This page groups religions by the era in which they first emerged, from ancient antiquity to movements founded within the last two centuries. Wikipedia dates the BaháΚΌí Faith's founding to "19th-century Iran," while describing Judaism as "the oldest Abrahamic religion." Browsing by origin era lets a visitor see which traditions are recent arrivals and which reach back into the ancient world.
Facts
Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryContested: whether this is a religion, a philosophy or an ethical system is a question the Western category itself produced, and the field has not settled it. The atlas classes it as religious because that is how it has been practised. 2 Overview
What Defines This GroupingChinese traditions centred on right conduct, social order and the correct performance of rites rather than on doctrine about gods, which nonetheless acquired temples, a canon, a calendar of observance and a religious life of their own. 2 Origins
Whose Classification This IsConfucianism is a European coinage, formed in Jesuit Latin from Kong Fuzi. Chinese usage names the ru, the classicists, and has no single word for the ism the Western term supposes. 3 Learn More
Chinese Ethical-Religious Tradition
This group holds a Chinese tradition classed as ethical-religious, a tradition rooted in the Chinese cultural world that functions at once as a system of ethics and social order and as a religion with rites and reverence. Confucianism is the paradigm case, oriented to moral cultivation, ritual propriety and the ancestors.
The browser will find the tradition the atlas classes here. The entries describe it in its own terms, noting the long scholarly debate over whether it is best called a religion, a philosophy, or both at once.
Origin Era
Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. ConfucianismView the Source 3. The Five "Confucian" Classics
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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