Ranking World Religions

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Those who follow the two "last book you read" threads here on WP may have noticed that I have been reading quite a lot of books about various religions in the last several months. As a matter of fact, I decided to smarten up on things and attempt be come knowledgeable about *all* major world religions... Which is of course an exercise in futility, given the many different branches, denominations, variations, rituals, practices etc. within each religious tradition.

Nonetheless, I have now... in an obvious fit of narcissistic megalomania - somehow decided that I consider myself capable of passing judgement on all these various religious traditions. And I'm fairly tired of the fact that most discussions about religion on WP tend to focus almost exclusively on Christianity and Islam.

Now, any religious tradition would likely consider itself superior based on it's *own* criteria, so it would only make sense to rank them according to some external criteria... So I came up with the following:

Internal morality:
This refers to the tradition's approach towards its own members. Obvious aspects are social roles, gender equality, crimes and punishments, religious leadership, etc.

External morality:
This refers to the tradition's approach towards members of other religions (or no religion at all). Obvious aspects are religious tolerance, inter-faith dialogue, views on conversion, etc.

Scientific rationality:
This refers to the tradition's support of scientific endeavours, critical thinking, educational achievement, free thinking, etc..

Economic rationality:
This refers to the tradition's support of productive economic activity, hard work, social mobility, entrepreneurship etc.

These aren't completely separate categories, of course, as not all religions make similar distinctions between members and non-members of the faith, for instance.. Yet I believe it is possible to make some general evaluation without too much shoe-horning into artificial categories...

Oh, and for both concepts of "morality" I am applying a concept of morality that focuses on altruism, compassion, benevolence etc., and thus not some Nietzsche/Gordon Gekko/Sith Code concept of "Good".

Anyway... To get back to the point. I then singled out 16 different religious traditions*, and ranked either from 1-16 based on my infallible sense of judgement and impeccable personal integrity, which yielded the following:



And a graphical illustration, where I combine the scores into 2 dimensions of morality and rationality...



As demonstrated above, I arrive at a fairly high correlation between moral and rational elements within religions, as either can explain approx. 56 percent of the variation in the other**. However, the 5 Dharmic traditions tend to "over-perform" on moral aspects (wrt. the dotted line) compared to rational aspects, while the 9 Abrahamic traditions generally display the opposite trend. Food for thought, perhaps?

Some additional comments:
- The traditions are ranked, not scored on a continuous scale, so nothing meaningful can be said about the distance between either. Nor can anything be said about how each religious tradition scores compared to atheism, as I haven't included this (and cannot include it, as per the not-collecting-stamps-hobby argument).
- Only one Hindu tradition is listed. I am well aware that there are many Hindu traditions... that's the problem, and several scholars have even suggested that one should not treat Hindu as a single religion at all. Yet I didn't want to spam the above list with the numerous different branches in Hinduism, nor did I want to exclude a billion persons from the list...
- Some may object to the omission of specific traditions. These objections may very well be valid, but I had to draw a line somewhere. I specifically omitted Shinto, for instance, because it has almost no moral precepts, thus making it difficult to evaluate. The same thing may be said - to a lesser extent - wrt. mystical traditions like Sufi Islam and Kabbalah.

Please discuss... and feel free to ask *why* I have evaluated each tradition as shown above...

Peace! is a lie

*Strictly speaking, this is a ranking (ordinal scale) of religions, so the proper statistical measure would be the Spearman Rank Correlation (rho), which I have also included.
**A rough estimate suggests that these traditions account for approx. 80 percent of the world's population. Add to this that approx. 15 percent of the world's population is irreligious, and we end up with a quite comprehensive (but admittedly not complete) overview of religion on the 3rd rock from the Sun.

What do you folks think about ranking SECTS of religions as well, like:

Christianity

1. Baptists
2. Lutherans
3. Roman Catholics
4. Presbyterians, etc

Judaism

1. Hasidim
2. Conservative Judaism
3. Reform Judaism
4. Modern Orthodox, etc.

Islam

1. Shiites
2. Sunnis
3. Sufis
4. Wahabbis, etc.

And sects of Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, etc.

Because all religions run the gamut on their views on morality.

Well, I did actually consider dividing Jainism into its two dominant sects: The Śvētāmbara and the Digambara...

... But such a distinction would be like distinguishing between Super-Super-Super-Super-Super-Super-Super pacifists and Super-Super-Super-Super-Super-Super-Super-Super pacifists... it doesn't actually add a lot of new information, since both sects of Jainism are rigorously dedicated to non-violence (Ahimsa)...

I also thought about including the 4 Sunni Madhhabs: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali...

But they all share one common feature (along with The Wahhabi/Salafi/Al-e-Hadith): The acceptance of the Sunnah as authoritative religious scripture... And these different sects only disagree on the importance of lower-order supplementary sources such as consensus, analogy and independent reasoning (Ijtihad) ... So the difference between these sects might be less pronounced than initially believed...

For instance... The Hanafi school is generally considered the most "liberal" of the 4 Sunni schools (with the largest scope for ijtihad,), and the Hanbali the most strict... However, Pew Research found that Pakistan (which is predominantly Hanafi) was the worst country in the world wrt. religious hostilities in 2014 - much more so than the Hanbali-dominated Saudi Arabia... thus challenging the "liberal" label somewhat...

On the other hand, Quakers and Anglicans obviously do not hold similar beliefs despite both being Protestant traditions... And had I included both I would have scored the former significantly higher on Morality than the latter...

Last edited by GGPViper on 15 Jul 2016, 5:19 am, edited 1 time in total.

1. Nice exercise, but I don't think anyone else will care about your personal criteria.
2. I consider pacifism to be immoral.
3. All except perhaps for Buddhism require faith, which is the the rejection of reason, which is why I consider most religions, regardless of flavor, to be poisonous to society.

No offense taken, actually I'm quite glad you shared your research and opinion - it's always interesting to see what kinds of conclusions people reach when they do this sort of research. I think you sort of constructively have this in the criteria, civic value IMHO is a big one in terms of how it helps a society hold cohesion in a positive manner and lends integrity to people's narratives from all walks of life.

Also I'd agree that mysticism is difficult to pin down morally since it's mostly pragmatic in that context, also it's usually a small crowd so measuring the effect it has on social habits proves difficult. One thing you might be able to say that those practicing an esoteric/mystic version of a mainstream faith, especially with something as detail-oriented as Kabbalah, might enjoy a sort of brain-games benefit in that their practice demands a lot of memory and focus which in turn aids aptitudes in scientific disciplines. Considering that a lot of the best-known scientists and thinkers between the Renaissance and Enlightenment were either alchemists, Kabbalists, or practitioners of one form or another of Hermeticism it would make sense that the two dovetailed neurologically.

Thanks for the great post, Viper!

I particularly enjoyed the supporting graphics and wisely chosen links to external sources.

I am curious about why Theravedan Buddhism is to the left of Mahayana Buddhism on the morality axis of the PPP plot. What is that about?

I suspect that bubbles (ellipses rather than circles) would be more accurate than points on a plot, given the diversity of practices in most of these traditions. Are "Christians, Protestant" to any degree uniform in their scientific or economic rationality or morality?

Another interesting alternative would be using a full cartesian plane instead of the first quadrant only. This would allow the low end of the scale to be given negative values, which might be satisfyingly pejorative. "And just look at those Sunnis! All the way down at negative 8!! ! etc."

But really, a thoroughly enjoyable post.

Are you going to be ranking world races in your next post?

Religion and race are not really comparable, though, are they?

Kind of hinges on the whole intrinsic/extrinsic thing.

If you don't like the topic- don't reply. It's that simple. Stop trying to start crap just to tick people off. It's gotten old and the moderators really need to do something pretty soon.

I generally consider the "Great Vehicle" (Mahayana) concept of Buddhist enlightenment to be more flexible, inclusive and tolerant than the Theravada school. A good example of this is China, where Mahayana Buddhism managed to incorporate/merge with many Daoist elements relatively peacefully... Contrast this with the Theravada-dominated Myanmar, which has some fairly unsavoury Buddhist nationalist groups engaged in systematic oppression of the Rohingya people.


Well, I did actually start out with a Cartesian plane, but then I had to decide when a religion met the threshold for being "negative" or "positive"... And I think I've already made quite a lot of assumptions to generate the chart...

I'm also working with an older version of Excel at home, so more fancy graphical illustrations will have to wait until I get an upgrade...

As for the Protestants... well, it's probably not the easiest group to pin down... I took some inspiration from the Lutheran and Calvinist traditions as well as the semi-famous analysis by Max Weber on the protestant ethics... It's probably easier to define Protestantism by what is is *not* (a rejection of Papal authority and Sacred tradition) than by what it *is*... - And even then, the Anglicans have some "semi"-catholic aspects...

I did, however, treat Evangelical Christianity (not to be confused with the Evangelical Lutheran Church, which is a mainstream Protestant denomination) as distinct from Protestantism, due to its mostly American origin and history...

But it might be a good idea with ellipses to illustrate the diversity (or lack hereof) of beliefs within a tradition... I may have to work on that...

Interesting post. In particular, it seems that Buddhism is of the "left" - nice and friendly but not concerned about economics - whilst conservative branches of Christianity and Judaism are on the "right" - emphasising hard work and productivity but not so big on compassion for its own sake.

Can't help but feel that including a post-enlightenment religion is cheating somewhat. It was always likely to grab first place. Having said that, some of the post-enlightenment branches of Christianity would do pretty badly - I'm thinking of LDS and Jehovah's Witnesses.

I'd be particularly interested in seeing how deliberately "liberal" strains of the other major faiths do, as well as some esoteric branches of major faiths. But that might be quite hard.

Do any with a better rank for external than internal treat their own worse than outsiders, or do they all still treat their own better or even far better than outsiders?