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World Religions: Western Traditions: Chapter 1

Instructions: For each question, click on the radio button beside your answer. When you have completed the entire quiz, click the 'Submit my answers' button at the bottom of the page to receive your results.

Question 1:


a) A cosmos divided into heaven, earth, and underworld
b) Blood sacrifice
c) Powerful spirits that interact with the human world
d) A human soul that survives bodily death

Question 2:


a) holy
b) spiritual
c) relating to deities
d) set apart

Question 3:


a) The physical postures of bodies in tombs
b) The location of tombs relative to sacred sites
c) The use of preservations techniques (such as mummification)
d) The presence of rare or valuable ‘grave goods’ in tombs

Question 4:


a) offer sacrifices to the High God
b) prepare herbal medicines and remedies
c) serve as an intermediary between the spiritual and human realms
d) foretell the future and provide moral guidance

Question 5:


a) The composition of the earliest religious texts, with a pronounced focus on the rituals described therein
b) A focus on the regularity of the cosmos, which led to the development of various calendar-based rituals
c) The formation of associations between animals and particular deities
d) Burial of the dead in hilltop tombs (or, when necessary, constructing artificial ‘hills’ for this purpose)

Question 6:


a) A visionary ritual that provides a glimpse of the underworld
b) A deity that judges the souls of the deceased
c) A religious practice inherited from another tradition
d) A symbolic link between the divine and human realms

Question 7:


a) A matriarchal pantheon
b) A system of hereditary priesthood
c) A cultural focus on metallurgy, charioteering, and warfare
d) A stratified society

Question 8:


a) Jewish prophets warned their communities that disaster would befall them if they failed to heed the commandments of God.
b) The Christian tradition based many of its doctrines upon the premise that Jesus represented the fulfillment of classical Greek prophesies.
c) The Islamic tradition suggests that Muhammad is God’s final prophet, as he received a complete revelation of God’s message.

Question 9:


a) The illusory nature of the material world
b) The idea that various spiritual beings are present in the world
c) The notion that all of creation is ultimately good
d) The concept of heaven and hell

Question 10:


a) Connecting to the Cosmos
b) The Energy God
c) Purity and Monasticism
d) God on Earth

Question 11:


a) The Dao cannot be adequately named.
b) The Dao is without specific attributes.
c) The Dao functions naturally (like water flowing downhill).
d) All of the above.

Question 12:


a) The goal of Upanishadic practice is to discover sat (‘being’, ‘the Real’).
b) The Divine can be best served through the sacrifice of one’s personal effort
c) Human lives are dependent upon (and constituted of) a force that underlies material existence.
d) The truth about the nature of reality is a form of secret wisdom.

Question 13:


a) Adopting a vow of poverty
b) Performing of good deeds
c) Practicing celibacy
d) Avoiding doing harm to living things

Question 14:


a) Initiation via baptism
b) A faith centered on the death and resurrection of its central figure
c) The promise of a pleasant afterlife
d) Characterization of the central figure as the creator of the cosmos

Question 15:


a) The ‘enfleshment’ of a god
b) The ‘transformation’ of a god
c) The ‘coming down’ of a god
d) The ‘instantiation’ of a god

Question 16:


a) Non-sexual conception (often a virgin birth)
b) Incarnate god acts primarily as a teacher
c) Incarnate god possesses of miraculous abilities
d) A posthumous return to Paradise

Question 17:


a) Rabbinical Judaism
b) Vedic Hinduism
c) Protestant Christianity
d) Islam

Question 18:


a) American Protestantism
b) Roman Catholicism
c) Islam
d) Nationalistic Hinduism

Question 19:


a) To better understand the modern world (culturally, socially and politically)
b) To gain a critical perspective on one’s own religious tradition and enable dialogue between traditions
c) To help defend one’s own religious tradition against possible criticism
d) All of the above.

Question 20:


a) They are useful and clearly understood analytical categories
b) They are merely conventional labels, which oversimplify both the origins and the geographical spread of the religious traditions under discussion
c) They represent a consensus that has existed in the academic literature since the dawn of religious studies in the 19th century
d) Both a and c.