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[MetalSlimeHunt]

I think it's a culture thing, and something in Monotheism just doesn't agree with atheism in nature.

The part of monotheism that doesn't agree with atheism is theism.

[counting]

I think it's a culture thing, and something in Monotheism just doesn't agree with atheism in nature.

The part of monotheism that doesn't agree with atheism is theism.

One other thing bothers me, that different religions Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism seems to merged in our society in the Far East, and in the West part of the old worlds. A single Abrahamic religion divided into more an more religions. The thing happens in India subcontinent is the strangest, they first divided in to many (including Buddhism), and later merged again. It's like a spectrum of light with extreme on both ends.

In my assumption, it's very likely due to political/culture power maps and regions. Far East tends to merge into 1 super power. And in another end in the west, kingdoms divided into chaos when religions divided as well, and in India, it's divided before it's unified again. It all fits very well. An emerge and unified superpower in the New World also gave birth to a also unified (majority) religion. The pieces all fit together, I just don't know if it's religions affect political/culture/sociology systems or the other way around, or they effect each other and create a positive feedback loop. (negative feedback loop, when divided) 

[nil]

I think it's a culture thing, and something in Monotheism just doesn't agree with atheism in nature.

The part of monotheism that doesn't agree with atheism is theism.

One other thing bothers me, that different religions Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism seems to merged in our society in the Far East, and in the West part of the old worlds. A single Abrahamic religion divided into more an more religions. The thing happens in India subcontinent is the strangest, they first divided in to many (including Buddhism), and later merged again. It's like a spectrum of light with extreme on both ends.

In my assumption, it's very likely due to political/culture power maps and regions. Far East tends to merge into 1 super power. And in another end in the west, kingdoms divided into chaos when religions divided as well, and in India, it's divided before it's unified again. It all fits very well. An emerge and unified superpower in the New World also gave birth to a also unified (majority) religion. The pieces all fit together, I just don't know if it's religions affect political/culture/sociology systems or the other way around, or they effect each other and create a positive feedback loop. (negative feedback loop, when divided)

A lot of people think his work is overly simplistic, but Jared Diamond said the initial cause of this dynamic was geography.  In contrast to China/East Asia's large, mostly undivided stretches of territory, Europe is split into a number of little pieces by the Alps and the various bays and channels, which in turn encouraged a relatively fractured, heterogeneous civilization.

[Bohandas]

I like the Church of the SubGenius' take on religion. Their mythology is supposed to be false, so therefore if it isn't true then it is, and if it is true then it isn't.

[Bohandas]

I think it's a culture thing, and something in Monotheism just doesn't agree with atheism in nature.

The part of monotheism that doesn't agree with atheism is theism.

One other thing bothers me, that different religions Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism seems to merged in our society in the Far East, and in the West part of the old worlds. A single Abrahamic religion divided into more an more religions. The thing happens in India subcontinent is the strangest, they first divided in to many (including Buddhism), and later merged again. It's like a spectrum of light with extreme on both ends.

Two minor things:

1.) You left Shintoism out of the list of merged asian religions.

2.) There are a few syncretic western faiths, such as Voodoo and Santeria (which combine elements from Christianity with elements from African tribal religions).

[RedKing]

I think it's a culture thing, and something in Monotheism just doesn't agree with atheism in nature.

The part of monotheism that doesn't agree with atheism is theism.

One other thing bothers me, that different religions Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism seems to merged in our society in the Far East, and in the West part of the old worlds. A single Abrahamic religion divided into more an more religions. The thing happens in India subcontinent is the strangest, they first divided in to many (including Buddhism), and later merged again. It's like a spectrum of light with extreme on both ends.

In my assumption, it's very likely due to political/culture power maps and regions. Far East tends to merge into 1 super power. And in another end in the west, kingdoms divided into chaos when religions divided as well, and in India, it's divided before it's unified again. It all fits very well. An emerge and unified superpower in the New World also gave birth to a also unified (majority) religion. The pieces all fit together, I just don't know if it's religions affect political/culture/sociology systems or the other way around, or they effect each other and create a positive feedback loop. (negative feedback loop, when divided)

Uhh, no. Just no. The history of religion (and politics for that matter) in Asia is entirely more complex than your characterization suggests. There's no "merger" of religions in China (or Japan or Korea or India). You have what might be better termed "utilitarian coexistence". You have people who might pray at a Confucian shrine before a big exam, get married in a Buddhist temple, and have a Taoist temple handle their funeral. Because you don't have a lot of strong adherency to any one dogma for most people there. Buddhism has been a state religion under some dynasties, and severely repressed under others. And even within Buddhism, there are dozens upon dozens of denominations. Taoism has numerous schools and lineages as well.

Korea is far more homogenously Buddhist, with some Confucian influences. Taoism never really caught on there.

Japan has primarily a mix of Mahayana Buddhist and Shinto, although Shinto has become a hot potato because it's one of the few religions in the world that has a nationalistic component to it. While Japan seems homogenous, it's only until you look at the distinctions between different branches of Buddhism (Pure Land, Zen/Ch'an, Shingon, Tendai, Nichiren, etc.)

India has had the Vedic traditions for thousands of years. Buddhism can be thought of as an attempt to "reform" Hinduism, and one that mostly failed within India itself. With the Mughal conquests, a large swath of northern India was converted to Islam. You also have the rise of the Sikhs in Punjab in the 15th century. Add to that some local animist religions (especially in eastern India) and pockets of Christian conversion (especially along the SW coast), and India is a polyglot. For that matter, India's pretty much always been massively divided by language, by geography, by religion, by perceived ethnicity, etc.

[counting]

Two minor things:

1.) You left Shintoism out of the list of merged asian religions.

Japan is mostly isolated in geological or political for most of time in history.

And I am not familiar with any African of New World religions. Anyone?

[Onlyhestands]

Well from my fading knowledge of a college class on African history. I feel fairly confident on this, but take it with a grain of salt.
1. Christianity used to be very strong in North Africa before the Muslim conquests, especially in Egypt. There had been many Jews in Egypt who were more prone to converting to Christianity, but Christianity also appealed to many of the peasants and farmers in the area. Many early influential Christians came from North Africa, forming their own ideas, sects, and even sending Missionaries up into Europe. Coptic Christianity still survives in Egypt, and is probably the biggest Christian segment in N. Africa. Early Islam was seen by many as another form of Christianity. Christians gradually converted for tax breaks (non-muslims had heavier taxes), or due to change in belief. Conversions in 95% of cases were peaceful and unforced, but of course Christian Europeans liked and propagated the idea that it was due to being forced.
2. As Ethiopia held off Muslim invaders well, Christianity survived there and evolved somewhat differently from European Christianity due to lack of contact.
3. Islam penetrated pretty far down into Africa, throughout the Sahara, and into the Savannah. At first African Kings, such as in Mali would convert to please Muslim nations and traders. Eventually Islamic belief spread, but was heavily influenced and mixed with native beliefs such as Animism. If you read the epic of Sundiata you will see Islamic beliefs mixed with Animist ideas like magic, and dijins.
4. Christianity too that was brought by Europeans to Sub-Saharan Africa was influenced heavily by native religions.
5. Native beliefs still survive in many areas. This is often broadly categorized as Animism, which includes things like spirit worship, ancestor worship, belief in animals having certain "greater qualities". This is very broad, and Africa is a very big place.
6. I forgot to mention pre-Christian beleifs in North Afirica.  There were different polytheistic religions, such as Egypt's pantheon, and Phonecian traders/settlers brought their religion, as well as Animism or others. These pantheons had many similarities/influences of Greek polytheism. Early Greeks and Egyptians had lots of contact, and similar beliefs. The Macedonian conquest strengthened Greek-Egyptian cultural ties.

Hopefully someone more educated than me on the matter can correct my mistakes here.

[counting]

Uhh, no. Just no. The history of religion (and politics for that matter) in Asia is entirely more complex than your characterization suggests. ...

Korea ...

Japan has primarily a mix of Mahayana Buddhist and Shinto, ...

India has had the Vedic traditions for thousands of years. Buddhism can be ... ethnicity, etc.

So people here start to discuss about other religions finally.

From my perspective, I assume all religious believes are subjective views of a certain category ideas/believes, hence everyone has one's own 'sub-religion'. Like all creatures are different, since there are so many possibilities of combinations of believes and ideas can exist. So if you group people together by similarity in common believes and ideas, you get bigger and bigger mother groups which share less and less common traits, until there are just few groups left and each defined by some few significant common ideologies.

On the other hands, you can also trace the origin of someone's believes through time, and find out where is certain ideologies originated from. And if possible, you may trace them back to certain ancient groups of people who started these common trade of ideologies (religion founders and their followers). And one can measure the similarities of traits between the existing mother groups and the traits with those historical ones. Thus we can truly calculate how much influence each current religious groups affects each other, and how many traits stay true to the origins. But I believed it will be a difficult subject, since the history of religion are often clouded, and measuring and defining certain ideas within people's heads may prove difficult. (meme? I still very confused about how to define a meme.) Maybe if this method can be done in some ways, can we truly objectively discuss what's the difference of each religion. And why they spread so unevenly.

I thought religions are like creatures competing the space of limited resources - human brains (Very Dawkins thoughts). And a dense populated area like China, India, will be good breading grounds for them. Will they eating and merging with each others? Or eliminated other competitors by killing the host? Or removing the old ones placing with new ones (conversion)?

About the diversities, I think the population of japan, Korea, are relatively few compare to the whole population of East Asia. And the diversity in these fracture lands and their diversity in religions, exactly proving my points rather than disproving it. And the phenomena like people practicing these fundamentally different religions (Buddhism/Taoism/Confucianism) with mashup style in their life, should also mean in the mind of general populations they are not seen as separated ideologies but rather integrated. Many temples (truly for general populations than the ones for monks/nuns) in China and their offshoots (Taoists seems more acceptable to other believes), you can see Confucian Figures (Mostly historical figures and later viewed as Deities), siting on the side of Taoist Deities (Many many of them, mostly fictional), along with statues of Buddha, but mostly Bodhisattvas, and Vajra. So people can pray to all of them without traveling long distance to different temples. Isn't that the definition of merges in believes? You don't see a church who prey to Allah, or a Mosque decorated with saints and angels, or a Judaist prays to Jesus. They don't mashup like we do in the Far East. That's what I thought it's because the nature of monotheism causing this, or is it the culture difference? Or is it political? I don't know. And my assumptions are fairly rudimentary. But if there is a trend, then why? Can we study them? (I still confused with India, they are between the boarders of monotheism, but majority are Hindu over 80%. That's a lot unity than difference.)

[counting]

Well from my fading knowledge of a college class on African history. I feel fairly confident on this, but take it with a grain of salt.
1. Christianity used to be very strong in North Africa before the Muslim conquests, especially in Egypt. There had been many Jews in Egypt who were more prone to converting to Christianity, but Christianity also appealed to many of the peasants and farmers in the area. Many early influential Christians came from North Africa, forming their own ideas, sects, and even sending Missionaries up into Europe. Coptic Christianity still survives in Egypt, and is probably the biggest Christian segment in N. Africa. Early Islam was seen by many as another form of Christianity. Christians gradually converted for tax breaks (non-muslims had heavier taxes), or due to change in belief. Conversions in 95% of cases were peaceful and unforced, but of course Christian Europeans liked and propagated the idea that it was due to being forced.
2. As Ethiopia held off Muslim invaders well, Christianity survived there and evolved somewhat differently from European Christianity due to lack of contact.
3. Islam penetrated pretty far down into Africa, throughout the Sahara, and into the Savannah. At first African Kings, such as in Mali would convert to please Muslim nations and traders. Eventually Islamic belief spread, but was heavily influenced and mixed with native beliefs such as Animism. If you read the epic of Sundiata you will see Islamic beliefs mixed with Animist ideas like magic, and dijins.
4. Christianity too that was brought by Europeans to Sub-Saharan Africa was influenced heavily by native religions.
5. Native beliefs still survive in many areas. This is often broadly categorized as Animism, which includes things like spirit worship, ancestor worship, belief in animals having certain "greater qualities". This is very broad, and Africa is a very big place.
6. I forgot to mention pre-Christian beleifs in North Afirica.  There were different polytheistic religions, such as Egypt's pantheon, and Phonecian traders/settlers brought their religion, as well as Animism or others. These pantheons had many similarities/influences of Greek polytheism. Early Greeks and Egyptians had lots of contact, and similar beliefs. The Macedonian conquest strengthened Greek-Egyptian cultural ties.

Hopefully someone more educated than me on the matter can correct my mistakes here.

If they indeed correct, religions are like parasitic micro-organism indeed. They evade the hosts, competing territories, evolved under isolation, and eating absorbing materials from existing ones.   

[Bohandas]

Two minor things:

1.) You left Shintoism out of the list of merged asian religions.

Japan is mostly isolated in geological or political for most of time in history.

Yeah. I get that Shinto never really caught on outside of Japan. But within the borders of Japan those other asian religions that merged with each other were in turn incorporated into Shinto.

[Bohandas]

I think it's a culture thing, and something in Monotheism just doesn't agree with atheism in nature.

The part of monotheism that doesn't agree with atheism is theism.

One other thing bothers me, that different religions Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism seems to merged in our society in the Far East, and in the West part of the old worlds. A single Abrahamic religion divided into more an more religions. The thing happens in India subcontinent is the strangest, they first divided in to many (including Buddhism), and later merged again. It's like a spectrum of light with extreme on both ends.

In my assumption, it's very likely due to political/culture power maps and regions. Far East tends to merge into 1 super power. And in another end in the west, kingdoms divided into chaos when religions divided as well, and in India, it's divided before it's unified again. It all fits very well. An emerge and unified superpower in the New World also gave birth to a also unified (majority) religion. The pieces all fit together, I just don't know if it's religions affect political/culture/sociology systems or the other way around, or they effect each other and create a positive feedback loop. (negative feedback loop, when divided)

Its probably also due to the fact that the major modern religions of the west are all monotheistic. Whereas, of the major religions in asia, Hinduism is polytheistic, Buddhism's stance on deities varies heavily between denominations (IIRC, the stance of most denominations puts religious figures such as Gotama Buddha and Avalokiteśvara in a role loosely equivalent to Catholic saints, but with the guiding principle behind their actions being the ideals of enlightenment and tranquility rather than a personified deity), Taoism seems to be more concerned with the guiding principles behind the cosmos and the meaning of life (combined with a secondary theme of how to live effectively yet without being a controlling douchebag) than with any deity that may have established or been established by this principle or with mortal or formerly mortal religious figures (to the point where the name of Taoism's most famous and influential religious philosopher has actually been lost to history (he is now known only by the honorific Lao Tzu ("the old master"))).

[Virex]

Well from my fading knowledge of a college class on African history. I feel fairly confident on this, but take it with a grain of salt.
1. Christianity used to be very strong in North Africa before the Muslim conquests, especially in Egypt. There had been many Jews in Egypt who were more prone to converting to Christianity, but Christianity also appealed to many of the peasants and farmers in the area. Many early influential Christians came from North Africa, forming their own ideas, sects, and even sending Missionaries up into Europe. Coptic Christianity still survives in Egypt, and is probably the biggest Christian segment in N. Africa. Early Islam was seen by many as another form of Christianity. Christians gradually converted for tax breaks (non-muslims had heavier taxes), or due to change in belief. Conversions in 95% of cases were peaceful and unforced, but of course Christian Europeans liked and propagated the idea that it was due to being forced.
2. As Ethiopia held off Muslim invaders well, Christianity survived there and evolved somewhat differently from European Christianity due to lack of contact.
3. Islam penetrated pretty far down into Africa, throughout the Sahara, and into the Savannah. At first African Kings, such as in Mali would convert to please Muslim nations and traders. Eventually Islamic belief spread, but was heavily influenced and mixed with native beliefs such as Animism. If you read the epic of Sundiata you will see Islamic beliefs mixed with Animist ideas like magic, and dijins.
4. Christianity too that was brought by Europeans to Sub-Saharan Africa was influenced heavily by native religions.
5. Native beliefs still survive in many areas. This is often broadly categorized as Animism, which includes things like spirit worship, ancestor worship, belief in animals having certain "greater qualities". This is very broad, and Africa is a very big place.
6. I forgot to mention pre-Christian beleifs in North Afirica.  There were different polytheistic religions, such as Egypt's pantheon, and Phonecian traders/settlers brought their religion, as well as Animism or others. These pantheons had many similarities/influences of Greek polytheism. Early Greeks and Egyptians had lots of contact, and similar beliefs. The Macedonian conquest strengthened Greek-Egyptian cultural ties.

Hopefully someone more educated than me on the matter can correct my mistakes here.

To make things a bunch more complicated, saying a region was Islamic only means that the leaders were Muslims, since for the better part of history, the Islamic world had little qualms with other religions within their borders (at least with the Abramic religions, excluding Jazidi because of the similarities between their God and the Islamic version of Satan). It's not that there was never oppression, but it was easily possible for the same town to have Islamic, Christian and Jewish communities living side by side (though segregated). As a result, an Islamic region could well have an Islamic minority, especialy with the middle east having a whole load of different religions.

[counting]

Two minor things:

1.) You left Shintoism out of the list of merged asian religions.

Japan is mostly isolated in geological or political for most of time in history.

Yeah. I get that Shinto never really caught on outside of Japan. But within the borders of Japan those other asian religions that merged with each other were in turn incorporated into Shinto.

Everywhere the Buddhist go, it's like a magnets, attaching whatever local cultures and believes outside. But with monotheist views, I wouldn't know much about it. But I do know, one of my family member is a Christan while also participate our traditional festival activities, mostly defined by traditional folk religions.   

[counting]

I think it's a culture thing, and something in Monotheism just doesn't agree with atheism in nature.

The part of monotheism that doesn't agree with atheism is theism.

One other thing bothers me, that different religions Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism seems to merged in our society in the Far East, and in the West part of the old worlds. A single Abrahamic religion divided into more an more religions. The thing happens in India subcontinent is the strangest, they first divided in to many (including Buddhism), and later merged again. It's like a spectrum of light with extreme on both ends.

In my assumption, it's very likely due to political/culture power maps and regions. Far East tends to merge into 1 super power. And in another end in the west, kingdoms divided into chaos when religions divided as well, and in India, it's divided before it's unified again. It all fits very well. An emerge and unified superpower in the New World also gave birth to a also unified (majority) religion. The pieces all fit together, I just don't know if it's religions affect political/culture/sociology systems or the other way around, or they effect each other and create a positive feedback loop. (negative feedback loop, when divided)

Its probably also due to the fact that the major modern religions of the west are all monotheistic. Whereas, of the major religions in asia, Hinduism is polytheistic, Buddhism's stance on deities varies heavily between denominations (IIRC, the stance of most denominations puts religious figures such as Gotama Buddha and Avalokiteśvara in a role loosely equivalent to Catholic saints, but with the guiding principle behind their actions being the ideals of enlightenment and tranquility rather than a personified deity), Taoism seems to be more concerned with the guiding principles behind the cosmos and the meaning of life (combined with a secondary theme of how to live effectively yet without being a controlling douchebag) than with any deity that may have established or been established by this principle or with mortal or formerly mortal religious figures (to the point where the name of Taoism's most famous and influential religious philosopher has actually been lost to history (he is now known only by the honorific Lao Tzu ("the old master"))).

They are all common knowledge in Far East society, especially in China, and its neighboring country. It's good to have someone who can explain them to Westerners. Good jobs. But you left Confucianism, but its status as religion is questionable.