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.

Orthodoxy and Dissent gathers thirty three concepts naming how traditions draw the line between belief that belongs and belief that does not, and what happens to a person found on the wrong side of it.

Heresy states the underlying logic before any single case: it is not a property of a belief but a relation between a belief and an authority that has rejected it, and orthodoxy and orthopraxy name the two different tests, right belief or right practice, traditions apply. Christianity supplies the largest set of named cases, Arianism, Adoptionism, Docetism, Nestorianism, Monothelitism, Sabellianism, Donatism, Montanism and Pelagianism, each a position argued and then formally rejected by council or consensus, and each still cited today as the far edge a live doctrine must not cross. Islamic theology names its own disputes over free will, Jabriyya, Qadariyya and Murji'a taking opposed positions on human agency and on judging a fellow Muslim's sin, while takfir and bidah name the acts of declaring another an unbeliever or an innovator and taqiyya names the concealment some communities have permitted under danger. Apostasy and blasphemy recur across traditions with consequences ranging from nothing to death, and excommunication, herem and meidung name three communities' own instruments of exclusion, Catholic, Jewish and Amish.

Two disputes are current rather than historical: Folkish and Universalist Heathenry and Native Faith and the Question of Who Belongs both record modern reconstructed traditions arguing, unresolved, over ancestry as a condition of membership. The Secret Chiefs, the Evangelical Quadrilateral, the Great Apostasy and the Restoration, and Come-Outism each name a movement's own account of what it is not, closing the group.