would be thin line as well. Of course it wouldn't look like real tree, and it shouldn't.
Similar for Africa(n) which leads me to believe that the periphery covers only what is extant and only the roots of those are traced back to their origins.
This is interesting, but you would be naive if you think this is in any way comprehensive or accurate.
My religion and main area of knowledge of Catholicism shows a limited number of picked and chosen orders of priests, (i.e. Franciscans, Cistercians, Capuchins). These are not separate religions by any means whatsoever; they are all members of the Catholic faith. They certainly don't belong on a chart that is meant to display different religions and schisms.
According to the key, they are listed as "adherent branches".
Schisms are shown by ovoids with white fill and appear to make some sense.
I guess the chart is trying to show practices that have a lot of adherents, not just a diagram of religions. Much of the problem is probably just using the word "branch", which isn't a great description of what is shown.
That's true I believe. However, my point is that at least in the Christianity (specifically Catholicism) sector of this graph, it's misleading.
Specifically in the graph, different orders of priests aren't schismatic offshoots of the Catholic religion by any means.
After looking at the graph a little more closely, I also see various Catholic traditions listed as separate religions (i.e. Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, Ruthenian Catholic Church, Melkite Greek Catholic Church). I understand the idea of listing these as separate from the Church, but they are in "full communion" with the Catholic Church and also shouldn't be mistaken as separate religions. We all believe the same important things, different cultures and traditions have brought their own gifts to the faith.
Catholics profess the Nicene Creed each mass and in it are the "Four Marks of the Church", something every Catholic grade schooler has to memorize at some point. One, holy, catholic, and apostolic. The word "Catholic" itself is greek for "universal".
Someone shared a chart with me the other day that, while not quite the same thing, could be of interest to those wondering what happened to the core followers of Jesus who went on to found the early local churches:
Nice visualization! I feel like there's room for many improvements both technically and in accuracy, though.
For example, the Bahá'í Wold Center is not a branch, though. It's just the spiritual and administrative center of the Bahá'í Faith [0][1]. Likewise, the Universal House of Justice [2][3] is the supreme governing institution of the Bahá'í Faith (and its seat is located at the Bahá'í World Centre), so it's not a branch either.
(I am a friend of the author and host the site for him) Sources were cited, the submitter deep-linked. A redirect is now in place to the page that has more information.
Edit, for clarity:
* 000024.org is owned by my friend, Alex Fink
* The 000024.org website is hosted on one of my servers, along with a few other static sites belonging to friends. I have been doing this for free as a favor to those friends for many years.
* The submitted link was not the intended landing page, but is now redirecting to it.
* The intended landing page explains where the images came from.
You should rephrase to be a little more careful about who the creator of the image is.
(at least, if I understand correctly, you are friends with the person hosting the jpg of the image that was extracted from the pdf that had the image that was pieced together from the original).
edit: You've made an edit, but you missed what I meant. Alex Fink is not really an author here where the point of the link is the image, he is the "page owner" or something like that. There is plenty of attribution and I don't mean to imply any attempts at obfuscation, but egwynn was talking to the original creator of the image, not to the hoster of this version of the image.
I didn't miss what you meant, I just didn't want to remove the part of my comment that you were talking about because then someone reading your comment might be confused.
I've been a little scatterbrained due to commenting while trying to get the bandwidth usage under control (sorted now), and I apologize for anything unclear in my comments here.
* "Wasted" is a value judgment. Arguably anything humans do with their lives that's valuable to them isn't wasted.
* Creating narratives that provide context and serve a starting/exploration point for value judgments seems to be something humans just do (the astute might even notice the author of the comment I'm replying to is hardly immune). Religion isn't that different from the rest of the liberal arts in that respect, though the way people inhabit it arguably is (and everyone inhabits one narrative/cosmology or another).
* Given those things, it looks like you might be confusing religion with a kind of folk cosmology (as that's the easiest explanation for a flat judgment of religion as a waste of time).
Really? How many official atheistic rituals are performed per week? per month? per year? How many atheistic personalities do you see/hear on the radio / television (talking about atheism, not about pizza)? How many atheistic politicians do you know (probably very few, since it is political suicide)? How many times per year is an atheist ringing at your door to tell you the wonders of atheism? (I get several calls per year from the jehova's witness and other groups, trying to convince me - very educately - that their religion is "the good one - tm")
I heard people are going to the church (or synagoge, or mosque, or whatever) every Sunday (Saturday / Friday) (or they should ...), and they are very freely and openly telling everybody how much they believe in their choice of god.
Compared to the publicity with which believers are living their faith, atheist's non-faith is very introvert.
Which is according to the nature of the thing - why would you be talking about your non-beliefs all the time? Basically, we all have so many non-believes (an atheist has only one more than a believer) that there is no material time to talk about them.
Of course whenever an atheist breaks this code of silence (like poor madengr just did above) with a single sentence (not a three hours prayer - mind you!), it clearly proves that atheists are exhibitionists.
All this makes your joke a very stupid joke (since its logic is broken)
The joke was that atheists (along with the others listed) are inclined towards outspoken rants at everyone. You responded with an outspoken rant to the joke.
I often wonder if God is up with technology and is up in heaven watching peoples twitter feeds, facebook and forum comments saying to himself, "Hm, that acheron is being too christian today. Buck your ideas up young man."
What I see is millennia of people who have found themselves in a mysteriously ordered world with intense experiences and moral instincts. Over time people have developed systems to explain these things which have developed also.
Religion can provide a sense of community and support that society can otherwise lack. Personal faith can also be a means of support for people in troubled times.
>Now imagine the man-millenia wasted on all that hocus pocus.
my/mine imaginary deity/deities is/are the one true deity/deities, because, er, I say so, and so did my parents!
how people can buy into the fairy-tales which is religion has always baffles me, atleast unless you are indoctrinated from a young age and shielded from critical thinking.
It also makes it a fairly fuzzy target, since at at any time someone might invoke but <criticism> does not apply to <placeholder religion>, therefore it's not really an argument against religion per se and i dismiss it entirely
Exhaustive, lawyer-proof arguments are fairly tedious. Obviously some generalizations and shortcuts are taken.
The "my imaginary deity" argument was (hopefully) meant as criticism regarding institutionalized denial of truth to uphold supernatural aspects and claims to power for various religions.
Creation mythologies don't just have a bonding function, they may also serve as a justification for monarchy or caste systems if some people are descended from/treated preferentially by some aspect of that creation. X's chosen people.
Of course religions did fulfill social roles, as glue for people who needed answers for things that could not be answered at the time. And maybe they still do to some extent to this day. But that shouldn't keep anyone from highlighting anachronistic aspects.
If it doesn't make any unverifiable claims about the supernatural, then by all means remove it from the "religions" category and add it to "philosophy".
Krishnamurti Foundation is not at all about religion. In fact Jiddu Krishnamurti was completely against any dogma to the point where he asked people to not even follow his words. And they still made it part of the Hinduism branch, which is funny.
This is less "inaccurate" than fundamentally conceptually flawed. Human ideological systems are not like biological systems that speciate through schism. They are creations of living human minds and societies that piece together ideas that they find meaningful and useful.
So this chart lists a couple of major sources: Chinese folk Taoism, Japanese mythology, Shramana traditions (non-vedic), Early Vedic period, and Ancient Israelite religion. Most of these traditions have been cross-pollinating, merging, and re-dividing for millenia. Yet this kind of visualization can only depict schism, not influence.
> This is less "inaccurate" than fundamentally conceptually flawed. Human ideological systems are not like biological systems that speciate through schism.
Given the existence of horizontal gene transfer [0], neither are the biological systems traditionally described that way. Nevertheless, the schism model can be a useful illustrative approximation even when its not a completely accurate model.
If they wanted to they could break off LDS into LDS, Reorganized LDS/Community of Christ, and FLDS, and Church of Christ Temple Lot, as well as a handful of defunct schisms like Strangite.
I wouldn't say it does. The very first thing I did was to zoom out, and then understood that I cannot really use it without magnifying glass. So I installed xzoom to find out (unsurprisingly) that I cannot use it as well, because on that scale pixelation is strong enough for text to be unreadable, so the only solution would be to actually implement that feature in js.
It is astonishingly bizarre that this so called tree focuses only on a small number of recent religions and their sects and orders.
There are thousands of religions not represented, most significantly older than the oldest concrete points on this graph.
I do recognize though that this focuses on fairly modern religions of the last two millennia. Still, what a small, narrow, and uninteresting group of beliefs that is.
The Ethiopian Jews do not observe Hanukkah, which would indicate that they split of from the rest of the Jews earlier than 167 BC.
Also "Ancient Isrealite Religion" should probably be "Ancient Caananite Religion". And a lot of things happened there before 500 BC - such as Yahweh becoming the dominant deity and King Hezekiah forbidding the worship of any other gods.
Looking at this, I can't help but see a few original Gits, forking into hundreds, then thousands of moral software programs, installed across human history.
Im interested in this link between hinduism and European native beliefs. A quick google search didn't lead to anything authoritative. Do you know where more info could be found?
In theory Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and the ancient Greek, Roman, Germanic, Celtic, Norse, etc, religions, are all descended from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_religion - however, that is so long ago, by the time we get to the historical period, they have diverged a lot, both due to their own organic development in different directions, and also due to the influence of differing non-Indo-European cultures - such as Dravidian culture in the case of Hinduism; Semitic and Sumerian cultures in the case of Zoroastrianism; Etruscan culture in the case of the Romans
For example it has a bizarre split of Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai and even more bizarrely continues the lines to modern times as if there are actually two separate branches.
When the parts that I know best are inaccurate, it seems likely to me that everything else will be just as bad.