Arts & Opinion.com
Arts Culture Analysis
Vol. 24, No.1, 2025
 
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Editor
Robert J. Lewis
Senior Editor
Jason McDonald
Contributing Editors
Louis René Beres
David Solway
Nick Catalano
Don Dewey
Chris Barry
Howard Richler
Gary Olson
Jordan Adler
Andrew Hlavacek
Daniel Charchuk
Music Editor
Serge Gamache
Arts Editor
Lydia Schrufer
Graphics
Mady Bourdage
Photographer Jerry Prindle
Chantal Levesque
Webmaster
Emanuel Pordes

Past Contributors
Noam Chomsky
Mark Kingwell
Charles Tayler
Naomi Klein
Arundhati Roy
Evelyn Lau
Stephen Lewis
Robert Fisk
Margaret Somerville
Mona Eltahawy
Michael Moore
Julius Grey
Irshad Manji
Richard Rodriguez
Navi Pillay
Ernesto Zedillo
Pico Iyer
Edward Said
Jean Baudrillard
Bill Moyers
Barbara Ehrenreich
Leon Wieseltier
Nayan Chanda
Charles Lewis
John Lavery
Tariq Ali
Michael Albert
Rochelle Gurstein
Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

and the winner is
RANKING THE RELIGIONS


by
ROBERT J. LEWIS

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Robert J. Lewis has been editing  Arts & Opinion since 2002.  

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity.
When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.
Robert Pirsig

 

From time immemorial, human beings have been obsessed with ranking, or as anthropology would have it, Homo sapiens is an incurably hierarchal species. The gene sequence that prefigures the disposition best serves outcomes that ensure our very best are recognized and rewarded for being the best, and have first access to life’s essentials. Even in pursuits or activities of no consequence (cribbage, hop-scotch), the participants invariably arrange themselves from best to worst, and that same proclivity holds for almost everything in life. We want to know which are the world’s best beaches, best iPhone, music’s top ten, the year’s best and worst dresser, the richest person, the poorest nation, the tallest building, the hottest day. There is no end to our predilection to rate and rank.

However, as far as I know, no specialist, dedicated researcher or organization has bothered to rank the religions, attempted to objectively determine what might make one religion more attractive or performative than another, which becomes the task of this provisional essay.

All the religions, in their own fashion, position themselves to satisfy three basic human wants: (1) communion with God through prayer, ritual and scripture (2) the equivalent of the Ten Commandments as a moral code (3) a sense of belonging to a privileged community.

Is it possible establish if one religion answers to these desideratum more than the others? Is it possible to measure or ascertain, for example, if a Muslim feels or identifies with his religion more deeply than, for example, a Hindu or Buddhist?

If all religions, however implicitly, would like to remake their world in their image, can we demonstrate that one religion does this more convincingly than the others? Or why are people more likely to convert to Islam than Judaism?

Each religion, in arguing for its authority, claims a unique and privileged relationship with God, or the gods. We note that a religion's devotees are more favourably disposed to their own and less so toward all others. The degree of tolerance toward the outsider varies significantly from one religion to another: Buddhism is non-denominational while Islam regards all non-Muslims as infidels. Of the world's approximately 4000 religions, each, if only implicitly, views itself as the best, that is the best connected to the will and word of God.

When it comes to ranking the religions, and with all due respect to qualitative analysis, there is a preponderance of evidence suggesting that the most telling category is quantitative. According to the Pew Research Center, there are 2.3 billion Christians in the world, 1.9 Muslims, 1.1 secularists/agnostics/atheists, 1.1 Hindus, 500 million Buddhists and only 15 million Jews. However, there was a Roman time when there were more Jews than Christians in the world and Islam didn’t exist. Two thousand years hence, half the world’s eight billion people are either Christian or Muslim, while the Jews check in at a paltry 15 million. In number-speak, Judaism has been a colossal failure since it must be self-evident that if prior to WWII had there been two billions Jews in the world instead of 15 million, there would not have been a holocaust. Numbers translate into man power, boots on the ground, the sina qua non in defending a territory and way of life.

If a religion’s first duty to itself is to self-propagate and survive, to stake out a territory and defend it, Judaism is tragic lesson on what not to do. In the meantime Christianity and Islam have divvied up half the world’s land masses, and Hinduism and Buddhism have staked out considerable territory.

The more attractive, caring and accessible are a religion’s founding first principles, doctrines and, of vital importance, promises, the greater will be its numbers. In respect to the most dreaded event in the life of every human being, death, Judaism is the only major religion that doesn’t attach importance to the afterlife.

Of all the religions, Judaism is the only one that doesn’t permit active recruitment. On the other hand, Islam's doors are as wide open as a saloon's. In order to become a Muslim, you only have to utter three times in front of two witnesses, “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.” It takes between six months to a year to convert to Judaism. One could accuse Judaism as shooting itself in the foot in respect to spreading its gospel, or in current parlance, marketing its product.

If Judaism's numbers have rendered it a dwarf religion next to Christianity and Islam, this outcome is partly consequent to having failed to recognize the importance of encountering beauty in one’s daily life. The bleak house of the synagogue pales next to the majesty and beauty of the great Cathedrals, Mosques, Buddhist and Hindu temples. So visually arresting are these magnificent religious edifices that they have become popular tourist destinations, and no less so with respect to their interiors which house some of the world's finest sculpture and art masterpieces. Only Judaism and Islam regard the depiction of the human form as idolatry. Suffice to say, a religion that ignores the importance of aesthetics does so at its own peril.

From the medieval Gregorian chants, oratorios, hymns, cantatas and the timeless masses of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), Christianity’s music remains unsurpassed. By comparison, the other religions haven’t been able to offer better than the equivalent of endless monophonic droning that is more likely to produce torpor than wonder. Inspired by spirituals and gospel in Black churches, and recognizing the importance of music in the lives of young people looking to find their way in an increasing complex world, many of the Christian churches (Presbyterian), now feature live bands playing soft rock with religious lyrics. No other religion does this; and the parishes, at least in Brazil, are packed.

Since all faiths inculcate the equivalent of the Ten Commandments, the religions can be ranked according to those that produce the most law-biding followers, or even better, the most God-fearing, those who literally believe there will be theological consequences if the commandments are trespassed. From considerable personal experience, having spent a year of my life in Muslim countries as well as several years in Catholic Latin America, I would unquestionably rather have my car break down in the former. But getting a measure on what religion produces the safest environment is problematic because of too many variables. Law enforcement varies significantly from country to country, as do poverty indices and the culture of corruption. If the numbers force the conclusion that Catholic Latin America is more crime ridden than countries under Islam, the data must be treated with scepticism since chopping off the hand of a thief or executing a drug dealer, as in Indonesia and the Philippines, will be a more effective deterrent than a fine or prison term, which is why of the ten safest cities in the world, six are Islamic.

While marriage and fidelity are the cornerstones of all religions, only Catholicism -- in Buddhism celibacy is a choice -- presumed that the life of the spirit could be decoupled from man’s recurring sexual drive. Beginning in the 11th century, priests were required to take the oath of celibacy, which, in hindsight, was a colossal miscalculation that eventually spawned a global epidemic of child abuse by the priesthood, resulting in hundreds of thousands of damaged adults, and a religion, in the minds of many, that has lost its credibility. No surprise that among the world’s major religions, Catholicism leads the way in disaffections.

In reckoning with human sexuality, Catholicism attempted to suppress it, refused to acknowledge the force of nature behind it, while Islam decided to snip it in the bud. In Somalia, 98% of women between the ages of 15-49 have been subjected to the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), otherwise known as clitoral circumcision. In Egypt, the numbers modestly improve to 87%. In allowing for the healthy expression of human sexuality, Judaism and Protestantism are light years more enlightened than the other major religions.

Despite gender apartheid and Sharia law, more people are converting to Islam than all other religions. Converts to Islam cite community and family values as being the principle reasons. If current trends continue, by 2050 there will be more Muslims than Christians in the world and this is not simply due to birthrate.

Both Islam and Hinduism recognize that there is no greater burden on man than asking him to take responsibility for his life. To be relieved of this existential weight constitutes one of their main attractions. In both religions, dress protocol, dietary laws, hygiene and interpersonal relationships -- who can talk to whom where and when -- are all meticulously regulated by time-tested rules and regulations. Pre-empting the anxiety associated with dating and courtship is arranged marriage, a custom that has weathered all manner of criticism and denunciation. Doubting Thomases are invited to scan the matrimonial classified ads (brides wanted: grooms wanted) in the local newspaper. In Islam the male or his family, and Hinduism the woman or her family, provide the dowry.

In the West, especially among the under 30, secularism is the fastest growing anti-religion. Phil Zuckerman reports, in "Why Nations Are Becoming Secular ,"

that “ . . . for the first time in recorded history, we now have numerous societies—such as Scotland, Estonia, the Netherlands, Japan, Scandinavia, the Czech Republic, South Korea, France, Hungary, and Australia—wherein non-religious people outnumber religious people.”

It seems that despite the elegant belief systems and sense of belongingness offered by all the major religions, there isn’t a human being who wouldn’t rather be free than not, and secularism best answers to that primordial longing and is the fastest growing non-religion in the world despite major growing pains that stem from the failure of its advocates to inculcate the importance of linking freedom with responsibility. That said, according to a study conducted by psychologist Will Gervais at Brunel University in London, religious people do not behave more morally than atheists.

In keeping pace with the latest developments in science and technology, Secularism, Christianity and Judaism by far and away outstrip the competition. Woman’s rights do not exist in Islam and in Hinduism it is a long day's work in progress. When women are systematically excluded from participating in the productive life of a nation, millions of IQ points, every nation's greatest asset, are squandered, guaranteeing civilizational impoverishment. It's not a coincidence that many of the poorest countries in the world are Islamic.

Buddhism is no less backwards, since a woman, in order to achieve enlightenment, must assume the male form. In Hinduism there are indeed female divinities, but despite the reforms of Nehru in 1947 India remains stubbornly patriarchal. However, unlike Islam, both Hinduism and Buddhism are beginning to concede to women more space in traditional male professions. For women for whom secularism has no purchase, Christianity and Judaism are their best bets.

That secularism has grown exponentially in the past century suggests that all religions are antiquated, lacking the structural and doctrinal elasticity that would allow them to take into account the latest developments in science and technology, especially in cosmology and astronomy. Creationism has been blown to bits by Darwinism, and then into bytes by the Big Bang.

If being at peace with oneself and one's neighbours constitutes a reasonable ask of a devotee to his religion, Islam, as verifiably the least tolerant of all the major religions, is almost everywhere in the world at war or in a territorial dispute with its neighbours; and where Islamic communities form in Europe, as in France, Germany, England, social upheaval is rendering dysfunctional those once orderly societies.

CONCLUSION

Given the many variables and imponderables in evaluating the world's principal religions, a definitive ranking of the religions is probably a bridge too far to cross. Individual needs very significantly from one region of the world to another and what is good for Peter may not be good for Abdul. But there can be no doubting that Islam is doing something right. From its humble beginnings in 610 A.D, Islam is poised to become the most popular religion in the world and it occupies 25% of the world’s territory. In the best sense of the accusation, if religion is indeed the opiate of the masses, Islam is slowly but inexorably cornering the market.

However all the religions are losing ground to secularism. One in four Americans identify as secular and less than 50% are members of a church.

And as it pertains to the growing many for whom all religions are nothing more than fairy tales but who cannot subscribe to the notion that life is an accident, they have embraced the idea that there is a creative force or prime mover that inheres in the universe, and being blessed with the means to posit, contemplate and connect to it is man's supreme privilege.

 

also by Robert J. Lewis:

ORIGINAL ALT-CLASSICAL MUSIC FOR GUITAR

The Unacceptable Indulgence: PETHOOD
The Embedded

The Automobile as Extension of Home

The Outlaw

Exploring the Universe

How Free Are We?
Monadville
Meditation on Anger
To Birth a New Religion
Entertainment Addiction
Descent into Language Barbarism
Who Owns the Moon?
Why Do We Daydream
Argument & Disagreement
Smashing the God Particle
The Decline of Reading
In Praise of Useless Activities
When Sex Became Dirty
Blood Meridian: (McCarthy): An Appreciation
Trump & Authencity
Language, Aim & Fire
One Hand Clapping: The Zen Koan Hoax
Human Nature: King of the Hill
The Trouble with Darwin
The Life & Death of Anthony Bourdain
Denying Identity and Natural Law
The Cares versus the Care-nots
Elon Musk: Brilliant but Wrong
As the Corporation Feasts, the Earth Festers
Flirting & Consequences
Breaking Bonds
Oscar Wilde and the Birth of Cool
The Big
Deconstructing Skin Colour
To Party - Parting Ways with Consciousness
Comedy - Constant Craving
Choosing Gender
Becoming Our Opposites
Broken Feather's Last Stand
Abstract Art or Artifice II
Old People
Beware the Cherry-Picker
Once Were Animal
Islam is Smarter Than the West
Islam Divided by Two
Pedophiling Innocence
Grappling with Revenge
Hit Me With That Music
The Sinking of the Friendship
Om: The Great Escape
Actor on a Hot Tin Roof
Being & Self-Consciousness
Giacometti: A Line in the Wilderness
The Jazz Solo
Chat Rooms & Infidels
Music Fatigue
Understanding Rape
Have Idea Will Travel
Bikini Jihad
The Reader Feedback Manifesto
Caste the First Stone
Let's Get Cultured
Being & Baggage
Robert Mapplethorpe
1-800-Philosophy
The Eclectic Switch
Philosophical Time
What is Beauty?
In Defense of Heidegger
Hijackers, Hookers and Paradise Now
Death Wish 7 Billion
My Gypsy Wife Tonight
On the Origins of Love & Hate
Divine Right and the Unrevolted Masses
Cycle Hype or Genotype
The Genocide Gene

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ISSN 1718-2034

 

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