Beliefs & Restrictions

368 entries. Click any to see everything it connects to.

The specific things traditions hold and require: dietary rules, prohibitions, obligations and articles of faith. Each entry states the belief plainly, names the tradition that holds it, and gives the reason the tradition itself offers. Related traditions often share a restriction while giving different reasons for it, and the entries record the reason as stated rather than harmonising them.

Facts

Overview

Entries in the Atlas: 368
What Defines This Grouping: Single tenets, rules and prohibitions isolated from the traditions that hold them and stated in that tradition's own terms with the reason it offers. Organising religion around propositional belief is itself a Western and largely post-Reformation habit: several traditions treat practice, lineage or law as primary and have no close equivalent of the noun. 1

Status

Standing as a Comparative Category: Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed 1

Sources

Belief, Language, and Experience Rodney Needham, 1972

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What a Tradition Holds and Requires

This category holds the specific things traditions believe and require: articles of faith, dietary rules, prohibitions, obligations and taboos. Where a religion entry describes a whole tradition, a belief entry isolates a single tenet or rule (the oneness of God, the prohibition of certain foods, an obligation of charity, a taboo on certain acts), and states it plainly.

Each entry names the tradition that holds the belief, states it in that tradition's own terms, and gives the reason the tradition itself offers, so that comparable beliefs across traditions can be set side by side.

Belief and boundary

Beliefs and the rules that follow from them often mark the boundary of a community, what its members affirm and how they must live, and small differences in them can distinguish one tradition or denomination from another. The atlas treats each as the tradition presents it, without ranking or refuting.

The beliefs group by kind (core tenets, cosmological beliefs, moral precepts, dietary restrictions, prohibitions and taboos), so a browser can compare, for instance, the dietary rules of several traditions together. The enacted side of religious life, rites, practices and festivals, is treated under its own categories.