Christian
22 personas22 personas across religious orders, theological schools, the Reformation, contemporary intra-Church renewal, the Evangelical/Pentecostal layer, and the Eastern Catholic bridge.
/intelligences / atlas
Atlas of Human Belief & Worldview
130 tradition-voices across 11 rosters in 7 families — religious, philosophical, and secular worldviews held side by side, each represented at the strongest, most sympathetic version of itself.
7
families
11
rosters
130
personas
Two complementary systems
Human belief is a graph, not a tree. This atlas therefore runs two indexing systems at once, answering two different questions.
The hierarchy — where does this live?
A strict tree: every tradition lives in exactly one family folder. Useful for navigation, storage, and scope control. Necessary, and also a simplification — the moment you file Confucianism under "East Asian" you sever its kinship with Stoicism; the moment you file Sufism under "Abrahamic / Islam" you sever its kinship with every other mystical path.
The tag layer — what is this like?
A flat, multi-valued layer that cuts across the hierarchy. Many tags per persona. Used for discovery, cross-family resonance, dialogue routing, and honest representation of the fact that traditions share features across the tree.
The hierarchy is the map; the tag system is the territory's refusal to be flat.
The seven families
11 rosters, 130 personas. Each family is a strict-tree home; the tags below capture what the tree must sever.
Abrahamic (non-Christian)
20 personas20 personas across Judaism and Islam — the two other great Abrahamic monotheisms, each with its own internal diversity of denomination, school, and reform current.
- Jewish Voices 10
- Islamic Voices 10
Dharmic
28 personas28 personas across Hinduism, Buddhism, and the independent traditions of Jainism and Sikhism — held firmly as their own religions, not Hindu sects.
East Asian
12 personas12 personas across the kami/spirit-and-folk traditions (Shinto + Chinese folk religion) and the philosophical-sage traditions (Daoism + Confucianism). Buddhism in East Asia stays in the Dharmic family.
Other Organized
4 personas4 personas for the major organized world religions that belong to no other family — Zoroastrianism (Traditional and Reformist), the Bahá'í Faith, and Tenrikyō as representative of organized new religious movements.
Indigenous & Animist
34 personas34 personas across 6 regional rosters — Native North America, Mesoamerica/Amazonia/Andes, Africa & Afro-diaspora, Circumpolar/Siberia/Asia, Oceania, and a cross-cultural philosophical layer. The program's most provisional family, awaiting review by voices from the traditions represented.
Secular & Naturalistic
10 personas10 personas across atheism, naturalism, humanism, pantheism, deep ecology, existentialism, SBNR, Stoicism, and transhumanism — a separate top-level family, NOT a sixth religion.
The constellation map
130 personas, arranged by family. Each dot is one tradition-voice. Color encodes family; size is uniform — every voice is heard once.
Cross-family bridges
Resonances the hierarchy must sever — kinships discovered across the tree.
virtue-ethicsA discipline of cultivating character through reasoned practice.
e.g. Confucian, Stoic, Aristotelian-Thomist, Secular Humanist
nature-sacredThe cosmos / Earth / place itself as object of reverence.
e.g. Andean Pachamama, Māori kaitiakitanga, Pantheist, Gaian, Shinto kami-nature, Daoist
mystical-unionDirect experiential nearness or identity with the absolute.
e.g. Sufi, Kabbalist, Advaita Vedānta, Zen, Carmelite, Eastern Catholic
liberation-justiceStructural-social compassion as religious vocation.
e.g. Liberation Theology, Engaged Buddhism, Reformist Sikh, Progressive Catholic, Secular Humanist
practice-as-transformationDisciplined psychophysical practice as the route to realization.
e.g. Yogic/Tantric Hindu, Internal-Alchemy Daoist, Vipassanā, Sufi tariqa
revealed-monotheismOne God revealed through scripture and prophet.
e.g. Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Bahá'í, Zoroastrianism
ancestor-centeredThe continuing presence of forebears as the spine of family and community.
e.g. Chinese folk-ancestral, Bantu, Confucian, Shinto, much Indigenous
practice-vs-philosophy-pairA recurring structural signature: one tradition holds both a lived-practice voice and a philosophical-articulation voice.
e.g. Dominican/Thomist, Vaishnava/Vishishtadvaita, Theravāda-Forest/Abhidharma, Religious/Internal-Alchemy Daoist, Jain practice/Anekantavada
Family ↔ internal axes
Each family carries its own local coordinate system. The program-wide authority-source meta-axis (revealed-text / lineage-transmission / direct-experience / philosophical-reason / ancestral-traditional) is the one shared spine.
| Family | Internal axes |
|---|---|
| Christian | in-communion · liturgy · polity · authority |
| Judaism | halakha · temper · identity · modernity |
| Islam | authority · method · temper · modernity |
| Hinduism | metaphysics · ultimate · path · orientation |
| Buddhism | vehicle · goal · gate · view |
| Jain & Sikh | Jain: sect · role · emphasis · Sikh: emphasis · observance · orientation |
| Shinto/Folk | sacred-locus · orientation · form · exclusivity |
| Daoism/Confucian | orientation · register · authority-source · exclusivity |
| Other Organized | theology · authority-source · stance · scope |
| Indigenous | cosmology · mediation · orientation · knowledge-boundary |
| Secular | metaphysics · stance-on-theism · meaning-source · temper |
Open items & honest caveats
- The Indigenous family is consultation-dependent. Even at equal depth, the six regional rosters under-resolve reality. They are a good-faith scaffold built from public scholarship, explicitly awaiting review by voices from those traditions — not a finished authoritative account.
- The Islam roster carries Prophet-depiction and clerical-authority constraints; personas frame positions as "this school holds…" rather than as rulings.
- Confucianism is the program's deliberate religion/philosophy borderline; the secular-bridge tag is a feature, not an inconsistency.
- The tag vocabulary is a v1. It will need curation as personas mature.
- Counts are approximate where rosters flag placeholder or expandable entries (e.g. organized New Religious Movements).