The sticky part is that one religion might say they share the same god as another religion that in turn rejects that conclusion. It’s not hard to find Christians who insist they follow the god of Moses but reject the idea that Mormons follow the god of Jesus.
Very true. Is Buddism a religion?
As I understand from limited knowledge and reading of early texts which may well have been very corrupted from original sources, it was originally more of a practical philosophy. Supposedly Budda said, in response to questions about gods or life after death, something to the effect of “I make no pronouncements about such things”…
But it has clearly been developed later into something which would certainly be called a religion today. The ‘Need to Believe’ seems to be strong in many people?
Regarding the term “People of the Book”: My first exposure to the term was in an alt-history story where a Muslim group had (Caliphate) had expanded into the Americas and coming into contact with one of the indigenous empires (I forget if it was Aztecs, Incas, or Mayans) considered them to heathens until someone was able to convince them that their writings constituted religious texts, thus qualifying them as “People of the Book” and therefore subject to the same status as Jews and Christians.
I wish I could remember more specifics, but it’s been a while since I read it.
My understanding of “schism” is that it specifically refers to a split in a formerly singular religion/denomination/sect, leading to two or more separate denominations, which may or may not believe that the others are legitimate (or even, potentially, worship the same deity).
It’s certainly one way that you wind up with different denominations or faiths which worship the same god, but it’s probably not the only way.
That’s interesting. I always took the term to refer specifically to some version of the Bible; not to any religious texts whatsoever. But I don’t know whether there’s a standard definition; or whether it agrees with me, if there is one.
There’s a joke made by the comedian Emo Philips (which you can find at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIuOEVUDyBk ) about what someone does when they discover that another person isn’t the precise same denomination as them.
I’m OK with “Abrahamic”. While Christians and Muslims (except for the Arabs, arguably) are not Abrahamic people, they do belong to Abrahamic religions. After all, Abraham wasn’t just the ancestor of all the Jews, he was also, according to the Bible, the first man to reject the false idols of his people and worship God and God alone, making him the father of monotheism in general. Naming the monotheistic religions originating from Jewish belief after him makes sense.
Philosophically, there’s a question about what constitutes the same god? The historical roots may be shared, and they may use the same name, but when the conceptual description is different is it really the same one?
Misty obvious is if Mormons are considered Christians, and does the nature of Jesus affect the meaning of what God is, separating christianity’s god experience from the a Jewish one?
More subtlely but still relevant IMO is the different descriptions within Christianity. Are a unitarian and a trinitarian really discussing the same god? Are the Old Testament retributionists consistent with the New Testament forgivers?
Is a Deist talking about the same God as a fundamentalist?
To me, a lot of religious distinction is glossed over by the term “Christianity” that gives undo social clout to the myth of shared religion.
“Sectarianism” is probably the closest word you are looking for.
The “shared” nature of God across the “big three” is a contrivance that is only paraded when it is convenient. But ask your standard MAGA if Allah refers to the Christian God.
“Heretic” comes to mind.
“Heretics” means that they’re worshipping the right god the wrong way. If they were worshipping a different god, they’d be “pagans”.
Right, since none of them seem to manifest objectively and we don’t have a hand-held Godometer to measure them with, it’s all down to opinion.
I like Ganesh, myself. He’s a jolly god!
The term “Abrahamic” is not so much about the god worshiped by the adherents of a religion as about the origins of the religion. The Abrahamic religions originated in what we usually think of as the Middle East. The Indic religions originated in India and nearby countries like Pakistan. The Iranian religions originated in Iran and nearby countries. The East Asian religions originated in China and nearby countries. The Asian traditional religions originated in China earlier. The American traditional religions originated in North and South America. The Australian traditional religions originated in Australia. The fact that a religion originated in a particular area doesn’t mean that its followers are mostly there now. More Buddhists are in China than in India. More Moslems are in the eastern portion of Asia than in the Middle East. You can look up where most followers of Christianity and Judaism are rather than in the Middle East.
Part of the problem is most of the world’s religious people are either believers in abrahamic montheistic religions or Indian polytheistic religions.
There are monotheistics and polytheistic religions that aren’t Abrahamic or Indian in nature. But they are the minority. There isn’t a lot of diversity in religions in the world now.
I have no idea if there are categories under monotheism but before individual religions. Is ahura mazda from zoroastrianism the same diey as god of the abrahamic religions? I don’t think so. But both are monotheistic.
If two religions developed independently, then I wouldn’t consider them as worshiping the same god. If god is real, then it could be that they truly are worshiping the same god. That is, god could be telling separate groups of people about itself and those people are worshiping it without any knowledge of the other groups. But in the sense I’m thinking about it, it’s the different religions which have branched apart and are considered separate religions, but the god they are worshiping is the same because they branched from the same religion.
If we were talking about sci-fi, we might talk about how certain franchises take place in different, separate universes. We say the Star Wars stories are in the Star Wars universe and the Star Trek stories are in the Star Trek universe. But they are separate universes. With religion, it’d be like saying that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are in the same universe (Abrahamic), but Judaism and Hinduism are in different universes (Abrahamic and Indian).
Zoroastrianism isn’t monotheistic, it’s dualistic.
That said, Zoroastrianism had a major influence on early Judaism, and consequentially on Christianity.
Right, that last was for the Op.
When monotheism and polytheism meet:
See, you could tell a version of that joke with increasingly specific sects and sub-sects of Judaism instead - but the punchline would just be “FEH!”
That’s hilarious.
(It would be even worse if the other party to the conversation was Jewish, of course.)
That’s mostly a semantic question rather than a religious question. "Buddhist* is the term used by a lot of Buddhists to name their religion, and by a lot of other people who live in countries with a lot of Buddhists, to name the religion of those people. As such, Buddhists are mostly animist: there isn’t any particular ambiguity about it.
I just want to point out that, since Greek and Roman gods are mentioned above, that they are not precisely identical. I have separate books on Roman and Greek mythology. Although they shared similar gods (with mostly different names and many of the same myths, there are subtle differences between gods we often think of as identical (Mars isn’t quite the same as Ares, for instance), and Rome has some myths lacking in Greece.
And just when you think you’ve got that figured out, here come the Etruscans, who also have adopted Greek and Roman mythology. Mostly.