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:
“All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“It is a quite remarkable fact that the great religions of the most civilized peoples are more deeply fraught with sadness than the simpler beliefs of earlier societies. This certainly does not mean that the current of pessimism is eventually to submerge the other, but it proves that it does not lose ground and that it does not seem destined to disappear.”
—Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)