Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

God and Divine Nature is the largest doctrine grouping the atlas holds, seventy five concepts describing what traditions say God or ultimate reality is, and how each answer generates its own dispute.

Christology supplies the densest cluster: the Trinity, the hypostatic union, and centuries of dispute over how one person can be two natures, Miaphysite, Dyophysite and Nestorian answers each rejected by the others, the Filioque splitting East from West, kenosis, incarnation, the virgin birth and Theotokos filling out what the claim about Christ commits a church to. Classical theism supplies shared philosophical furniture beneath several traditions, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence and divine simplicity, each raising its own puzzle, and apophatic and cataphatic theology name the two methods, denial and affirmation, by which those attributes get stated, answered by theodicy where the attributes and observed evil appear to conflict.

Hindu thought works the one and the many differently: Brahman as the single reality behind everything, approached through an ishta-devata a worshipper chooses, described as sat-chit-ananda rather than by ordinary predicates, and reconciled with the Vaishnava and Shakta traditions' own preferred name for the ultimate, Mahapurusha or Shakti itself. Zoroastrianism sets Ahura Mazda against Angra Mainyu as two primal spirits who chose good and evil at the beginning. Islam states tawhid against shirk as the line it draws most sharply, and Kabbalah locates the same absoluteness in Ein Sof, the infinite of which nothing can be said.

Newer traditions round out the group, each proposing its own divine identity, Rastafari's reading of Haile Selassie, the Nation of Islam's teaching of Master Fard Muhammad, and Wicca's Maiden, Mother and Crone.