Where is humanity leaning?
513 religions, ideologies, philosophies and subcultures, each scored on six values and linked by what grew out of what. Count the ideas and the world looks secular and modern. Count the people and it doesn't.
Same world, counted two ways. The ideas sit near the middle. The people sit further toward sacred, revealed, traditional: most of those7.75B people belong to a handful of old religions, and those carry the weight.
The map
↑ universal · sacred · individual
← material · empirical · progressive↓ tribal · material · collectivesacred · revealed · traditional →
Near means similar: dots sit by how alike their six value scores are. Left to right is the biggest divide in the data (55% of all variation); bottom to top is the next (18%). Dot size is followers, where anyone has counted. Drag to move. Pinch, or Ctrl/⌘ + scroll, to zoom. Tap a dot to see what it grew from and fights with.
Every dot is a way of seeing the world: 513 religions, ideologies, philosophies, economic schools, political systems, subcultures and national creeds.
Tap one to see where it came from, what grew out of it, and what it can't sit next to. Or search for one you hold.
- grew out of / into
- a branch of
- often held together
- hard to hold both
Where do you sit?
Move any slider and your nearest worldviews show up here, along with the ones furthest from you.
Six sliders can't hold a person. Match is how close your six answers are to each worldview's six scores, nothing more: two people can land on the same dot for opposite reasons.
Six degrees of belief
Ideas don't appear from nowhere. Every link on this map is a claim: this grew out of that, these two are held together, those two fight. Walk from any worldview to any other and read the argument one step at a time.
- Platonism Philosophy
the real is what does not change, so the world you see is the copy
- grew intoNeoplatonism Philosophy
the conduit by which Greek metaphysics entered Christian, Islamic and Jewish theology alike
- grew intoChristian mysticism Religion
union with God as direct experience; structurally nearer to Sufism than to its own hierarchy
- is a branch ofChristianity Religion
container; population is counted in the branches below, not here
- includesGnosticism Religion
the material world as a mistake and secret knowledge as escape; the losing side that keeps returning
- is often held with · the same claim; this world is a fabrication by a lesser maker; in engineering vocabularySimulation hypothesis Way of knowing
a creation story derived from probability; structurally theistic and held mostly by materialists
Who's actually counted
- Religiously unaffiliated1.89B
- Sunni Islam1.79B
- Hinduism1.16B
- Catholicism1.12B
- Protestantism830M
- Buddhism319M
- Eastern Orthodoxy247M
- Shia Islam199M
- Other religions171M
- Judaism16M
Only 10 of the 513 worldviews have a real head count: the big religions, plus the people who belong to none. The largest single group is no religion at all, about 24% of everyone.
Nobody runs a census of Stoics, preppers or goths, so the people-weighted leaning at the top of this page is really the leaning of these ten. Figures: Pew Research Center, 2025, for the year 2020.
Sources & caveats
This started as doxa, a personal thinking tool I built in July 2026. Every score is an opinion: the six values were drafted partly with a language model and edited by hand, and the links are claims to argue with, not facts. The cultural spheres are a lens, not a verdict on any culture. Head counts: Pew Research Center, How the Global Religious Landscape Changed (2025), for 2020; only those ten carry real numbers, and every other size is a rough guess. Think a score is wrong? Tell me.