Five Major Religions part 2

Today in class, Mr. Schick presented more of the slide presentation on the five major religions. In my last blog and in the last class, we discussed the two major religions, Islam and Christianity. The religion and or topic that we are currently discussing now is, Hinduism. The number of adherents Hinduism has is 1.1 billion, making it the third largest religion in the world. The name that we call the followers of this religion is Hindus, and the geographic location is India and Nepal. The holy book is called the Vedas- eternal truths revealed to ancient sages; composed in verse form (meant to be sung and easily memorized). There is no distinct founder for Hinduism, it is a series of intellectual or philosophical points of view, rather than a ridged, strict set of beliefs- probably the oldest extant religion, although Hinduism is less a religion than a way of life, or a faith. An example of this is, "as a person puts on new clothes and discards old and torn clothes similarly an embodied soul enters new material bodies, leaving the old bodies". In other words, recarnation. The next topic and or section we talked about was the religion of Buddhism. They have about 500 million to 1.5 billion adherents, and we call the followers Buddhists. The geographic location of Buddhism is southeast Asia, China, Nepal, and Japan. There are 1.2 million Buddhists in the United States. The founder of Buddhism is Siddhartha Gautama, and the denominations are Tibetan, Zen, Theravada, and Amidst. The Four Noble Truths are that there is suffering, attachment to desire is the origin of suffering, there is a cessation of suffering, and the Eightfold Path will lead to cessation of suffering. The Eightfold Path is the right view, the right intention, the right speech, the right action, the right livelihood, the right effort, the right mindfulness, and the right dedication. The fifth and final major religion is Judaism. This religion has about 14-18 million adherents, making it the ninth largest religion in the world. We call the followers of this religion Jews. The geographic location for this religion is Israel, with 6.4 million Jews, and the U.S with 5.3-7 million Jews, and the founder is Abraham. The holy book of Judaism is the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). The beliefs of this religion are ethical monotheism- God is one, and concerned with the actions of humankind, with the Ten Commandments and the 13 Principles of Faith. That is mostly all we discussed today in class.