Sunday, July 6, 2008

Belief systems held in different countries


Here is a really useful map showing us the distribution of major religions of the world today.

Purple=Christianity
Green=Islam
Light Blue=Judaism
Red=Hinduism
Yellow=Buddhism
Gold=Chinese religions
Dark Purple=Tribal Religions
Gray=Non-religious

Religion has spread throughout the world. In many cases religion was imposed in different countries during colonizations, expansions and conquests. A clear example is America, it is mainly Christian but before the 1500's, America had no trace of Christianity, it was imposed by the Spanish and other "Conquistadores" who came to colonize America and convert polytheistic and tribal tribes to Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church has a history of violently imposing religion upon non-believers or people who followed other religions. The Crusades was probably one of human kind's most horrendous actions, all hidden under God's name. There is something completely ironic especially in Christianity. God's name has been widely used to kill during many Christian events or periods such as burning "witches" at the stake, and as mentioned before during the crusades the ironic factor is that for Christianity, killing is prohibited by the 10 commandments. The same happened for Africa and during the "Reconquista" of Spain from Muslims.

Here is a really nice video from mapsofwar.com and shows the history of religion since the beginning of the major religions today and how it has spread during history.



History of Religion


In this video we can clearly see how each different religion started in a country with its founder or prophet and gradually expanded until each country was covered by one. It is important to note that Christianity used many expansive methods and at the end they worked as Christianity is the most successful religion in expanding. It covered most regions of the world.

Currently most countries have chosen a single religion as their official religion, if you want to see a chart with percentages of religions in each country, please click here.

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