Religion & Belief
Faiths, calendars, customs and where they came from.
Born Shinto, married Christian, buried Buddhist
Japan has more religious adherents than people. Most of the population is counted as both Shinto and Buddhist, yet most say they have no personal faith.
Jesus was probably born “Before Christ”
The AD system was invented in 525 by a monk who got the date slightly wrong. Most historians place Jesus’s birth around 6–4 BC.
One of the oldest faiths, and Freddie Mercury’s
Zoroastrianism was once the state religion of Persian empires. Today it has perhaps 100,000–200,000 followers, among them the Parsi community into which Freddie Mercury was born.
The “Laughing Buddha” isn’t the Buddha
The cheerful, round-bellied figure in restaurants and gift shops is Budai, a Chinese monk from about a thousand years ago, not Siddhartha Gautama.
The devil’s interval was never banned
The tritone is said to have been outlawed by the medieval Church as ‘the devil in music’. The phrase is real, but the ban looks like a story that grew in the retelling.
The temple kitchen that feeds tens of thousands every day, free
At the Golden Temple in Amritsar, anyone, of any religion, can sit on the floor and eat a free meal, cooked and served mostly by volunteers.
Why Christmas is on 25 December
The Bible never gives a date for Jesus’s birth. Historians have two main explanations for 25 December, and many Orthodox Christians celebrate on 7 January.
Why Ramadan moves about 11 days earlier every year
The Islamic calendar follows the moon, not the sun, so Ramadan travels through every season in about 33 years.