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:
“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)
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)