Disputed Statements

Sonderbund War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 93.000000

Swiss military records tally ninety three dead in action across both sides, sixty federal soldiers and thirty three Sonderbund defenders, the figure the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland gives for combat deaths during the twenty six days of fighting.

Source A Very Civil War: The Swiss Sonderbund War of 1847, Joachim Remak tier 1

Sonderbund War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 128.000000

General histories of the war round the toll upward to allow for wounded soldiers, several hundred on each side, who later died of their injuries after the fighting itself had ended, a figure Remak's account also treats as the more complete one.

Source A Very Civil War: The Swiss Sonderbund War of 1847, Joachim Remak tier 1

Songtsen Gampo, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 605

Tibetan and Chinese sources for the early Yarlung dynasty do not agree closely enough to fix Songtsen Gampo's birth precisely, and historians cite years across a range in the early seventh century. Around 605 is among the commonly cited estimates rather than a settled date.

Source Tibet: A History, Sam van Schaik tier 1

Sophia, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Formally condemned by this tradition

Whether Sophia is best read as a poetic personification of Wisdom, a divine attribute, or a distinct hypostasis is answered differently by every tradition that inherited her, from Proverbs' street-preaching figure through the Gnostic aeon whose fall produces the material world to Orthodox Christianity's identification of Holy Wisdom with Christ. The condemned status recorded here belongs to the strongest of these readings: the Russian sophiology of Vladimir Solovyov and Sergei Bulgakov, which pressed Sophia toward a fourth hypostasis alongside the Trinity, was formally condemned by church authorities in 1935. The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) is the earliest source behind the personification itself, in Proverbs 8, where Wisdom calls in the street and says she stood beside God at the world's founding; the 1935 condemnation is a later doctrinal ruling on how far that personification can be pressed, not a rejection of the personification.

Source The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), Anonymous (multiple authors) tier 1

Sophia, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Doctrinal Status Detail

Currently States Whether Sophia is a poetic personification, a divine attribute or a distinct person has been answered differently by each tradition that received her, and the Russian sophiology that pressed the last answer was condemned by church authorities in 1935.

Source The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), Anonymous (multiple authors) tier 1

Sou ⲋ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Greek letters wrote Egyptian from about the first century CE, settled by the fourth

According To The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) surveys the small corpus of Old Coptic texts, pre-Christian magical and astrological papyri in which Egyptian was first written out using Greek letters plus a few signs borrowed from Demotic, against the standardised Coptic used in Christian scripture translation from around the third century CE onward. Comparing the two corpora, its contributors find the evidence thin enough to support two readings: that the Old Coptic magical texts already fixed the practice of writing Egyptian in Greek-based letters, or that the Christian translation project, needing a stable and teachable orthography for scripture, was the decisive act that standardised the script that survives. Because both readings draw on the same handful of surviving texts and no source describes an official act of decision, the volume treats the question as open rather than favouring either camp.

Source The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.) tier 1

South Africa, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Legal Status

Currently States The 1996 constitution guarantees freedom of religion with no established church and permits religious observance at state institutions on an equitable basis; the CRL Rights Commission has proposed regulating religious practitioners, which the churches have resisted.

South Africa's 1996 constitution, adopted after the end of apartheid, guarantees freedom of religion with no established church and permits religious observance at state institutions on an equitable basis available to all recognised traditions. The Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities, a body created under the same constitution, has separately proposed regulating religious practitioners, following public concern over reported abuses by some independent churches and self-styled prophets, including cases of congregants made to eat grass, drink petrol or undergo other harmful practices presented as acts of faith. Established churches and religious bodies have resisted the proposed regulation, arguing that state licensing of religious leaders risks the state deciding which religious claims are legitimate, a role the constitution's own religious freedom guarantee is meant to keep the state out of. Whether existing criminal law against the specific harmful acts is the more appropriate remedy had not been legislatively resolved as of the report.

Source International Religious Freedom Report, United States Department of State, Office of International Religious Freedom tier 1

South Sudan, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Religious Composition

Currently States Majority Christian by most estimates, around three in five, with a large share, perhaps a third, following Nilotic traditional religions, and a Muslim minority of roughly six per cent.

No national census has been taken since independence in 2011. Pew's 2010 era estimates give Christians about 60 per cent, while some church and government figures claim considerably more; the traditional religion share is the least settled number.

Source Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, Pew Research Center tier 2

Soviet Anti-Religious Campaigns, Religious Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 20000.000000

Estimates of Orthodox clergy and religious believers killed during the worst purge years, chiefly 1937 to 1938, vary widely across scholarship; this reflects a conservative figure at the lower end of published estimates rather than the higher totals some historians propose.

Source The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917-1982, Dimitry V. Pospielovsky tier 1

Soviet Anti-Religious Campaigns, Religious Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 200000.000000

Alexander Yakovlev, who headed Russia's post-Soviet Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression and researched this figure from ten years of access to the Presidential Archives and other state and Party archives opened after 1991, states that the number of Orthodox monks, nuns and priests killed in the Soviet purges exceeds 200,000. This sits far above the 20,000 already recorded as death-toll-min from Dimitry Pospielovsky, whose standard reference history was researched before those archives opened. Scholarship on this question diverges very widely by source, by which years are counted (the worst purge years of 1937-38 chiefly, in both figures' own framing) and by which faiths and ranks are included; this range names the two most substantively grounded poles found rather than resolving between them.

Source Yakovlev, Alexander N., "A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia" (2002), Alexander N. Yakovlev (translated by Anthony Austin) tier 1

Soviet Repression Dissolves Nearly All Adventist Communities, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 1930

The source dates this only to "the 1930s" as a decade, with no month, season or specific year given, unlike the precise 1844, 1863 and 1874 dates already recorded for this tradition's other spread events. 1930 to 1939 is carried as the span the source itself supports, and this atlas is deliberately not rounding to a narrower date it has not actually verified.

Source V. A. Shelkov and the True and Free Seventh-Day Adventists of the USSR (Sapiets, 1980), Marite Sapiets tier 1

Soviet Repression Dissolves Nearly All Adventist Communities, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1939

The same imprecision applies here as to the start year: the source names no month or specific year, only the decade "the 1930s" as a whole. 1939 marks the close of the span this atlas can honestly support from what the source actually states, not a separately verified terminal date.

Source V. A. Shelkov and the True and Free Seventh-Day Adventists of the USSR (Sapiets, 1980), Marite Sapiets tier 1

Soviet Rule Suppresses Islam in Central Asia, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1985

The low point of the Soviet-era mosque network, reduced to a few hundred functioning sites, is documented broadly across the interwar and wartime decades rather than dated to a single year; 1985, just before Gorbachev's reforms began loosening religious policy, is used as a representative closing point for the suppressed period.

Source Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia, Adeeb Khalid tier 1

Spanda Karikas, Scriptures & Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historicity debated

Kashmiri sources attribute the verses variously to Vasugupta himself, as his own versified elaboration of the Shiva Sutras, and to his student Kallata, as a disciple's commentary. Both attributions have textual support and the question is not resolved.

Source The Doctrine of Vibration: An Analysis of the Doctrines and Practices of Kashmir Shaivism, Mark S. G. Dyczkowski tier 1

Spanda Karikas, Scriptures & Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Kashmiri tradition is divided on authorship of the roughly fifty two verses: some sources credit Vasugupta himself, treating the Karikas as his own versified elaboration of the Shiva Sutras he had received, while others credit his student Kallata, treating them as a disciple's systematic commentary. Mark S. G. Dyczkowski's The Doctrine of Vibration: An Analysis of the Doctrines and Practices of Kashmir Shaivism (State University of New York Press, 1987) surveys both attributions without settling between them.

Source The Doctrine of Vibration: An Analysis of the Doctrines and Practices of Kashmir Shaivism, Mark S. G. Dyczkowski tier 1

Spider, Animals & Totems

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The words spirit animal and totem are used in popular Western practice for a personal animal ally. Native scholars and communities object to both usages, on the ground that they take the vocabulary and the authority of particular Indigenous traditions and apply them to a generic and commercial practice.

Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (Continuum, 2008) documents the objection Indigenous communities in North America raise, ongoing and in the present tense, against the commercial "spirit animal" genre. Owen's study examines how the practice borrows specific Indigenous terms and claimed lineages, presenting them as licensing a service sold to outside customers, and sets that use against the communities' own accounts of what those terms and practices mean within their traditions. What is disputed, on Owen's reading, is not that people generally feel a kinship with animals, a widely attested feeling that belongs to no one tradition, but the specific commercial borrowing of Indigenous vocabulary and claimed authority. The atlas records the animal, records that the modern commercial practice exists, and records that this documented objection is made, without adjudicating between the parties.

Source The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Suzanne Owen tier 1

Spiritual presence (real presence received by faith), Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Note

Currently States Whether Calvin's account differs from Zwingli's in substance or only in emphasis is disputed

One camp, drawing on the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549, holds that Geneva and Zurich reached one doctrine and that the later distinction between them is a retrospective tidying. The other holds that Calvin taught a genuine feeding on the body of Christ that Zwingli never affirmed, and that the Consensus was a diplomatic text rather than a merger of positions.

Source The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Jaroslav Pelikan tier 1

Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple, Sacred Sites

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Institutional Wealth or Finances

Currently States A Supreme Court of India appointed panel opened and inventoried five of the temple's six underground vaults beginning in 2011, cataloguing gold idols, a diamond studded throne, thousands of gold coins and sacks of gemstones accumulated over centuries by the Travancore royal family; the sixth, Vault B, remains sealed by court order and has never been opened or inventoried. The widely repeated valuation of roughly 1 trillion Indian rupees, about 22 billion US dollars, for the opened vaults' contents is a media estimate rather than an audited or court certified figure; no comparable estimate exists for Vault B, which is unopened.

Source A One Trillion Rupee Hidden Treasure Chamber Is Discovered at India's Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple, Jim Dobson tier 2

Sri Chand, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit

Currently States Sri Chand's birth in 1494 is the accepted date, but the death dates traditionally given for him run as late as 1629, which would make his life extraordinarily long, well over a century. The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies (Singh and Fenech, eds., Oxford University Press, 2014) treats these traditional dates as devotional rather than documentary, in keeping with the record that the founder of the Udasi order is remembered through hagiography more than through a verified chronology.

Source The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies, Pashaura Singh and Louis E. Fenech (eds.) tier 1

Sri Mediates Between the Soul and Vishnu, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States How far her mediation is itself a means of salvation, and whether she is a soul of a special kind or is divine in the same sense as Vishnu, are among the questions on which the two Sri Vaishnava schools divide.

In Sri Vaishnava theology, Lakshmi, called Sri, is worshipped as inseparable from Vishnu and as the one through whom the soul approaches him, so that the divine is addressed as a pair rather than as a single figure; the tradition takes its own name from her title. Patricia Mumme's study of the historical dispute between the Sri Vaishnava teachers Manavalamamuni and Vedanta Desika, which produced the tradition's later division into the Vadakalai and Tenkalai schools, records that the two schools disagree over how far her mediation itself functions as a means of salvation and over whether she is a soul of an exceptional kind, closer to human souls though supreme among them, or divine in the same sense Vishnu is divine. The dispute reaches back to the medieval theological argument between the two named teachers and has not converged since, because it concerns Lakshmi's precise ontological status, a question the tradition's shared scriptures address only implicitly enough to support both readings among the same body of texts.

Source The Srivaisnava Theological Dispute: Manavalamamuni and Vedanta Desika, Patricia Y. Mumme tier 1