The World Religions Tree (huge visualization)

http://000024.org/religions_tree/religions_tree_4.html

by dirtyaura • 11 years ago

78 74 11 years ago

000024.org

caipre• 11 years ago

Some sort of minimap for navigation would be useful. Also a zoom, the text is a bit small for my eyes.

Edit: browser zoom works well. There's a legend in the lower left.

krick2• 11 years ago

I wouldn't say it does. The very first thing I did was to zoom out, and then understood that I cannot really use it without magnifying glass. So I installed xzoom to find out (unsurprisingly) that I cannot use it as well, because on that scale pixelation is strong enough for text to be unreadable, so the only solution would be to actually implement that feature in js.

Or to have 50" display.

fastball• 11 years ago

Is Greek / Roman / Norse mythology (basically everything Western that isn't Christianity) not considered religion? Because maybe I'm just blind but I can't seem to find those anywhere in the tree.

davyjones• 11 years ago

Similar for Africa(n) which leads me to believe that the periphery covers only what is extant and only the roots of those are traced back to their origins.

lqndlwq2• 11 years ago

It seems to be incomplete and inaccurate in a lot of ways.

For example, Christianity borrows elements of Zoroastrianism and Judaism is actually derived from ancient Babylonian polytheism. Maybe I just didn't see it, but Confucianism seems to be missing too.

mgraczyk• 11 years ago

Confucianism can be found near the center. It's the thick brownish-green branch that goes left near 0 AD.

ars4• 11 years ago

Judaism is actually derived from ancient Babylonian polytheism.

That isn't true. At best, and even this is debated, there are some traces, but it's not in the slightest "derived from".

anigbrowl• 11 years ago

Confucianism can be found around 9 o'clock on the outer circumference.

krick2• 11 years ago

Basically it lacks everything which is not a part of some "mainstream" religion today, for which it has, conversely, very impressive list of local (sometimes even hardly distinguishable) denominations. I cannot find any animistic religions, no shamanism, virtually no polytheistic religions outside of hinduism.

But it isn't really because the map isn't "complete enough", I'd say the whole taxonomy is a bit weird. It makes it look like there were several "major" religions like "Chinese folk Taoism" and "Japanese Mythology" which produced everything else, when if fact they are not "major" at all: it would be more accurate to start from general spiritual cults, where every concrete local religion would be thin line as well. Of course it wouldn't look like real tree, and it shouldn't.

Wikipedia, as always can provide somewhat decent insight: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_religion

transfire• 11 years ago

Early history provided is not very accurate. And it is missing religions not generally believed any more.

FrankenPC• 11 years ago

Wow. Nice taxonomic work.

It sure is a good thing there is only one true religion eh? /s

FiReaNG3L• 11 years ago

Anyone knows what software was used to make the visualization?

jonloldrup• 11 years ago

Who made this?

afsina• 11 years ago

I think there are many inaccuracies. Many branches are dead but seems to be alive. Some branches are actually should not be separated. Nice try tough.

DrinkWater• 11 years ago

I checked some random branches and found a lot of errors and inaccuracies. Nice visualization though

egwynn2• 11 years ago

Truth. It has “Taoism” mispelled near the root. :-\

ars4• 11 years ago

This is very inaccurate. It invents splits in Judaism (for example) that simply don't exist.

For example it has a bizarre split of Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai and even more bizarrely continues the lines to modern times as if there are actually two separate branches.

When the parts that I know best are inaccurate, it seems likely to me that everything else will be just as bad.

wbillingsley• 11 years ago

It seems to be attempting to list the church organisations rather than the faiths -- for instance, the Anglicans and Presbyterians have an entry for each country. If you were to list the faiths, you would have something very much smaller.

a_c_s• 11 years ago

Even so, the part on Judaism (about which I have the most knowledge) is still highly inaccurate: marking divisions that do not exist, branching in the wrong places, over-branching in some places, under-branching in others.

It seems like an compelling idea undertaken by somebody vastly under qualified to implement it properly. (Which is not altogether surprising given the enormity of the task)

larsiusprime• 11 years ago

There's a similar thing going on with other traditions -- with Eastern Orthodoxy, a lot of the various national jurisdictions (Russian, Greek, etc) are listed out separately even though (most) of them are in full communion with one another.

It is cool to see all the "branches" laid out like this but it does lend itself to presenting more divisions than are actually there because that's what we naturally think of when we see a tree structure.

kiliancs• 11 years ago

Nice visualization! I feel like there's room for many improvements both technically and in accuracy, though.

For example, the Bahá'í Wold Center is not a branch, though. It's just the spiritual and administrative center of the Bahá'í Faith [0][1]. Likewise, the Universal House of Justice [2][3] is the supreme governing institution of the Bahá'í Faith (and its seat is located at the Bahá'í World Centre), so it's not a branch either.

[0] http://www.bwc.org/

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%AD_World_Centre

[2] http://universalhouseofjustice.bahai.org/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_House_of_Justice

cjsthompson• 11 years ago

As expected, European native beliefs (and their link to hinduism) are not even mentioned.

hereandthere2• 11 years ago

Im interested in this link between hinduism and European native beliefs. A quick google search didn't lead to anything authoritative. Do you know where more info could be found?

skissane• 11 years ago

In theory Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and the ancient Greek, Roman, Germanic, Celtic, Norse, etc, religions, are all descended from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_religion - however, that is so long ago, by the time we get to the historical period, they have diverged a lot, both due to their own organic development in different directions, and also due to the influence of differing non-Indo-European cultures - such as Dravidian culture in the case of Hinduism; Semitic and Sumerian cultures in the case of Zoroastrianism; Etruscan culture in the case of the Romans

egwynn2• 11 years ago

This could be awesome, but instead it falls very flat. If the author is reading this, I think my advice boils down to:

  1. Cite sources
  2. Make it an SVG

ryan-c4• 11 years ago

(I am a friend of the author and host the site for him) Sources were cited, the submitter deep-linked. A redirect is now in place to the page that has more information.

Edit, for clarity:

* 000024.org is owned by my friend, Alex Fink

* The 000024.org website is hosted on one of my servers, along with a few other static sites belonging to friends. I have been doing this for free as a favor to those friends for many years.

* The submitted link was not the intended landing page, but is now redirecting to it.

* The intended landing page explains where the images came from.

maxerickson3• 11 years ago

You should rephrase to be a little more careful about who the creator of the image is.

(at least, if I understand correctly, you are friends with the person hosting the jpg of the image that was extracted from the pdf that had the image that was pieced together from the original).

edit: You've made an edit, but you missed what I meant. Alex Fink is not really an author here where the point of the link is the image, he is the "page owner" or something like that. There is plenty of attribution and I don't mean to imply any attempts at obfuscation, but egwynn was talking to the original creator of the image, not to the hoster of this version of the image.

madengr• 11 years ago

Nice chart. Glad to be an atheist. Now imagine the man-millenia wasted on all that hocus pocus.

Anyway, you are here: http://i.imgur.com/WNkmN.jpg

rtz12• 11 years ago

tips fedora

SCNR

gillianseed• 11 years ago

Now imagine the man-millenia wasted on all that hocus pocus.

my/mine imaginary deity/deities is/are the one true deity/deities, because, er, I say so, and so did my parents!

how people can buy into the fairy-tales which is religion has always baffles me, atleast unless you are indoctrinated from a young age and shielded from critical thinking.

hcarvalhoalves2• 11 years ago

You're naive if you think that's all what religion boils down to.

That tree includes Confucianism, for instance. Although it's considered a religion, it's secular and closer to philosophy.

Most religions are also mixed with creation mythologies, which have a bonding function inside cultures and ethnic groups.

So, the `religion` subject is much more complex than a simple pissing contest.

acheron• 11 years ago

An atheist, a vegan, and a CrossFitter walk into a bar.

I only know because they told everyone within two minutes.

gonvaled4• 11 years ago

Really? How many official atheistic rituals are performed per week? per month? per year? How many atheistic personalities do you see/hear on the radio / television (talking about atheism, not about pizza)? How many atheistic politicians do you know (probably very few, since it is political suicide)? How many times per year is an atheist ringing at your door to tell you the wonders of atheism? (I get several calls per year from the jehova's witness and other groups, trying to convince me - very educately - that their religion is "the good one - tm")

I heard people are going to the church (or synagoge, or mosque, or whatever) every Sunday (Saturday / Friday) (or they should ...), and they are very freely and openly telling everybody how much they believe in their choice of god.

Compared to the publicity with which believers are living their faith, atheist's non-faith is very introvert.

Which is according to the nature of the thing - why would you be talking about your non-beliefs all the time? Basically, we all have so many non-believes (an atheist has only one more than a believer) that there is no material time to talk about them.

Of course whenever an atheist breaks this code of silence (like poor madengr just did above) with a single sentence (not a three hours prayer - mind you!), it clearly proves that atheists are exhibitionists.

All this makes your joke a very stupid joke (since its logic is broken)

EDIT: added more ranting

monk_e_boy• 11 years ago

I often wonder if God is up with technology and is up in heaven watching peoples twitter feeds, facebook and forum comments saying to himself, "Hm, that acheron is being too christian today. Buck your ideas up young man."

bennettfeely2• 11 years ago

What I see is millennia of people who have found themselves in a mysteriously ordered world with intense experiences and moral instincts. Over time people have developed systems to explain these things which have developed also.

Religion can provide a sense of community and support that society can otherwise lack. Personal faith can also be a means of support for people in troubled times.

wwweston• 11 years ago

A couple of criticisms:

* "Wasted" is a value judgment. Arguably anything humans do with their lives that's valuable to them isn't wasted.

* Creating narratives that provide context and serve a starting/exploration point for value judgments seems to be something humans just do (the astute might even notice the author of the comment I'm replying to is hardly immune). Religion isn't that different from the rest of the liberal arts in that respect, though the way people inhabit it arguably is (and everyone inhabits one narrative/cosmology or another).

* Given those things, it looks like you might be confusing religion with a kind of folk cosmology (as that's the easiest explanation for a flat judgment of religion as a waste of time).

ryan-c4• 11 years ago

The site may go down entirely for a moment... This site belongs to my friend Alex Fink.

Edit:

Mods, please adjust link to point to http://000024.org/religions_tree/

I've done an emergency move of the images to another server that's better able to handle the load and re-written the image links (I host his site).

gtirloni• 11 years ago

You could also host it on CloudFlare for free.

ryan-c4• 11 years ago

We just made changes to run it through cloudflare, but that'll take some time to go through. It's on a faster server in the meantime.

jplur• 11 years ago

(for Europe and Asia)

31reasons• 11 years ago

Krishnamurti Foundation is not at all about religion. In fact Jiddu Krishnamurti was completely against any dogma to the point where he asked people to not even follow his words. And they still made it part of the Hinduism branch, which is funny.

bennettfeely2• 11 years ago

This is interesting, but you would be naive if you think this is in any way comprehensive or accurate.

My religion and main area of knowledge of Catholicism shows a limited number of picked and chosen orders of priests, (i.e. Franciscans, Cistercians, Capuchins). These are not separate religions by any means whatsoever; they are all members of the Catholic faith. They certainly don't belong on a chart that is meant to display different religions and schisms.

maxerickson3• 11 years ago

According to the key, they are listed as "adherent branches".

Schisms are shown by ovoids with white fill and appear to make some sense.

I guess the chart is trying to show practices that have a lot of adherents, not just a diagram of religions. Much of the problem is probably just using the word "branch", which isn't a great description of what is shown.

neaanopri• 11 years ago

Where is Manichaenism?

SocksCanClose• 11 years ago

Looking at this, I can't help but see a few original Gits, forking into hundreds, then thousands of moral software programs, installed across human history.

A_COMPUTER• 11 years ago

If they wanted to they could break off LDS into LDS, Reorganized LDS/Community of Christ, and FLDS, and Church of Christ Temple Lot, as well as a handful of defunct schisms like Strangite.

kghose• 11 years ago

I always thought Buddhism was an off-shoot of Hinduism - a kind of cleaned up version by the Buddha, who was born Hindu.

Cogito2• 11 years ago

Couldn't see it linked anywhere yet, but the original OpenMap version is at

http://funki.com.ua/ru/portfolio/lab/world-religions-tree/

maxerickson3• 11 years ago

That's the first link at the result of the redirect, the text "World Religions Tree".

Cogito2• 11 years ago

Thanks, I went through three or four links looking for the original!

Must have missed it on first parse.

willf• 11 years ago

The Anabaptist/Baptist branches are also pretty inaccurate.

firepoet• 11 years ago

Question for the author: Where is Shambhala Buddhism? It emerged from the Kagyupa and Nyingmapa branches of Tibetan Buddhism.

vorg• 11 years ago

The 4 most numerous religious groupings by number of followers in the world are each color-coded in the popular mind:

* Green for Islam

* Red for Hinduism

* Yellow for Buddhism

* Blue for Christianity

droithomme• 11 years ago

It is astonishingly bizarre that this so called tree focuses only on a small number of recent religions and their sects and orders.

There are thousands of religions not represented, most significantly older than the oldest concrete points on this graph.

I do recognize though that this focuses on fairly modern religions of the last two millennia. Still, what a small, narrow, and uninteresting group of beliefs that is.

panglott• 11 years ago

This is less "inaccurate" than fundamentally conceptually flawed. Human ideological systems are not like biological systems that speciate through schism. They are creations of living human minds and societies that piece together ideas that they find meaningful and useful.

So this chart lists a couple of major sources: Chinese folk Taoism, Japanese mythology, Shramana traditions (non-vedic), Early Vedic period, and Ancient Israelite religion. Most of these traditions have been cross-pollinating, merging, and re-dividing for millenia. Yet this kind of visualization can only depict schism, not influence.

dragonwriter• 11 years ago

This is less "inaccurate" than fundamentally conceptually flawed. Human ideological systems are not like biological systems that speciate through schism.

Given the existence of horizontal gene transfer [0], neither are the biological systems traditionally described that way. Nevertheless, the schism model can be a useful illustrative approximation even when its not a completely accurate model.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer

poizan42• 11 years ago

The Ethiopian Jews do not observe Hanukkah, which would indicate that they split of from the rest of the Jews earlier than 167 BC.

Also "Ancient Isrealite Religion" should probably be "Ancient Caananite Religion". And a lot of things happened there before 500 BC - such as Yahweh becoming the dominant deity and King Hezekiah forbidding the worship of any other gods.

The World Religions Tree (huge visualization)

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