Disputed Statements

Secularization, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed

The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2005) records that the strong secularization thesis, that modernity necessarily erodes religion, has been abandoned by several of the sociologists who built it, Peter Berger most publicly recanting his own earlier position. A revised version, restricted to Western Europe and to institutional participation rather than to belief, is still argued by other sociologists of religion and still contested by those pointing to persistent religiosity elsewhere.

Source Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.) tier 1

Secularization, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2005) records that the classical secularization thesis, that modernization necessarily brings religious decline, was the sociological consensus through much of the twentieth century. It is now contested, with critics examining global religious trends rather than only Western Europe and pointing to persistent and resurgent religiosity elsewhere as evidence against a single global pattern.

Source Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.) tier 1

Sed Festival, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States -3100

3100 BCE marks the conventional start of the First Dynasty, from which its own text says depictions of the festival run. The same text states plainly that some kings recorded jubilees on a schedule their actual reigns cannot support, a problem Egyptologists read as evidence the festival's real periodicity and even its precise origin are not settled by the surviving record.

Source The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Donald B. Redford (ed.) tier 1

Sefer HaRazim (Book of the Mysteries), Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition

Currently States Generally dated by scholars to somewhere between the third and fifth centuries CE, in the late antique period, based on its content and its affinities with the wider corpus of Greco-Egyptian and Jewish magical literature from that era, though the text's composite, orally transmitted background makes a precise date genuinely difficult to fix.

The work survives only in later manuscript and geniza fragments reconstructed by modern scholarship into a single critical edition, and no single fragment carries an internal date, so every proposed range rests on comparative content and vocabulary rather than direct dating evidence.

Source Sefer Ha-Razim: The Book of the Mysteries (Michael A. Morgan), Michael A. Morgan, translator, based on Mordecai Margalioth's critical Hebrew reconstruction tier 1

Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation), Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Jewish tradition long credited the text to the patriarch Abraham himself, a legendary attribution scholarship does not accept; who actually composed it, and in what century, remains argued rather than settled, with proposals ranging from an anonymous early rabbinic author to a much later medieval compiler.

Scholars remain divided because the work carries no internal claim of authorship beyond its legendary Abrahamic frame, and no external witness names a historical author independently of that legend. Those who favor an earlier date read its ideas as consistent with early rabbinic modes of thought, while those who favor a later date point to vocabulary and conceptual parallels with early medieval material, and neither position has displaced the other.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Seidr, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Gendered stigma attached to male practitioners

Whether a male practitioner of seidr genuinely incurred the social stigma of ergi described in Lokasenna, or whether that passage is poetic insult rather than a description of settled social fact, is discussed rather than resolved among scholars of Old Norse religion.

Source Dictionary of Northern Mythology, Rudolf Simek, translated by Angela Hall tier 1

Sek, Haab Months

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States Commonly glossed as death, though this reading is among the weaker ones in the series: the colonial form and the Classic-period glyph do not map onto one another as cleanly as they do for months named after animals.

The gloss rests on the colonial Yucatec word rather than a confirmed decipherment of the sign, so it is treated as conventional rather than established.

Source Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan, Diego de Landa tier 2

Selene, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Selene's name is generally derived from the Greek word selas, meaning light or brightness, though some scholars connect it instead to an older root for the moon itself shared across Greek's Indo-European relatives; either reading ties her name directly to the light she personifies.

Source The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition, Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.) tier 1

Seleucid Empire, Empires & Polities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Religious Policy

Currently States Ordinary Hellenistic patronage of local cults, broken once: whether the measures of 167 BCE against the Jerusalem Temple were a royal persecution of Judaism, unique in antiquity, or a king backing one side in a Jewish quarrel between hellenizers and traditionalists, is a long-standing argument

Bickerman argued the initiative came from the hellenizing Jerusalem priesthood; the older reading, taken from First and Second Maccabees, makes Antiochus IV the author of a deliberate persecution. Both remain current.

Source The God of the Maccabees: Studies on the Meaning and Origin of the Maccabean Revolt, Elias J. Bickerman tier 1

Self-emptiness (rangtong): things are empty of their own inherent existence, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether a purely negative emptiness can account for what the tantras say is realised. That is the standing objection from the other-emptiness side, and the argument between the two has run for six centuries.

Self-emptiness, rangtong, the settled position of the Gelug tradition and held in its own form by the Sakya, reads emptiness as an absence found in the thing itself: a person, a mind and ultimate reality alike are empty of any nature standing on its own, with nothing left over once that negation is made. On this reading, treating the ultimate as a positive presence of any kind risks reintroducing the very grasping the teaching is meant to remove. Stearns's study of the rival Jonang tradition's founder records the six-century-old argument between this position and other-emptiness, shentong: shentong proponents hold that a purely negative account of emptiness cannot explain what the tantras describe as actually realised in meditative experience, while rangtong proponents, the standing Gelug objection, hold that any positive residue is exactly the permanent self the Buddha's teaching on emptiness was meant to rule out. The dispute has run for six centuries between two living traditions each transmitting its own reading of the same third-turning scriptures, and it remains unresolved because neither side's textual reading has been shown to be impossible from within the shared canon.

Source The Buddha from Dolpo: A Study of the Life and Thought of the Tibetan Master Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen, Cyrus Stearns tier 1

Selket, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Richard H. Wilkinson's The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt (Thames & Hudson, 2003) reads Selket's name, also written Serqet, as usually understood to be a shortening of a longer Egyptian phrase meaning she who causes the throat to breathe, a name tying her venom cult, invoked against scorpion and snake bites, to its opposite, restoring breath to the choking or the dead, consistent with her role as one of the four goddesses guarding the coffin and canopic jars in funerary practice.

According To Ancient Egyptian Religion

Source The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, Richard H. Wilkinson tier 2

Semah, Sacred Dances

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Whether semah should be performed outside the cem, on stages and at festivals, is disputed within the community.

One camp holds that public performance has protected a tradition long suppressed and misdescribed, and cites the UNESCO inscription in support. The other holds that a service lifted out of the cem stops being that service. Both positions are widely held among Alevi associations and neither has prevailed.

Source Semah, Alevi-Bektasi Ritual, UNESCO tier 1

Semitic, Language Families

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Homeland Hypothesis

Currently States Either the Levant and the Arabian peninsula, where the branch is attested from the beginning, or Africa, if Afro-Asiatic began there and Semitic is the branch that left it.

The dispute is inherited from the level above and cannot be settled at this one. If Afro-Asiatic originated in Africa, which is the majority position among those who work on the phylum, then Semitic is its only branch to have moved substantially out of the continent, and the Semitic homeland question becomes a question of when and by which route. If Afro-Asiatic began in the Levant instead, Semitic never left. The Semitic evidence on its own is compatible with both, which is why the argument is conducted at the Afro-Asiatic level and not here.

Source The Semitic Languages, Robert Hetzron (ed.) tier 1

Semma ⲥ, 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

Senakulo, Performance Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Year

Currently States 1704

The National Museum of the Philippines dates the Senakulo performance tradition to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, tied to the emergence of the first written Pasyon text. The most precisely dated anchor within that window is Gaspar Aquino de Belen's Ang Mahal na Pasion ni Jesu Christong Panginoon Natin na Tola, composed in 1703 and approved and first printed in Manila in 1704, the earliest Tagalog Pasyon known to survive. No source consulted fixes an exact year for when chanted Pasyon narration first became staged Senakulo dramatization specifically, and the form draws on a still older layer, Filipino communities' pre-Hispanic tradition of chanting epic narrative poetry, which missionaries adapted to the Passion story after introducing Christianity in the sixteenth century rather than replacing outright.

Source Wikipedia, "Pasyon", Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Serbia, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Legal Status

Currently States The 2006 Law on Churches and Religious Communities grants seven traditional communities a privileged status including tax exemption and state funded chaplaincy; the Serbian Orthodox monasteries in Kosovo are protected under a separate international framework.

Serbia's 2006 Law on Churches and Religious Communities grants seven named traditional religious communities, the Serbian Orthodox Church chief among them alongside the Catholic Church, several Protestant bodies, Judaism and Islam, a privileged legal status including tax exemption and state-funded chaplaincy, a tier not available outside this named list. Separately, Serbian Orthodox monasteries located in Kosovo, whose independence from Serbia Serbia does not recognise, are protected under a distinct international framework, reflecting their significance both as active religious sites and as contested cultural heritage in a still-disputed territorial relationship. The State Department's report records both arrangements as current without resolving the political question underlying the Kosovo monasteries' status, bound up with the broader unresolved Serbia-Kosovo relationship. Whether communities outside the seven named groups will be added to the privileged tier, and whether the monasteries' protected status changes with any future resolution, both depend on developments outside religious law specifically.

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

Serer Religion, Religions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Theology

Currently States Monotheistic: one God

Roog is one, self-created and without cult, and the pangool are ancestors and place-spirits rather than gods, which supports a monotheistic reading. Against it, the whole of ritual life is directed at the pangool, and classifying a religion by a being nobody addresses arguably describes the theology rather than the religion. The disagreement is the same one that runs through the classification of West African religion generally.

Source African Religions and Philosophy, John S. Mbiti tier 1

Sergei Shirokogorov, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States His argument that much of the Tungus spirit hierarchy and terminology reflects Buddhist and Chinese contact, rather than preserving something archaic, has been contested ever since it appeared.

Ronald Hutton's Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination (Hambledon and London, 2001) examines Sergei Shirokogorov's early twentieth century ethnographic documentation of Tungus (Evenki) shamanism, the fieldwork that introduced the word shaman itself into Western scholarly and popular use, against the question of how much of the ritual complex Shirokogorov recorded was itself a recent formation rather than an ancient, unbroken practice. Hutton's comparative historical method, reading Shirokogorov's fieldwork against the wider documented history of Siberian indigenous religion under Russian and Chinese contact, finds specialists still holding opposing positions on that question, since the fieldwork itself, however careful, records a snapshot of a tradition already centuries into contact with outside influences rather than an untouched original.

Source Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination, Ronald Hutton tier 1

Sergius of Radonezh, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1314

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) tier 1

Sethianism, Denominations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The category is modern and contested; Michael Williams and Karen King have both argued that Gnosticism is too loose a grouping to carry it

Sethianism is conventionally classified as one of the "Gnostic" schools of late antiquity, but the term Gnosticism itself is the source of the dispute rather than Sethianism's own content. Michael Allen Williams's Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton University Press, 1996) argues that modern scholarship's category of Gnosticism was built by grouping ancient movements, including the Sethian texts from Nag Hammadi and the heresiological reports of writers such as Irenaeus, under a single coherent religion the ancient sources never described that way. Williams's method is comparative textual analysis, reading the Sethian corpus and the other groups conventionally filed as Gnostic against each other for the shared traits the category assumes, and finding the movements more distinct than alike. Because the category itself is what the critique dismantles, whether Sethianism is properly "Gnostic" at all, or simply itself, remains open rather than a settled classification.

Source Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category, Michael Allen Williams tier 1