A Brief History

This blog was created so that my classmates and I could discuss the topic of religion and how it affects American society. I feel that it is important to have a general understanding of the major religions in American and how they came to be. This post will have a brief summary of the creation of the three most popular religions in America.

The largest religions in American are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These three religions all have a common factor in they all can be traced back to a spiritual ancestry event. Around 2000 BCE an ancient tribe located in Mesopotamia made a realization that their god, Yahweh, was not just a god that looked over their people but looked over all living things. This god, Yahweh, was the one and true god. Eventually Judaism was founded, and the book of the Torah was created. The Torah was a book of law’s, created by god, for the people of earth to follow. Today there are about 15 million Jews in the world, which is about 0.2% of the population. Judaism is divided into three branches. One begins Orthodox, which is seen as the branch that follows Jewish law very closely. The second is Reformed, who have tried to modernize Jewish law. This means adapting dietary laws and worship practices to modern society. The last branch is Conservative. This branch is the opposite of the Reformed branch in that they have rebelled to all modernization of Jewish law.

            About 2,000 years later Christianity was created. The creation of Christianity is interesting because it was created because of a protest against the corruption of Judaism.  Christianity has grown to the single largest religion in the world.  Although Christianity has been divided into multiple branches such as Roman Catholcism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism they all have very similar religious practices.

The funny thing is that Islam was created from a protest against both religions about 600 years later. Islam is interesting because of its incorporation of government only a Muslim government is seen as legitimate. There are two branches of Islam, which are Shi’ite and Sunni. These two braches differ in their religious beliefs and practices very much. Like Christianity, Islam has grown exponentially. Although in modern society these religions may seem very different they actually come from similar beliefs and practices.