List 14 - next are Lists 12 and 13 - next Lists 1-11

1. The below is in my opinion the best place on the Net to get started on a study of religion. It does what it says it does, that is, describes the major world religions ranked by size. But it does a lot more too.
   Major Religions Ranked by Size - Aug 9, 2007 ... This is a listing of the major religions of the world, ... The "World's Major Religions" list published in the New York Public Library ...
   
   Some Books and Authors I can recommend
   What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy by Thomas Nagel (Paperback - Oct 15, 1987)
   Quest for Certainty by John Dewey (Paperback - Jun 1960)
   What Is Life?: with "Mind and Matter" and "Autobiographical Sketches" by Erwin Schrodinger
   Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science by Werner Heisenberg
   Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About - Hardcover (Jan 1, 2001) by Donald E. Knuth
   Amazon's Karen Armstrong Page <== she is very hot at the moment
   Discover books, read about the author, find related products, and more. Visit the page.
   
   Mathew Arnold had an interesting thought on the subject:
   Matthew Arnold Biography - Biography.com - Learn about the life of Matthew Arnold at Biography.com. ... in an age of crumbling creeds, poetry would replace religion and that therefore readers would ...
   
   One more book
   Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology) by Roy A. Rappaport (Paperback - Mar 28, 1999) (9)
   
   Ritual And Religion In The Making Of Humanity. - Review - book reviews
   Whole Earth, Fall, 1999 by Mary Catherine Bateson
   Roy A. Rappaport. 1999; 535 pp. $19.95. Cambridge University Press.
   Roy Rappaport writes in a time of urgency, when we must ask not only how religion fits in but what might replace or sustain its ancient contribution to meaning and social integration. In 1968 Rappaport published a groundbreaking ethnography of the Maring people of the New Guinea highlands, detailing the connections among their economy and its environmental impact, their endemic warfare, and their cycle of beliefs and ritual, which regulated the other two. Rappaport's curiosity then carried him into years of reading about ritual and religion, at the same time that he became increasingly engaged in environmental issues. This new book is what is meant when we speak of the culmination of a life's work. Rappaport delayed its completion for years while researching and rewriting passages again and again, until he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and finished it before his death in 1997.
   Anthropologists have argued that humankind and technology coevolved--the advantages of tool use, say, selecting for better and more opposable thumbs, nimbler hands, and greater intelligence, which in turn created better tools. The same argument has been made for the reciprocal development of language and intelligence. We suffer, however, the weaknesses of our strengths and the vices of our virtues. Human intelligence and technology have given us the tools to destroy the environment on which we depend, while language, which allows us to analyze the problem, does not seem to allow the creation of a consensus to address it.
   Rappaport proposes that ritual and language have Similarly coevolved, with ritual providing, from the very beginning, a necessary corrective for language-created problems that may otherwise be lethal. Language permits lies and permits any statement to be contradicted or opposed by alternatives suggested by experience or self-interest or speculation. However, by participating in ritual, in which invariable words and actions recur, men and women assume wider commitments which are forged at deeper levels of the psyche. Rappaport calls these invariable words and actions Ultimate Sacred Postulates. This does not necessarily mean that the participants believe the postulates. Indeed, they are ideally untestable and without immediate consequences: "In God We Trust." "Hear Oh Israel, the Lord Our God the Lord is One." But these postulates that cannot be questioned hold a key position in the governing hierarchies of ideas that Rappaport calls Logoi (the plural of Logos), and they have consequences for social life. The simplest example of ritual implementation of them would be the use of oaths to create metatruths that are more reliable than simple reports. The sanctity of the Ultimate Sacred Postulates underlies the authority of convention and of leaders, teachers, and priesthoods. It is what makes action possible as part of a larger social or ecological whole.
   Rappaport is not proposing the construction of a new religion; rather, he is describing the kind of ecology of ideas and actions that might include and sustain religion as an integral part of life. He points out that traditional religions can be interpreted in benign ways and that secular rituals (such as rock concerts or environmental clean-ups) also exhibit many of the unifying properties of shared participation. What is needed is not new theology (though some tune-ups might be helpful) but new forms of practice and social engagement. We can talk until we are blue in the face, but that may do more harm than good, creating new polarities; what we need to do instead is to march or dance or sing, as in the great civil rights demonstrations of the sixties that forged new convictions and new unity.
   The book draws on a great body of anthropological writing and on multiple scriptural traditions to explore the nature of the Logoi as they frame basic understandings of time and causality, space and human motivation. Side by side with examples from Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity, Rappaport sets examples of tribal Australians, of the Sioux and the Navaho, and above all of the Mating, dancing together and slaughtering pigs to create alliances sanctified by the spirits of the ancestors. All of these are used to illuminate philosophical concepts and ideas that have been drawn from cybernetics and communications theory (lots of Martin Buber and Charles Sanders Peirce and Gregory Bateson), explaining the universality of ritual and its necessary role in the evolution of humanity.
   This is a fat book, and a difficult one, occasionally defensive and constipated in its argument. But it is an essential one in the developing conversation about how human beings can deeply know their involvement in the biosphere and in each other and how they can act together to preserve it.
   "... high-order meaning ... is grounded in identity or unity, the radical identification of unification of self with other. It is not so much, or even at all, intellectual but is, rather, experiential. It may be experienced through art, or in the acts of love, but is, perhaps, most often felt in ritual and other religious devotions. High-order meaning seems to be experienced in intensities ranging from the mere intimation of being emotionally moved in, for instance, the course of ritual to those deep numinous experiences called "mystical." Those who have known it in its more intense forms may refer to it by such obscure phrases as "The Experience of Being" or Being-Itself. They report that, although it is beyond the reach of language, it seems enormously or even ultimately meaningful even though, or perhaps because, its meaning is ineffable.
   "Ultimate Sacred Postulates call a halt to the infinite regress that logic by itself cannot terminate.... Ultimate Sacred Postulates are taken to be ageless and do seem, in fact, to persist for long durations. The Shema of the Jews may have endured for 3,000 years; the Nicene Creed has remained unchanged since AD 325.... The Ultimate Sacred Postulates crowning these hierarchies of understanding are devoid of concreteness, low in social specificity, and taken to be eternal, immutable, ultimately efficacious, absolutely authoritative, fundamental rather than contingent or instrumental and, of course, intrinsically sacred.
   "In Sioux thought, and in the thought of other North American Indians, sacred pipes are "dominant" or "key" symbols, having in that respect the significance of the Cross for Christians. There are important differences, of course. The pipe's physical complexity contrasts with the simplicity of the cross, and the way in which the two are used ritually also distinguishes them. The intimacy of pipe, smoker and tobacco is unparalleled in the relationship of Christians to the Cross, but may be approximated in the relationship of Christians to the Eucharist.
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