Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Main page; Contents; Current events; Random article; About Wikipedia; Contact us; Donate
While the word religion is difficult to define, one standard model of religion used in religious studies courses defines it as [a] system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations ...
The list of religious populations article provides a comprehensive overview of the distribution and size of religious groups around the world. This article aims to present statistical information on the number of adherents to various religions, including major faiths such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others, as well as smaller religious communities.
In an article that discusses the challenge of teaching students about new religious movements, Douglas E. Cowan explains that, because of "the thousands of NRMs that exist in the world at any one time, only a relative handful are ever discussed in the various print resources […], and the Internet is, by default, the only source of information available.
World religions is a category used in the study of religion to demarcate at least five—and in some cases more—religions that are deemed to have been especially large, internationally widespread, or influential in the development of Western society.
A new religious movement (NRM) is a religious or spiritual group or community with practices of relatively modern [clarification needed] origins. NRMs may be novel in origin or they may exist on the fringes of a wider religion, in which case they will be distinct from pre-existing denominations.
[6] [7] [8] Similarly, historians and biologists have utilized DMR theory to help explain why some religions separate into sects and how reformations may occur. [ 9 ] [ 10 ] [ 11 ] However, the theory has been challenged by some scholars on theoretical grounds [ 12 ] [ 13 ] and faced criticisms from some ethnographers and historians for ...
The world's principal religions and spiritual traditions may be classified into a small number of major groups, though this is not a uniform practice. This theory began in the 18th century with the goal of recognizing the relative degrees of civility in different societies, [2] but this concept of a ranking order has since fallen into disrepute in many contemporary cultures.