Other Religions
There are small populations of people professing Judaism (196,000), Islam (150,000), Buddhism (215,000), Shinto, Rastafarian and a few other religions. They comprise 20th century immigrants from East Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, or of recent immigrant descent.
Seven percent of the population consider themselves agnostics or atheists. One of the most unusual features of the rich Brazilian spiritual landscape are the sects which use ayahuasca (an Amazonian entheogenic tea), including Santo Daime, União do Vegetal, and Centro de Cultura Cósmica.
This syncretism, coupled with ideas prevalent during the military dicatorship, has resulted in a church for the secular, based on philosopher Auguste Comte's principles of positivism, based at the Positivist Church of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro.
Read more about this topic: Religion In Brazil
Famous quotes containing the word religions:
“Those who believe in their truth—the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men—leave the earth behind them strewn with corpses. Religions number in their ledgers more murders than the bloodiest tyrannies account for, and those whom humanity has called divine far surpass the most conscientious murderers in their thirst for slaughter.”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)
“Politics at all times lead to bloody wars, and not only politics, but also religions as well as social and economic systems of all times are spattered with blood. Invariably the big ones devoured the little ones, and the little ones the tiny ones.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)