Religions

There are six religions in the world that average people have heard of.  People generally avoid talking about religion in public, they're not allowed to talk about them in public schools, most TV shows stay off the topic, and religious institutions only talk about their own -- and even then, very few people are paying attention.  So we hear about religion through news and movies, and then only under very specific circumstances.  One common idea is that people, and Americans in particular, don't care enough to learn about other belief systems, but I think this is unfair.  If a person has never heard of Sikhism, he's not going to know that he should ask, "What is Sikhism?"  Besides, most people are too practical to do research on topics which haven't come up on their own.  So here are the six religions that the average American layperson has heard of:

* Christianity - This religion, we only hear about with regard to Creationism, gay-bashing, or in the case of Catholicism, pederasty.  We also know that Catholics have sexy schoolgirl uniforms and exorcist movies.  But really, how many people know anything about the specific beliefs and practices of a Mormon, as opposed to a Lutheran, as opposed to a Methodist, an Orthodox Christian, a Jehovah's Witness, a Baptist or a Red-Letter Evangelical?  As far as the general public is concerned, Christians are just a radical sect of the Republican Party, and Catholics are a child-raping subdivision of those.

* Judaism - "So then the rabbi says, I throw my money in the air, and God can keep what he wants."  That's basically it.  People know about Jews through the jokes.  It helps a lot that most of the comedians happen to be Jewish themselves.  Also, we've seen the marketing promotions for Hannukah, which are now integrated into the Christmas shopping season.  As far as the public is concerned, we like Jews, because they make us laugh.

* Muslims - The only time you see Muslims on the news is when they're blowing something up or hijacking a plane... or both.  I doubt that the average person knows the specific beliefs of the average Muslim, but most of us know the specific beliefs of the terrorists (seventy-two virgins as a reward for killing an infidel).  All the non-terrorist Muslims, as far as the public is concerned, is just women in interesting scarves.

* Scientology - They're basically the popular punch-line these days.  People know they believe in aliens, and that Tom Cruise is kind of a nut job.  The general public concensus is that it's a scam to sell books and membership fees.  The Scientologists themselves tend to resent the way they were made fun of on South Park, but look on the bright side...  At least the rest of us have heard of you now.

* Buddhism - Probably everything Americans know about Buddha, we learned from kung fu movies.  So as far as the general public is concerned, Buddhists have mystical powers.  When it comes to the specifics, most of us really can't distinguish between a Buddhist and other similar religious philosophies, such as Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism or Hare Krishnaism.  To most people, it's all just one big category called "Eastern" stuff.

* Atheism - This one is self-explanatory, but I doubt that the average person is well-educated on the distinctions between different atheistic philosophies (e.g. humanism, nihilism, practical atheism, philosophical atheism, implicit atheism, etc.).  Just as the Christians only get on the news when they're bashing gays, or the Muslims when they're setting off bombs, the Atheists only get coverage in the media when they're filing some frivilous lawsuit, like having a Christmas tree removed from public site.  As far as the general public is concerned, Atheists are a bunch of buzzkills.  Also, for whatever reason, people seem to think they have a monopoly on evolutionary theory or even science in general.

...And the rest!  As far as the average person is concerned, all beliefs are basically in one of these six categories, and the ones that aren't, should be rounded off to the nearest one.  Shinto hasn't been made into any movies or been in any major news stories, therefor, it doesn't exist.  Even Wicca, which has appeared in a few movies and television, hasn't stuck around consistently long enough, or in the mainstream, for viewers to bother taking note of it.  As far as the general public is concerned, there are gay-bashing Christians, funny Jews, terrorist Muslims, crazy Scientologists, kung fu Buddhists, buzzkill Atheists, and nobody else.

What's even worse, is that six categories is STILL too much for some people's "black-and-white" brains to handle.  So we draw a line of demarcation.  Americans generally draw the line at something called "Judeo-Christian" beliefs, which basically means those who pray to the God of Abraham... but not the Muslims.  In this way, Christians and Jews can stand on one side of the line, and everybody else is on the other.  This gets confusing, because political affiliations are much more psychologically dominating than religious affiliations, and Jews and Catholics have a tendency to vote Democrat.  Atheists, on the other hand, count the Pagans, the Unitarians, the Deists, the Buddhists, and so on, as being on "their side," that is, the non-Judeo-Christian side of the line.

In Europe, however, the concensus (as far as I can tell) seems to be that the line of demarcation sits between "believers" and "non-believers," which basically means that they divide the world into Atheists and "everyone else."  This means that a Wiccan living in the United States gets lumped in with the Atheists, but the same Wiccan living in Europe gets lumped in with the Christians.

Okay, maybe we can't really educate the public on the nuances of the maybe several thousand different religious denominations in the world.  But at least, can we try to acknowlege that there are SEVERAL religions?  I mean, most people don't know the names, histories, capitals, languages and customs of every single COUNTRY on Earth, but we don't feel the need to "round off" Poland to just "Europe," or Mongolia to just "Asia."  You know what?  Maybe we need flags.  Yeah, maybe if religious symbols had a common shape, the way flags are rectangular, we'd recognize them more easily.  Or maybe if we had something analogous to a map, because world maps are everywhere.  Anyway, just a thought.