This page groups beliefs by their standing within a body of teaching. Wikipedia notes that "beliefs are the subject of various important philosophical debates," including how "fine-grained or coarse-grained" a given belief actually is. Browsing by status-within-the-tradition lets a visitor tell a settled belief from a contested one.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingStatements about the structure and history of the world and its beings - creation, world ages, the shape of the cosmos, the fate of the dead - held as articles of a tradition rather than as speculation. The accounts gathered here answer different questions: an origin of the world and a recurring destruction of it are not the same kind of claim. 2 Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryA standard analytic category in the study of religion 2 Learn More
The Cosmological Beliefs
This group gathers cosmological beliefs, the teachings of the traditions about the structure, origin and destiny of the cosmos: how the world came to be, how it is ordered, and how it will end. Every tradition frames human life within some such account of the whole.
The browser will find the cosmological beliefs the atlas gathers. The entries describe each in its own terms, reporting the tradition's own account rather than reconciling the many differing pictures.
Rejected, or not held, within this tradition
Filter Results9 entries
Advaita Vedanta (nondualism)
Rejected, or not held, within this tradition
Anatta: no permanent self
Rejected, or not held, within this tradition
Naturalist conception of God
Rejected, or not held, within this tradition
Other-emptiness (shentong): ultimate reality is empty of what is other than itself
Rejected, or not held, within this tradition
Purgatory
Rejected, or not held, within this tradition
Reincarnation (samsara)
Rejected, or not held, within this tradition
The Soul Passes Through Successive Bodies
Rejected, or not held, within this tradition
The World Is the Free Self-Expression of a Single Consciousness, Not an Illusion
Rejected, or not held, within this tradition
The World's Plurality Is an Appearance Superimposed by Ignorance
Rejected, or not held, within this tradition
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. CosmologyView the Source Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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