My Eightfold path to waffles

                Today in Human Geography we continued the culture unit by starting a PowerPoint on world religions. Of course, the first religion we covered was Christianity. I had no idea there were so many denominations for Christians! I did know all the names presented, but I had never really thought about how many there were until I saw the list. The second religion was Islam. The two main denominations of Islam are the Sunnis and the Shiites. The Sunnis outweigh the Shiites in about a 3:1 ratio, and in the Middle East they actually bomb each other and fight against each other because of their religion. You usually don’t hear about this because you don’t generally get news about stuff like this unless it affects you in some way. There are a lot of contradictions in the religion, and it has a lot of tradition involved that affects how their society works (the role of women for example). Their main basis of teaching is the Five Pillars, being testimony, prayer, alms-giving, fasting, and surprisingly, pilgrimage. The third religion we covered was Hinduism. Mostly all Hindus live in India (for whatever reason, I’m not sure). Hindu teaching consists of thousands of short verses meant to be memorized and sung, and all composed in a book called the Vedas. Hinduism isn’t really a religion, it’s actually more like a set of principles or philosophies to follow. The next religion was Buddhism, with the largest stretch of possible numbers on the list. Buddhism is similar in the formatting to Buddhism, in the ways that it is very philosophical. However, Buddhism is more strict and more like a religion than Hinduism. Buddhism has its own set of rules called the Eightfold path. These eight principles tell you how to have a better life. Buddhism has a large area in Asia, being concentrated in China, Japan, southeast Asia, and Nepal.