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Religion 101

With the end of the annual Hajj period fast approaching, Muslims today (as I write, Friday, October 26) are celebrating the first day of a major multi-day Islamic holiday. The conclusion of the Hajj, or pilgrimage at Mecca, is marked by the celebration of one of Islam’s two most important holiday festivals, the one known…

Today (as I write, Wednesday, October 24), millions of Muslims from all over the world are arriving in the holy city of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia. They are converging upon this holiest of Islamic holy cities on the eve of the annual period set aside each year to accommodate the millions of Muslim pilgrims who…

In a previous series of blog entries, I addressed a common basic question: How MANY religions are there? In my immediately preceding blog entries, I addressed a followup question: How BIG are the religions? In this blog entry, I’d like to round out this preliminary overview of the global religious landscape by addressing another followup…

In my previous blog entry (Part One of this series), I remarked that if I were from Mars, and knew absolutely nothing about Earth’s religions, then in order to begin to familiarize myself with the spiritual “lay of the land,” I’d probably start out by asking about the broad outlines of human religiosity: How MANY…

The overarching purpose of this entire “Religion 101” blog of mine is primarily to introduce newcomers to the study of religion, as well as newbies just starting out on a personal spiritual search, to the wider world of global religion and spirituality. It’s also my own modest contribution to the wider “war on religious illiteracy.”…

As I write, Hindus in India and beyond are preparing for the beginning of Navratri (or Navaratri, Sanskrit for “Nine Nights”), a major Hindu harvest-time religious festival. As its name implies, Navratri is a celebration running nine nights in a row. Hinduism’s lunar calendar means that that the precise dates of the nine nights in…

In my last blog entry, I continued to ask (or perhaps dance around) the simple question: How many religions are there in the world? Now, at last, I shall meet the question head on. Never mind about all of the myriad bygone religions of the remote past. We touched upon them briefly in Part One;…

In my last several blog entries, I have been asking (or perhaps dancing around) the simple question: How many religions are there in the world? Never mind about all of the myriad bygone religions of the remote past. We touched upon them briefly in Part One; let’s just focus instead upon asking how many religions…

In my previous blog entry, I again asked the seemingly simple question: How many religions are there in the world, today? (Popular objections that Christianity somehow doesn’t count because “it’s a relationship, not a ‘religion'” notwithstanding, it does count. It’s a religion. We covered that in Part Two.) Before proceeding further in addressing the opening…

In my previous blog entry, I asked the seemingly simple question: How many religions are there in the world, today? (Never mind about all the myriad bygone religions of the remote past. And never mind how many people think exclusively of their own religion alone as solely and genuinely qualifying as “authentic religion,” thereby deeming…
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