Religious Traditions Religion has played an essential role in the history of mankind. Throughout history many religious traditions have emerged -- some of them have disappeared -- and there are myriad of differences among religious traditions today. While people profess many religions, each religion then has a great deal of diversity within itself, and within each sect or religious movement (be they within Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, or any other

American Religious History Defining fundamentalism and liberalism in Christianity is hardly an exact science, especially because prior to about 1920 there was not even a term for fundamentalism as it exists today. While present-day fundamentalists often claim descent from the Puritans and Calvinists of the 17th and 18th Centuries, Puritans were not really fundamentalists in the modern sense. They were not in conflict with 20th Century-style liberals and supporters of evolution

boundaries between religion and science have always been thin, in spite of the triumph of reason in modern societies. For example, science is frequently called upon to aid those in times of need, from offering miraculous organ transplants to the terminally ill to engineering new homes and communities for those whose lives have been devastated by natural disasters. On the other hand, religion and religious ideals help guide the

This work provided an intensive discussion historical forces that were to lead to modern humanism but also succeeds in placing these aspects into the context of the larger social, historical and political milieu. . Online sources and databases proved to be a valid and often insightful recourse area for this topic. Of particular note is a concise and well-written article by Stephen Weldon entitled Secular Humanism in the United States.

7). Still, it seems safe from the seat of scholarship to condemn such exclusive and condemnatory practices as decidedly un-Christian; the oft-quoted (or at least oft-referenced) Biblical passage from John seems to be one of the more direct and unequivocal statements regarding who will be saved: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but

For a Catholic salvation without God or Christ is unthinkable. Admittedly, this is a comparison of two outwardly very different religious structures and cultures but it serves to illustrate the fact that important differences do occur and this can also be applied to other more homogenous religious groupings. While one may add dozens of similar examples of fundamental differences between religions, at the risk of over-simplification one could also assert