Five Major Religions

Today in class, Mr. Schick presented the slide presentation to the students. The power point was based on the five major religions in the world. Unfortunately, we weren't able to learn about all of them today. The first religion we discussed was Christianity. The number of adherents this religion has is around 2.2 billion people, making it the largest religion in the world. We call the people of this religion, Christians. The geographic locations for Christianity are, Europe, the Americas, and southern Africa. Denominations are: The Catholic Church, Orthodox Church, Protestants (Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and many more). The founder of Christianity is Jesus Christ, (Christianity is Abrahamic for origin). The holy book is, the Bible, especially the New Testament (gospels). The beliefs of Christianity are that Jesus is both human and divine, and the son of God. Jesus led a virtuous life; he was crucified, died, and resurrected. He also ascended into Heaven where he reigns with God the Father. The clergy is the Pope which is the head of the Catholic Church, priests are local authorities. The next and last religion that we talked about today was Islam. This religion holds second place with the largest number of adherents with 1.5 billion people. People call them Muslims. Some geographic locations are: Indonesia, middle East, and north Africa. Denominators are: Sunni (75-90%), Shiites (10-20%). The founder of this religion is Muhammed (570-632), and the holy book is the Qur'an (Koran). Beliefs are monotheistic and Abrahamic. Five Pillars (testimony, prayer, alms-giving, fasting, and pilgrimages. Muslims see their purpose in life as serving and submitting to Allah (God) and observing Islamic Law. That is all we discussed today in class.