Whose god is their belly. Jabez teaches us to pray in a self-centered way that God will “bless me . I will leave this question with the words from Philippians 4 vs. Graham Oppy classifies as innocents those who never considered the question because they lack any understanding of what a god is, for example one-month-old babies. In our day, a money system which the Bible describes as “abominable” complicates our understanding of wealth. This tradition worked for centuries in the forest zone including the present day, where there are vibrant Muslim minority communities. The history of Islam in Samoa dates back to before 1985, when Samoa had a number of Muslim workers who were working either for the government or for a United Nations program, but their number was small and hardly affected the local population. Over 20% (a total of 43) of the countries in the world have a state religion, most of them (27) being Muslim countries. Unlike a theocracy, this maintains the superiority of the state over the religious authorities. The number of Samoans who reported as non religious at the 2021 census was only 132, or 0.06% of the population.

Groups together constituting less than 5 percent of the population include Baháʼí, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Congregational Church of Jesus, Nazarene, nondenominational Protestant, Baptist, Worship Centre, Peace Chapel, Samoa Evangelism, Elim Church, and Anglican. The following is a distribution of Christian groups as of 2021 (the most recent census available): Congregational Christian (27 percent), Roman Catholic (18 percent), The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (17.6 percent), Methodist (11.8 percent), Assemblies of God (10.1 percent) and Seventh-day Adventist (4.9 percent). Traditionally, villages tended to have one primary Christian church. Various political doctrines have been directly influenced or inspired by religions. Beyond universalist ideologies, religions have also been involved in nationalist politics. There are many Russian converts, and the newer schools have been often criticised by representatives of the Gelug as the result of a Russianised (Rossiysky) Buddhism and of Western Buddhist missionaries. Later Buddhist philosophers also extensively criticized the idea of an eternal creator deity concerned with humanity. Visitors at Ustuu-Huree, a Tuvan Buddhist monastery in Chadan.

Sufi saints shaped the development of popular Islam, just as bhakti saints shaped religious belief and practice among those we now call by the general term “Hindu.” Like bhakti poets, Sufis (many of them poets as well) spoke of their direct experience of god and the need to get beyond just formal religious observance to a true and immediate religious engagement. The constitution and other laws and policies protect religious freedom. Religious political issues may involve, but are not limited to, those concerning freedom of religion, applications of religious law, and the right to religious education. The sick is healed, the hopeless receives courage, the brokenhearted experiences joy and those who were in bondage receive freedom. Cortés sailed to South America from Cuba under the Spanish flag, but against the protests of the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, who wanted to put someone else in charge of the expedition. A theocracy is “government by divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided”. In 1966, Elliott was a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma when he spotted a life-changing announcement on a bulletin board: “NASA Hiring Today.” He became the first Native American to work for NASA, joining the Gemini program as a guidance engineer.

Yazidism is practised by a minority that established itself in Russia already during the Russo-Turkish wars and especially during the First World War, though their number has grown in the 2010s with new immigrants from Iraq fleeing anti-Yazidi persecution by Muslims. Her wild and ultimately tragic life story is the subject of a new Starz series called “Gaslit” starring Julia Roberts as Martha with Sean Penn playing her disloyal husband, John, the first and only U.S. This number has increased to 61 Muslims, or 0.04% of the population, according to the 2006 census. Hinduism in Russia was practised by 140,000 people, or 0.1% of the total population, in 2012. It constituted 2% of the population in the Altai Republic, 0.5% in Samara Oblast, 0.4% in Khakassia, Kalmykia, Bryansk Oblast, Kamchatka, Kurgan Oblast, Tyumen Oblast, Chelyabinsk Oblast, 0.3% in Sverdlovsk Oblast, 0.2% to 0.3% in Yamalia, Krasnodar Krai, Stavropol Krai, Rostov Oblast, Sakhalin Oblast, and 0.1% to 0.2% in other federal subjects.