/ lab / religions
Twenty belief systems, oldest first, each in the landscape that made it.
/ lab / religions
one sky, read in order
Twenty belief systems, oldest first, each in the landscape that made it. The circles in every scene have something to say — open them, follow the threads between religions, and by the end you'll have built a sky.
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01 / 20 · indigenous/primal
prehistory · everywhere at once
The world is a society of persons, only some of whom are human — and religion is the etiquette of living among them.
◯ 7 annotations in this landscape — click the circles
02 / 20 · ethnic religion
prehistoric roots · japan
The world is full of kami — spirits of places, forces, and ancestors — and life goes well when your relationship with them is kept clean, literally.
◯ 8 annotations in this landscape — click the circles
03 / 20 · ethnic religion
c. 1800 BCE · canaan, reshaped in babylonian exile
The one God made a binding covenant with one family — Israel keeps his commandments in this life, and this life is the point.
◯ 7 annotations in this landscape — click the circles
04 / 20 · world religion + ethnic religion
c. 1500 BCE · indus and ganges plains
One ultimate reality (Brahman) underlies everything, including you; the self wanders through rebirth after rebirth, its circumstances set by karma, until it realizes this and exits the cycle (moksha).
◯ 7 annotations in this landscape — click the circles
05 / 20 · ethnic religion
c. 1200 BCE · the eastern iranian steppe
The universe is a war between one wholly good God and an uncreated spirit of destruction, every human is drafted to a side by their thoughts, words, and deeds — and good wins, guaranteed, with everyone eventually saved.
◯ 9 annotations in this landscape — click the circles
06 / 20 · world religion + ethnic religion
c. 550 BCE · the ganges plain
Every living thing, down to the microbes, contains an eternal individual soul weighed down by karma — actual matter, not metaphor; stop the harm that attracts it, burn off the accumulation, and the soul rises to the summit of the universe, omniscient, forever.
◯ 8 annotations in this landscape — click the circles
07 / 20 · philosophy/way of life
c. 500 BCE · the state of lu, zhou china
Human beings become fully human through cultivated virtue, ritual propriety, and rightly ordered relationships — order the family and you have begun to order the world.
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08 / 20 · world religion
c. 5th century BCE · the ganges plain
Life as ordinarily lived is suffering driven by craving, and the self doing the craving does not actually exist; see this fully and the craving — and with it the cycle of rebirth — goes out (nirvana).
◯ 7 annotations in this landscape — click the circles
09 / 20 · philosophy/way of life + ethnic religion
c. 4th century BCE · the mist valleys of zhou china
Reality has a grain — the Tao — and life works when you stop forcing and move with it, the way water does.
◯ 7 annotations in this landscape — click the circles
10 / 20 · world religion
c. 30 CE · the hills of roman judea
God became human in Jesus, died to pay for humanity's sins, and rose from the dead — trust that, and death is not the end for you either.
◯ 7 annotations in this landscape — click the circles
11 / 20 · world religion
c. 610 CE · mecca and the hejaz
There is one God without partner or image, Muhammad is his final messenger, and the Quran is God's own uncorrupted speech — submit, and your deeds will be weighed with mercy at judgment.
◯ 7 annotations in this landscape — click the circles
12 / 20 · world religion
c. 1499 CE · punjab, land of five rivers
One formless God is directly available to everyone, regardless of caste, gender, or priesthood — remember God constantly, work honestly, share what you earn, and the soul merges with the One instead of cycling on through rebirth.
◯ 7 annotations in this landscape — click the circles
13 / 20 · offshoot (of Christianity) + new religious movement
1830 CE · burned-over new york, then the utah desert
True Christianity vanished with the apostles and God restored it through Joseph Smith in 1820s New York — new scripture, a living prophet, eternal families, and godhood as the faithful's own destination.
◯ 7 annotations in this landscape — click the circles
14 / 20 · new religious movement
1838 CE · yamato province, japan
God the Parent created humans to watch them live joyously, and the whole task is sweeping the dust off the mind until the Joyous Life is realized on this earth.
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15 / 20 · new religious movement — though Kardec insisted it was a science and a philosophy, not a religion
c. 1857 · paris parlors, then brazil
The dead are simply people between lives, reachable by methodical mediumship, and every spirit is enrolled in a compulsory school of reincarnations that only ever moves forward — toward perfection, via charity.
◯ 7 annotations in this landscape — click the circles
16 / 20 · world religion + offshoot (of Islam, via the Bábí movement)
1863 · baghdad, on the exile road to acre
All the world's religions are successive chapters of one unfolding revelation from one God, Bahá'u'lláh wrote the current chapter — and its theme is that humanity is one and should start acting like it.
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17 / 20 · offshoot (of Christianity)
c. 1879 · pittsburgh, pennsylvania
God's kingdom is a real heavenly government that has ruled since 1914 and will shortly replace every human one at Armageddon — and warning the neighbors, door by door, is the core act of worship.
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18 / 20 · syncretic + new religious movement
1926 CE · tây ninh, french cochinchina
All religions were always one religion, revealed in installments — and God has now cut out the human messengers and opened a direct line by séance to organize the merger.
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19 / 20 · new religious movement + offshoot (of Christianity, read through the King James Bible from Jamaica)
1930 CE · the yards of kingston, jamaica
God incarnated as Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia; Black people are the Bible's true Israelites exiled in Babylon; and salvation is not a heaven after death but repatriation to Zion — Africa — in this life.
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20 / 20 · new religious movement
1954 CE · los angeles, by way of the pulps
You are an immortal spiritual being (thetan) who has forgotten its own godlike nature, and Scientology sells the fixed sequence of techniques — the Bridge — that restores it, course by purchased course.
◯ 8 annotations in this landscape — click the circles
epilogue
Six more entries, documented with the same straight face as the other twenty. That is the joke, and also — it isn't.
new religious movement — neopagan · 1962 CE
Divinity is immanent in the living Earth and in every person — "Thou art God" — a theology taken, with full disclosure, from a science-fiction novel.
UFO religion + new religious movement · 1974 CE
All life on Earth was engineered in laboratories by extraterrestrial scientists called the Elohim, every religion is a garbled report of contact with them, and they will return openly once humanity builds them an embassy.
UFO religion · 1997 CE
Fleets of benevolent extraterrestrials under Ashtar Sheran orbit Earth broadcasting telepathic guidance, and those who raise their vibrations by living in love will be evacuated by ship when the crisis comes.
parody religion · 1998 CE
Diego Armando Maradona is the god of football (D10S), and the 1986 quarter-final against England — two goals, one divine, one merely the century's best — is the miracle that proves it.
parody religion + new religious movement — a census joke and a sincere practice sharing one name · 2001 CE
The Force of Star Wars names something real — an impersonal energy present in all things, with which a practitioner can align through meditation, discipline, and ethical conduct, the films themselves being admitted fiction.
parody religion · 2005 CE
An invisible, undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe — a claim precisely as testable as intelligent design, which is the entire point.
the sky you built
Every chapter is a star in its own sky color — the wider the star, the older the faith; every ring around it is another power of ten in followers today. The timeline below anchors each one in history. Click a star to trace its family through time: direct relations draw solid, second degree dashed, third degree dotted.
click a star to trace its family through time