Intellect PlusReligion and spirituality
628 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 10 of 11.
The word ghost once meant breath, and before that probably meant furyNearly one American in five says they have seen a ghost, according to a 2009 Pew survey. The word they use has a strange past: Old English gast meant breath or spirit, and linguis…
Why is a pansy, a flower that seems to ponder, the emblem of freethinkers?Freethinkers chose the pansy as their badge because its name comes from the French pensée, thought, and in late summer the flower droops forward as if lost in contemplation. Bertr…
Freyja, not Odin, claimed first pick of half the Norse battle deadValhalla gets the fame, but in Norse myth only half the warriors who fell in battle went to Odin. The other half went to Fólkvangr, the field ruled by Freyja, a goddess of love, b…
Ezra the scribe may have rebuilt Judaism around a book, not a templeAround 457 BCE a Persian emperor reportedly sent a priest and scribe named Ezra from Babylon to Jerusalem to teach God's law. Jewish tradition credits him with restoring the scrip…
Folklore fairies rarely had wings; the Victorians added themThe winged, tiny fairy of children's books is a late invention. In older European folklore fairies were human-sized or shape-shifting, flew by magic or rode on birds, got blamed f…
Is faith belief without evidence, or trust with good reasons?Richard Dawkins calls faith blind trust that ignores evidence. Many Christian thinkers answer that the Greek word behind it was used for presenting evidence in court, and that anc…
From Ramadan to Yom Kippur, fasting is both a ritual and a metabolic switchMuslims fast from dawn to sunset through Ramadan, Jews go 25 hours without food or water on Yom Kippur, and Bahá'ís fast for nineteen days each March. Inside the body, fasting sta…
In Islam, sharia is held infallible but fiqh, its human interpretation, can changeMuslims regard sharia, the divine law, as perfect and unchanging. Fiqh is something different: the human effort to understand that law, built by jurists who interpret the Quran an…- The Five Pillars of Islam might be better called five cornerstonesDeclaring faith, praying, giving alms, fasting in Ramadan and making the pilgrimage to Mecca form the core duties of Islam. The Arabic word usually translated as pillar actually m…
Scholars now argue there is no pure religion that folk belief corruptsFolk religion covers everything believers do outside official doctrine, from Vodun's blend of African belief and Catholicism to the non-churchgoer who still wants a religious wedd…
Buddhism's famous first sermon may not have been first at allTradition says the Buddha's very first teaching was the Four Noble Truths: life is unsatisfying, craving causes it, craving can end, and a path leads there. Yet several scholars t…
A patriarch proposed a League of Churches alongside the League of NationsIn 1920, just as world governments formed the League of Nations, Patriarch Germanus V of Constantinople wrote an open letter to every Christian church, wherever it might be. He ur…
El Dorado was originally a golden man, not a city of goldThe legend began with a ruler, the Golden One, who coated himself in gold dust and washed it off in a sacred lake. Spanish treasure hunters turned that ritual into a lost golden k…
Elijah found God not in wind or fire but in a quiet voiceFew biblical figures are claimed by so many traditions. Elijah, a prophet of ninth-century BC Israel, is remembered at Jewish Passover tables, seen beside Jesus at the Transfigura…
Enki, the Mesopotamian trickster god who shaped humans from clayIn Mesopotamian myth, when the gods grew tired of their labour, it was Enki who suggested making humans to do it. God of wisdom, crafts and the fresh water hidden underground, he …
Enlil, Sumer's chief god, reportedly sent a flood because humans were too noisyFor centuries Enlil ruled the Mesopotamian gods from his temple at Nippur, a city that never built a royal palace because the god himself was its king. He pried heaven apart from …
Religions and physicists alike have imagined how everything endsEvery culture seems to wonder how the story finishes. Abrahamic faiths picture history moving in a line toward redemption, Indian traditions see ages turning in cycles, and cosmol…
Martin Luther saw Ethiopia's ancient church as a forerunner of ProtestantismMore than a thousand years before European missionaries reached the Horn of Africa, the kingdom of Aksum had adopted Christianity. Its church, now the largest of the Oriental Orth…
The church that once stretched from Persia to ChinaEastern Christianity is not one church but a cluster of families, and one of them, the Church of the East, once reached further than almost any other branch of the faith. From its…
How a bishop under Heraclea became first among Orthodox equalsBefore 330 AD, the bishop of Byzantium answered to a senior bishop in nearby Heraclea. Then Constantine moved his residence to the city and renamed it New Rome, and its church ros…
Why does nearly every culture invent dragons? Three competing theoriesDragons turn up in the myths of almost every people on Earth, and the oldest ones all look like giant snakes. One anthropologist blames an inherited fear of serpents, big cats and…
The Druze are named after a preacher their own scriptures call a hereticAbout a million people in the Levant follow the Druze faith, a secretive monotheism that teaches reincarnation and admits no converts. Its members call themselves the unitarians. …
Durga's name means the goddess nobody can get pastDurga shares a root with the Sanskrit word for fortress, and her name means impassable or beyond defeat. Pictured riding a lion or tiger with a weapon in each of her many hands, s…
Some Catholic priests may marry, if they belong to an Eastern churchThe Catholic Church is not one church but 24: the Latin Church plus 23 self-governing Eastern churches, all loyal to the pope yet running their own liturgies and laws. About 18 mi…
Egyptian texts name more than 1,400 gods, and some scholars count thousandsThere is no agreed definition of a god. Across cultures a deity can be an all-powerful creator, a local spirit of a river, a principle like the soul, or a being that dies and is r…
Socrates had a daimon, and it was nothing like a demonTo the ancient Greeks a daimon was simply a spirit or divine power; Plato used the word for the inner voice that guided Socrates. Early Christians recast those neutral spirits as …
The word devil began as the Greek for slandererThe oldest religions had no Devil at all. Egyptian and Mesopotamian gods could help or harm on a whim, and evil was simply part of how nature worked. The idea of a single cosmic e…
The Buddha's most-read teachings fit into 423 short versesThe Dhammapada condenses a vast body of Buddhist teaching into 423 compact verses arranged in 26 chapters. Tradition says each was spoken for a particular occasion in the Buddha's…
One translator of the Rigveda needed 20 English words for dharmaDharma has no single equivalent in any Western language. It can mean law, duty, justice, order, custom or the nature of reality, depending on who is speaking and when. At root it …
The oldest dated printed book was made to be given away freeA Chinese copy of the Diamond Sutra printed on 11 May 868 is widely called the oldest surviving printed book, and its closing note says it was produced for universal free distribu…- Greek armies refused to fight until a seer read the right omensIn ancient Greece, two armies could face each other and wait, because neither general would advance until his seer reported favourable signs. Divination, the attempt to read hidde…
Deists believed in God but threw out every holy bookDeism accepts a creator yet rejects scripture, prophecy, miracles and religious authority. Reason and the natural world, Deists argue, are the only reliable guides to God, who mad…
Conservative Judaism says Jewish law is binding and also changes over timeConservative Judaism treats religious law as obligatory yet historically shaped, drawing its authority mainly from the Jewish people's acceptance across generations. For decades i…
In one Maidu story, Coyote told the world's very first lieAcross many Indigenous North American cultures, Coyote is creator, fire thief, fool and troublemaker, sometimes all in one tale. In a Maidu story he laughs while trying to shape c…- Christianity's earliest creed was three words long: Jesus is LordBefore councils drafted long statements of belief, the apostle Paul recorded the shortest possible one: Jesus is Lord. Creeds later grew into elaborate summaries recited in church…
Britain's first crematorium was tested on a horse in 1879Cremation is at least 17,000 years old, yet Christian Europe abandoned it for over a millennium. Its modern comeback relied on a steel furnace, fears about disease, and a Welsh dr…
Most scholars stopped using the word cult back in the 1970sThe word cult once simply meant worship, as in the imperial cult of ancient Rome. Today it is an accusation. By the late 1970s most academics had swapped it for new religious move…
Six cities claim Daniel's tomb, yet most scholars doubt he existedDaniel of the lions' den is honoured by Jews, Christians and Muslims, and his supposed tomb is claimed in Iraq, Iran and Uzbekistan. Most scholars, though, see him as a literary h…
King David's biblical story may be partly a defence against accusations of murderGiant-slayer, harpist, psalmist and ancestor of the Messiah: David is revered across three faiths. Yet historians find little about him that is concrete and undisputed. One long-r…
Tuesday is named after the same ancient sky father as Zeus and JupiterZeus Pater in Greece, Jupiter in Rome and the Vedic sky god Dyaus Pitr in India carry names that are linguistically identical. The Germanic Tiu, who gave English its Tuesday, belo…- The study of world religions was pioneered by two medieval Muslim scholarsLong before European universities founded departments of religious studies, al-Biruni and Ibn Hazm, writing around the year 1000, compared faiths across cultures and are now calle…
- Lutherans and Anglicans also call themselves catholic, with a small cCatholic comes from a Greek word meaning general or universal, and the Roman church holds no monopoly on it. Orthodox Christians, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists and others all r…
- Ancient Rome taxed bachelors but made its Vestal Virgins vow 30 years of chastityRomans regarded the unmarried life as an oddity and imposed financial penalties on it, with one exception: the Vestal Virgins, sworn to three decades of chastity to tend the state…
Before public parks, Americans picnicked and raced carriages in cemeteriesCemetery comes from a Greek word for a sleeping place. The idea is ancient, with a Moroccan cave holding burials around 15,000 years old, but the landscaped burial ground outside …- Lucretius disproved centaurs with growth rates: a three-year-old horse outpaces a toddlerHalf human, half horse, the centaur has galloped from Greek myth into medieval bestiaries, heraldry and modern fantasy. In the first century BC the poet Lucretius dismissed it on …
In Chinese folk religion you belong to the village's gods; belief is optionalUntil around 1900, Chinese had no general word for religion, and the one eventually adopted first meant Christianity. The country's oldest living faith, a mix of ancestor venerati…- In Chinese myth, heaven and hell both run on paperwork and bureaucratsTraditional Chinese mythology imagined a square earth under a round sky held up by pillars. Above sat a heavenly court with an emperor, palaces, clerks and guards. Below lay an un…
The first Christians called themselves followers of The Way; outsiders coined ChristianJesus's earliest followers were Jews who saw no new religion in what they were doing, and they described their movement as The Way. The label Christian came from non-Jewish reside…
Cologne Cathedral took over six centuries because builders stopped for 369 yearsWork on Cologne Cathedral began in 1248, halted in 1473 and only restarted in 1842. Church buildings carry long stories like that. The oldest one archaeologists have identified wa…
Graves are rarely six feet deep, and the rule began with plagueSix feet under is a phrase, not a standard. Graves are seldom dug that deep unless another coffin will go on top. The earliest known six-foot order came from London's Lord Mayor d…- Abel's name means breath, a hint at how briefly he would liveIn Genesis, Cain is the first human ever born and his younger brother Abel the first to die. The names carry clues. Abel comes from hebel, meaning breath or vapour, the same word …
- The Bahá'í Faith was founded by a prisoner who wrote to Queen VictoriaBahá'u'lláh spent four decades being exiled from Iran to Baghdad, Constantinople, Adrianople and finally the Ottoman penal colony of Akka. From captivity he wrote letters announci…
An early Christian manual preferred cold running water for baptism, but allowed warmChristians have argued for centuries over how much water baptism needs. The Didache, a guide from between AD 60 and 150, preferred cold running water, accepted still or warm water…
The first Baptist church was founded by English exiles in AmsterdamBaptists trace themselves to a band of English Dissenters who fled to Amsterdam in 1608 and, a year later, began baptising only adults who professed faith. Their leader soon doubt…
Hinduism's most famous scripture is a conversation in a chariot before battleThe Bhagavad Gita opens with a warrior prince who cannot bring himself to fight. His charioteer, the god Krishna, spends 700 verses persuading him that doing his duty without clai…- Hinduism's creator god has almost no worshippers and very few templesBrahma is the Creator in Hinduism's great trinity, alongside Vishnu and Shiva, yet today he has no significant sect and only a handful of temples in India, the best known at Pushk…
Brahman began as the power of Vedic chants and became ultimate realityIn the oldest Vedic hymns, brahman meant something like the force packed into sacred words and ritual formulas. Over centuries the idea swelled into the source, sustainer and fina…
Dukkha, Buddhism's key word, doesn't really mean sufferingBuddhism's central diagnosis is usually translated as life is suffering. The Pali word dukkha is subtler: it describes the built-in unsatisfactoriness of anything temporary, inclu…- Buddhism has no single Bible, but a shelf of rival Triple BasketsBuddhist scripture is often called the Tripitaka, or Three Baskets, after the containers that once held palm-leaf manuscripts. But there was never one canon. A Tibetan historian c…
Zoroastrian scripture survived for centuries without being written downThe Avesta holds the oldest texts in any Iranian language, some possibly composed around 1000 BCE. For most of that history the hymns passed from mouth to mouth. Only in the Sasan…