Religion
Most Filipinos are Christians, with most belonging to Roman Catholicism. About eighty percent of the total Filipino population follows the Roman Catholic faith. Historically, the ancient Filipinos held animistic religions, Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims could also be found in the Philippines. The Spanish arrival converted a vast majority of the Filipinos to Roman Catholicism. There are also large groups of Protestants and members of independent Philippine churches such as the Iglesia ni Cristo. Five to ten percent of Filipinos follow Islam. Islam in the Philippines is mostly concentrated in southwestern Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago. The Filipino Muslims call themselves the Moros, which is a Spanish word that refers to the Moors, a Muslim empire that had once ruled Spain. Although the Filipino Moros and Arab Moors have no cultural connection, other than following Islam. Indigenous groups like the Aeta are Animists. There is a small minority in Manila practicing Buddhism. These are mostly the ethnic Chinese and Chinese-Filipinos living in Metro Manila.
Read more about this topic: Filipino People
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“The only human beings I have thoroughly admired and respected in the world have been those who carried the load of the world with a smile, and who, in the face of anxieties that would have knocked me clean out, never showed a tremor. Such men and women end by owning us, soul and body, and our allegiance can never be shaken. We are only too glad to be owned. Religion is nothing but this.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to children by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the philosophers celebrate in vain. And nothing stands between the people and the fictions except the silly falsehood that the fictions are literal truths, and that there is nothing in religion but fiction.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“In the religion of all nations a purity is hinted at, which, I fear, men never attain to.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)