1. Discuss the questions preceding the text.

2. Select the correct ending to the following statements and explain what areas or countries the other choices are true of.

1. The religion in Japan is …

   1. Buddhism

   2. Islam

   3. Shintoism

2. The holy book of Muslims is …

   1. the Bible

   2. the Koran

   3. the Vedas

3. Islam came into being … Christianity.

   1. before

   2. after

   3. at the same time with

4. Of religious in practice today the oldest is …

   1. Christianity

   2. Islam

   3. Judaism

5. There is no prophet-like figure in …

   1. Islam

   2. Buddhism

   3. Hinduism

6. A religion that directs itself to the purification of life and consciousness, not to the worship of a God figure is …

   1. Buddhism

   2. Judaism

   3. Islam

3. D evelop the following ideas and let your classmates add to what you can say.

   1. The predominant religions are …, they are practiced in …

   2. Religion teaches about … and prescribes …

   3. The holy books are …

   4. The founder of Christianity is …

   5. God is believed to deliver a religious message to …

   6. A major religion that unlike others does not have an organizational hierarchy is…

   7. Basic elements of a religion are …

Text 2.

1. Work in groups. Choose a religion you are interested in and read the information below. Read the description of a religion in order to find out more about it and answer the following questions.

   • What are believers called?

   • What do they believe?

   • What is the name of a holy place?

   • What special customs or traditions are there?

1. Christianity

C hristianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as presented in the New Testament writings of his early followers. It is the world's largest religion, with an estimated 2.1 billion adherents, or about one-third of the total world population. It shares with Judaism the Hebrew Scriptures (called the Old Testament by Christians), and is sometimes called an Abrahamic religion, along with Judaism and Islam.

Christianity encompasses numerous religious traditions that widely vary by culture and place, as well as many diverse beliefs and sects. Since the Reformation, Christianity is usually represented as being divided into three main branches:

1. Catholicism, or the Roman Catholic Church (including Eastern Catholics)--the largest coherent group, with over one billion baptized members;

2. Eastern Christianity (includes the Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Oriental Orthodox Churches and the Assyrian Church of the East) -- networks of bishops and patriarchs in communion with one another, with over two hundred million baptized members;

3. Protestantism (including Anglicanism, Reformed, Lutheran, Methodist, Anabaptist, Evangelicalism, Charismatics and Pentecostalism)--numerous denominations and schools of thought, with just over five hundred million members altogether.

This leaves 158 million Independents (unaffiliated with the major streams of Christianity), as well as 31.7 million belonging to other groups with less clear status (including Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons).

These broad divisions are not equally uniform. On the contrary, some branches encompass vast disagreements, and in other cases the division overlooks existing sympathies. But this is the convenient standard overview of distinctions, especially as Christianity has been viewed in the Western world.

Christians have always viewed Christianity as the fulfillment and successor of Judaism, and Christianity carried forward much of the doctrine and many of the practices from the Hebrew faith, including a form of monotheism, the belief in a Messiah or "anointed one"—Christ from the Greek Christós (Χριστος)—spoken of in prophecies, many moral precepts, certain forms of worship (such as prayer, and reading from sacred texts), a priesthood (although most Protestants assert the "priesthood of all believers" is the only valid priesthood today), and the idea that worship on Earth is modeled on worship in Heaven.

The central belief of Christianity is that by faith in the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus, individuals are saved from death – both spiritual and physical – by redemption from their sins (i.e., faults, misdeeds, disobedience, rebellion against God, "spiritual illness", the latter especially in Eastern Christianity). Through God's grace, by faith and repentance, men and women are reconciled to God through forgiveness and by sanctification or theosis to, after death, find their place with God in Heaven, and, at the end of time, to be resurrected from the dead, to die no more.

Crucial beliefs in Christian teaching are Jesus' incarnation, atonement, crucifixion, and resurrection from the dead to redeem humankind from sin and death; and the belief that the New Testament is a part of the Bible. Many Christians today (and traditionally even more) also hold to supersessionism, the belief that Christianity is the fulfillment of Biblical Judaism.

The emphasis on God the Father giving his son, or the Son (who is God) becoming incarnate for the sake of humanity, is an essential difference between Christianity and most other religions, where the emphasis is instead placed solely on humans working for salvation.