Major World Religions and Their Worldviews: Comparative Profiles
This domain tests comparative accuracy: can you state each tradition's answers to the standard worldview questions without flattening internal diversity?
The comparative grid
Compare on six axes: ultimate reality, cosmogony, the human condition, the remedy, ethics, and destiny. Diversity is a feature, not an error: Advaita and Dvaita Vedanta, Theravada and Mahayana, Sunni and Shia, Reform and Orthodox Judaism answer the same questions differently.
Core profiles
- Christianity: Trinity (Nicene), creation, incarnation with two natures (Chalcedon), atonement, bodily resurrection, justification by grace through faith; ethics centred on love of God and neighbour.
- Islam: tawhid (strict unity), prophethood sealed in Muhammad, the Quran as revelation, five pillars (shahada, salat, zakat, sawm, hajj), Day of Judgment. Jesus (Isa) is prophet and Messiah but not divine; Quran 4:157 denies his crucifixion.
- Judaism: the Shema (Deut 6:4), covenant, Torah and mitzvot, this-worldly emphasis on halakhah and tikkun olam; afterlife beliefs are varied and historically less systematized than in Christianity.
- Hinduism: Brahman as ultimate reality, atman, maya, karma, samsara, moksha; four purusharthas (dharma, artha, kama, moksha); six orthodox darshanas.
- Buddhism: Four Noble Truths, Eightfold Path, anatta (no fixed self), anicca, dependent origination, nirvana; non-theistic rather than atheistic in the Western sense.
- East Asian traditions: Confucian ren, li, yi, and the junzi; Daoist Dao, wu wei, naturalness.
Worked example
Hindu and Buddhist soteriologies diverge because they answer the self-question differently. If atman is real and finally identical with Brahman (Advaita), liberation is realizing that identity, and the path is jnana or bhakti. If anatta holds, there is no self to realize, and nirvana is the cessation of craving and of the constructed self; the path is the Eightfold Path. Same vocabulary of karma and samsara, opposite metaphysical hinge.
Traps that cost marks
- Calling Hinduism simply polytheistic: nirguna Brahman underlies saguna devotional forms.
- Calling Buddhism atheistic without qualification; it denies a creator God but retains devas and rebirth.
- Mixing reincarnation (a self transmigrating) with resurrection (bodily restoration).
- Flattening Abrahamic traditions into one view; they differ on Trinity, incarnation, and revelation.
- Treating one school as the whole religion.