Other Religions
Though the word "temple" is used broadly, one should use it with discretion in the context of some religions. For example, a masjid or "mosque" should not be considered a temple because masjid in Arabic means "the place for kneeling (to God)."
Convention allows the use of temple in the following cases:
- Bahá'í temple (Mashriqu'l-Adhkárs or ‘Houses of Worship’).
- Mankhim, the temple of the ethnic group the Rai, located at Aritar, Sikkim.
- Confucian temple or Temple of Confucius.
- Shintoist jinja are normally called shrines in English in order to distinguish them from Buddhist temples (-tera, -dera).
- Taoist temples and monasteries are called guan or daoguan (道观, literally "place of contemplation of the Tao") in Chinese, guan being the shortened version of daoguan.
- Shrines of the traditional Chinese Ethnic Shenism are called miao, or ancestral hall in English. Joss house is an obsolete American term for such kind of places of worship.
Read more about this topic: Temple
Famous quotes containing the word religions:
“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)
“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)