ELI5: All religion in this world

There are quite literally hundreds, most of which have at least dozens of variations or denominations...and that isn't counting for syncretized belief systems and extinct religious groups. An overview of all of them would quite literally fill a dictionary-sized book. You really need to pare down your question.

Nevertheless, I'm going to try to group some of the major religions together into certain groups. Note that what I'm going to type is bound to be controversial if only because it's simplified.

The Abrahamic faiths are among the largest in the world, positing a single God who created the world and sends prophets to mankind to reveal the truth of his existence and his will for mankind. People have the free will to associate with good things by obedience to God, or evil by being disobedient. The world will eventually end and all will be judged according to their merits. This includes Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha'i, and Rastafari, but there are significant differences between them (and their denominations) outside of this very vague outline.

The Dharmic faiths focus on the duties people are to perform because of certain aspects of reality. What those duties and aspects are vary wildly, depending on the specific faiths. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism fall into this.

Sikhism is a large religion that focuses on a single God, and focuses on controlling impulses and embodying the virtues in their holy scripts. In addition to self-improvement, there is a drive to reform society in more virtuous ways as well.

In east Asia, there's a collection of different groups that are hard to categorize. Taoism and Confucianism focus on harmony with the universal order and adopting the behaviors and morals that this implies. There are significant differences beyond that point, with an enormous amount of regional variations. It encompasses Taoism and Confuciainism, both of which started more as schools of thought that later blended with local religions.

Then there are indigenous religions and, in some cases, their modern pagan revivals. How big these are how they might be subclassified is well beyond the scope of a post. Some might even argue that they even just contain elements of some religions, and are not fully-fledged religions until themselves ("religion" is, itself, a very difficult word to define). Most of these are local to the region.

After that, I'd classify thing as miscelaneous. Universalism has no creed, and generally accepts all religions as having the ability to lead to meaning. Raelians believe that humans were created by aliens that visited earthy in ancient times. Scientologists think that people are immortal spiritual beings who only suffer and die because they forgot this fact. Theistic Satanism groups worship Satan as a deity, although they often disagree with the Abrahamic faiths about the version of events that led to his downfall; non-Theistic Satanists don't believe in Satan as a real being, but use him as a symbol for freedom, independence, and the right to make your own choices. If Theosophy is considered a religion, it would be about people seeking to attain hidden knowledge of the mysteries of reality and the nature of both the divine and the mundane (Theosophy might be arguably grouped under Universalism...or it might not. It depends on the specific individual). And so on, and so forth. There are hundreds to go through.

As said, this is controversial and oversimplified. I just want you to gain an appreciation of how enormous your question really is.

/r/explainlikeimfive Thread