Comparative religion
Studying such material facilitates a broadened and more sophisticated understanding of human beliefs and practices regarding the sacred, numinous, spiritual and divine.
[7] In the seventeenth century, antiquarians such as Athanasius Kircher along with Sir Thomas Browne were pioneering scholars of comparative religion.
Social scientists in the 19th century took a strong interest in comparative and "primitive" religion through the work of Max Müller, Edward Burnett Tylor, William Robertson Smith, James George Frazer, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Rudolf Otto.
[8][9] Nicholas de Lange, Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Cambridge University, says that The comparative study of religions is an academic discipline which has been developed within Christian theology faculties, and it has a tendency to force widely differing phenomena into a kind of strait-jacket cut to a Christian pattern.
Instead, Hinduism and Theravada Buddhism both speak of a falling back into nonexistence and escaping the cycle of reincarnation, rather than eternal life after death.
Their creeds generally hold in common that the incarnation, ministry, suffering, death on the cross, and resurrection of Jesus was for the salvation of mankind.
However, in the 1860s a split occurred after which the vast majority of Bábís who considered Mirza Husayn `Ali or Bahá'u'lláh to be Báb's spiritual successor founded the Baháʼí Movement, while the minority who followed Subh-i-Azal came to be called Azalis.
In contrast to Christianity, which originated from interaction between ancient Greek, Roman, and Hebrew cultures, Judaism is very similar to Islam in its fundamental religious outlook, structure, jurisprudence and practice.
[26] Mandaeans believe that they descend directly from Shem, Noah's son,[27]: 182 and also from John the Baptist's original disciples.
They include Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, Ætsæg Din, Yazdanism, Ahl-e Haqq, Zurvanism, Manichaeism, and Mazdakism.
While not, properly speaking, a world religion, it became widespread in the Iranian cultural sphere, especially through the Achaemenid and Sasanian Empires.
Key areas of concern include a shared sense of duality between the forces of good and evil, or light and darkness.
It shares a dualist cosmology that pits good and light against evil and darkness, with an adversary to oppose the benevolent God.
[31] Furthermore, Manichaeism and Mandaeism also share a common belief in many of the figures and stories of the Abrahamic faiths, which has raised questions of influences and origins.
It is believed that "the kinship of the religions of India stems from the fact that Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs look back to Hinduism as their common mother.
The flow of qi, as the essential energy of action and existence, is often compared to the universal order represented by the Tao.
Despite the geographical distance that would seemingly preclude any direct influence, some scholars have historically observed similarities between traditional Chinese religious beliefs and Christianity.
This fusion was so pronounced that when Emperor Wuzong of the Tang dynasty began persecuting Buddhists in the 9th century, he claimed Christianity was merely a heresy of Buddhism rather than a distinct religion.
It is a form of cultural evolution that can be intuitively illustrated through trees depicting historical relationships and the diversification over time of the various traditions.
[45] Some of the most successful have been those religions that aligned with empires, kingdoms, or caliphates early in their history (e.g., Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism).
