Odinani, also known as Odinala, Omenala, Odinana, and Omenana, is the traditional cultural belief and practice of the Igbo people of south east Nigeria. These terms, as used here in the Igbo language, are synonymous with the traditional Igbo "religious system" which was not considered separate from the social norms of ancient or traditional Igbo societies. Theocratic in nature, spirituality played a huge role in their everyday lives. Although it has largely been syncretised with Catholicism, the indigenous belief system remains in strong effect among the rural, village and diaspora populations of the Igbo. Odinani can be found in Haitian Voodoo, Obeah, Santeria and even Candomblé. Odinani is a pantheistic and polytheistic faith, having a strong central deity at its head. All things spring from this deity. Although a pantheon of other gods and spirits, these being Ala, Amadiọha, Anyanwụ, Ekwensu, Ikenga, exists in the belief system, as it does in many other Traditional African religions, the lesser deities prevalent in Odinani serve as helpers or elements of Chukwu, the central deity.
Orishas are divine spirits that play a key role in the Yoruba religion of West Africa and several religions of the African diaspora that derive from it, such as Haitian Vaudou, Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican Santería and Brazilian Candomblé. The preferred spelling varies depending on the language in question: òrìṣà is the spelling in the Yoruba language, orixá in Portuguese, and orisha, oricha, orichá or orixá in Spanish-speaking countries.
In Christian theology, divinization, or theopoesis or theosis, is the transforming effect of divine grace, the spirit of God, or the atonement of Christ. Although it literally means to become divine, or to become God, most modern Christian denominations do not interpret the doctrine as implying an overcoming of a fundamental ontological difference between God and humanity; for example, John of the Cross indicated that while "God communicates to it [the individual soul] His supernatural Being, in such wise that it appears to be God Himself, and has all that God Himself has", yet "it is true that its natural being, though thus transformed, is as distinct from the Being of God as it was before".
Apotheosis, also called divinization or deification, is the glorification of a subject to divine levels and, commonly, the treatment of a human being, any other living thing, or an abstract idea in the likeness of a deity.
There are various names of God, many of which enumerate the various qualities of a Supreme Being. The English word god is used by multiple religions as a noun to refer to different deities, or specifically to the Supreme Being, as denoted in English by the capitalized and uncapitalized terms God and god. Ancient cognate equivalents for the biblical Hebrew Elohim, one of the most common names of God in the Bible, include proto-Semitic El, biblical Aramaic Elah, and Arabic ilah. The personal or proper name for God in many of these languages may either be distinguished from such attributes, or homonymic. For example, in Judaism the tetragrammaton is sometimes related to the ancient Hebrew ehyeh. It is connected to the passage in Exodus 3:14 in which God gives his name as אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה, where the verb may be translated most basically as "I am that I am", "I shall be what I shall be", or "I shall be what I am". In the passage, YHWH, the personal name of God, is revealed directly to Moses.
Formal principle and material principle are two categories in Christian theology to identify and distinguish the authoritative source of theology from the theology itself, especially the central doctrine of that theology, of a religion, religious movement, tradition, body, denomination, or organization. A formal principle tends to be texts or revered leaders of the religion, while a material principle is its central teaching. Paul Tillich believed the identification and application of this pair of categories in theological thinking to have originated in the 19th century. As early as 1845 the Protestant theologian and historian Philip Schaff discussed them in his The Principle of Protestantism. They were utilized by the Lutheran scholar F. E. Mayer in his The Religious Bodies of America in order to facilitate a comparative study of the faith and practice of Christian denominations in the United States. This is also treated in a theological pamphlet entitled Gospel and Scripture by the Commission on Theology and Church Relations of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.
Chukwu is the supreme being of Igbo spirituality. In the Igbo pantheon, Chukwu is the source of all other Igbo deities and is responsible for assigning them their different tasks. The Igbo people believe that all things come from Chukwu (Chiukwu), who brings the rain necessary for plants to grow and controls everything on Earth and the spiritual world. They believe Chukwu to be an undefinable omnipotent and omnipresent supreme deity that encompasses everything in space and space itself.
Nature worship, also called naturism or physiolatry, is any of a variety of religious, spiritual and devotional practices that focus on the worship of the nature spirits considered to be behind the natural phenomena visible throughout nature. A nature deity can be in charge of nature, a place, a biotope, the biosphere, the cosmos, or the universe. Nature worship is often considered the primitive source of modern religious beliefs and can be found in pantheism, panentheism, deism, polytheism, animism, Taoism, totemism, Hinduism, shamanism, some theism and paganism including Wicca. Common to most forms of nature worship is a spiritual focus on the individual's connection and influence on some aspects of the natural world and reverence towards it. Due to their admiration of nature, the works of Edmund Spenser, Anthony Ashley-Cooper and Carl Linnaeus were viewed as nature worship.
Binitarianism is a Christian theology of two persons, personas, or aspects in one substance/Divinity. Classically, binitarianism is understood as a form of monotheism—that is, that God is absolutely one being—and yet with binitarianism there is a "twoness" in God, which means one God family. The other common forms of monotheism are "unitarianism", a belief in one God with one person, and "trinitarianism", a belief in one God with three persons.
The beliefs and practices of African people are highly diverse, and include various ethnic religions. Generally, these traditions are oral rather than scriptural and are passed down from one generation to another through narratives, songs, and festivals. They include beliefs in spirits and higher and lower gods, sometimes including a supreme being, as well as the veneration of the dead, use of magic, and traditional African medicine. Most religions can be described as animistic with various polytheistic and pantheistic aspects. The role of humanity is generally seen as one of harmonizing nature with the supernatural.
The Baháʼí conception of God is of an "unknowable essence" who is the source of all existence and known through the perception of human virtues. The Baháʼí Faith follows the tradition of monotheism and dispensationalism, believing that God has no physical form, but periodically provides divine messengers in human form that are the sources of spiritual education. In another sense, Baháʼí teachings on God are also panentheistic, seeing signs of God in all things, but the reality of God being exalted and above the physical world.
The Kingdom of Nri was a medieval polity located in what is now Nigeria. The kingdom existed as a sphere of religious and political influence over a significant part of what is known today as Igboland prior to expansion, and was administered by a priest-king called an Eze Nri. The Eze Nri managed trade and diplomacy on behalf of the Nri people, a subgroup of the Igbo-speaking people, and possessed divine authority in religious matters.
Christianity is the largest religion in Ghana, with 71.3% of the population belonging to various Christian denominations as of 2021 census. Islam is practised by 19.9% of the total population. According to a report by the Pew Research, 51% of Muslims are followers of Sunni Islam, while approximately 16% belong to the Ahmadiyya movement and around 8% identify with Shia Islam, while the remainder are non-denominational Muslims.
The Igbo calendar is the traditional calendar system of the Igbo people from present-day Nigeria. The calendar has 13 months in a year (Afọ), 7 weeks in a month (Ọnwa), and 4 days of Igbo market days in a week (Izu) plus an extra day at the end of the year, in the last month. The name of these months was reported by Onwuejeogwu (1981).
God-Building is an idea proposed by some prominent early Marxists in the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Inspired by Auguste Comte's Religion of Humanity, the concept had some precedent in the French Revolution with the Cult of Reason. The idea proposed that in place of the abolition of religion, there should be a meta-religious context in which religions were viewed primarily in terms of the psychological and social effect of ritual, myth, and symbolism, and which attempted to harness this force for pro-communist aims, both by creating new ritual and symbolism, and by re-interpreting existing ritual and symbolism in a socialist context. In contrast to Leninist atheism, the God-Builders took an official position of agnosticism.
The ofo is a staff carried by selected Igbo leaders — notably patrilineage priests, kings, onyishi, and some masqueraders — that signifies authority, the right to command, administrative powers, and/or the conferment of leadership and power bestowed by the gods..It is typically six to seven inches long and made of bronze, brass, or wood.
The doctrines and practices of modern Pentecostalism placed a high priority on international evangelization. The movement spread to Africa soon after the 1906 Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles.
Kalu Onu Kama Onyioha, commonly referred to as K.O.K. Onyioha was the supreme Spiritual leader and founder of Godianism, religion also known as Chiism.
Chrislam refers to a Christian expression of Islam, originating as an assemblage of Islamic and Christian religious practices in Nigeria; in particular, the series of religious movements that merged Muslim and Christian religious practice during the 1970s in Lagos, Nigeria. The movement was pioneered by the Yoruba people in south-west Nigeria. Chrislam works against the conventional understanding of Islam and Christianity as two separate and exclusive religions, seeking out commonalities between both religions and promoting an inclusive union of the two. Chrislam also occupies a distinct geographical space; Nigeria is often understood to be geographically and religiously polarized, with a predominantly Muslim North, and a predominantly Christian South.
The Twenty-two vows or twenty-two pledges are the 22 Buddhist vows administered by B. R. Ambedkar, the revivalist of Buddhism in India, to his followers. On converting to Buddhism, Ambedkar made 22 vows, and asked his 400,000 supporters to do the same. After receiving lay ordination, Ambedkar gave dhamma diksha to his followers. This ceremony organised on 14 October 1956 in Nagpur included 22 vows administered to all new converts after Three Jewels and Five Precepts. On 16 October 1956, Ambedkar performed another mass religious conversion ceremony at Chandrapur.
