Good book to learn about the main religions?

There are many books on comparative religion. Two with titles that sound vaguely like what you remember are What World Religions Teach, by Edward Geoffrey Parrinder, and What’s the Difference?, by Louis Cassels. You could also to examine books on this subject in your local library under Library of Congress classification code BL80 or Dewey decimal code 290.0, then buy a copy of the best book online.
quote Mark K Digre
http://forum.biblio.com/index.php?topic=8812.0;prev_next=next

I have not yet read it, but my wife has been impressed by “God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter,” by Stephen Prothero. Amazon link, below:

link

I highly recommend Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions. The book does a nice job of highlighting the commonalities of the major faiths as well as what makes each one distinct, outlining their principal teachings in very readable language without exhibiting a bias toward or against any.

It’s such an immensely complicate topic that one book isn’t really going to cover everything but I would second @Jeruba‘s recommendation as a place to start. Your talking about religions that have evolved over hundreds, and some, over thousands of years. There are huge, but in some areas not so huge differences, faiths and theological and doctrinal hair-splitting within faiths/religions and within denominations within religions/faiths that will leave your brain in knots and spinning at the same time.

Also, religioustolerance.org is a very good website that has compiled a lot of information in a quite reasonably and refreshingly unbiased way that can help you begin to learn and understand what the various world religions are about.

I agree with @Jeruba and @lillycoyote…
“The World’s Religions” is a fabulous book. Huston Smith is a respected religious studies scholar.

also, this link (below) was posted by another fluther member and, while not exactly what you asked about, is a somewhat related and very interesting http://www.beliefnet.com/Entertainment/Quizzes/BeliefOMatic.aspx

This ain’t gonna be easy, but you might want to try reading the Bible, the Quran, and (summaries of) the Hindu epics (because the full texts are huge and not well-translated).

The trick is finding good translations. For the Bible, I recommend the New Revised Standard Version. Don’t do King James. For the Quran, I read the Dawood translation a while ago and it was fine, though there might be better newer ones. For casual reading, I don’t think it’s important to get a “scholarly” translation; look for whatever one seems easiest to read. And feel free to skip parts if they get boring or repetitive—repetition is the nature of these ancient texts, but I don’t think you’ll be missing much if you decide to skip, for example, Chronicles, or to skip slogging through all the psalms.

For the Hindu stuff, there isn’t a single holy text; there are several traditions. The Rg Veda is the oldest “text,” and then there are two famous, very long myths from later in history: the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. (You may have heard of the Bhagavad Gita; this is actually a tiny segment from the Mahabharata). Wendy Doniger translated a decent selection of the myths, called “Hindu myths.” You also might want to check out Narayan’s (extremely shortened) version of the Mahabharata and William Buck’s (not as short but still very shortened) version of the Ramayana, both of which I’ve read and thought were pretty good and easy to read.

(I ain’t got nothing for Buddhism, sorry.)

Obviously, these ancient texts are the map, not the territory, of modern religious belief, much of which is completely different from what it was when these texts were written. But they do provide the foundation for modern religion, and they’re fascinating in their own right.

Huston Smith and Karen Armstrong, are good. I got to see Huston Smith give a lecture in person, and I have to say I really enjoyed it.

I know the greatest ”..book to learn about the main religions..”.

It’s called The Internet.

I think that you’ll find that, pretty much, ALL “books” on the matter are to be found there.

@Qingu, a recommended simple introduction to Buddhism is What the Buddha Said, by Walpola Rahula.

Or a person could just read the Dhammapada. There are many wonderful translations, some literal and scholarly (as literal as you can get, I suppose), some down-to-earth and practical, and some highly poetic, with evocative photographs and nice paper. People are reached in different ways.

@everephebe, how interesting that we have this bit of personal history in common. Huston Smith used to be a really exciting and fascinating speaker in person. He can’t speak so well these days, following a stroke, and has to use an assistant. But I heard him several times back in his robust days, elderly but still vibrant, both at an all-day workshop in a large lecture hall at UC Berkeley Extension and in small zendo and bookstore settings. He autographed my copy of the book I recommended.

@Jeruba, wow I just got to see him the one time. And didn’t get a chance to meet him after. He was great, I remember he briefly talked about tennis, and girls when he was young. He was really gripping, this was about six years ago. The way he sees religion, all religion, makes him one of the best people to learn from. He is excited by religion and loves learning about it himself. And he brings both passion and pathos, to the scholarly study of religion.

I even had my picture taken with him. :D

Oh yeah well, I made out with Joseph Campbell… Ok, ok I just said that cause I’m jealous. @Jeruba, Oh wow, that’s so great, I’m so happy for you. ;D

Funny how some of us get excited about seeing a band in person or getting a photo taken with a Hollywood star, and others of us think it’s that cool to shake the hand of a world-class religious scholar. I guess a celebrity is whoever you think a celebrity is.

@jeruba, that is SO true about celebritiesm. I saw Robert Redford and Wynona LaDuke at an environmental conference and met Steve Wozniak on a Apple computer cruise. For me, they are celebrities.

I was more excited about meeting Robert Thurman than I would have been about meeting his daughter Uma.

Hey everyone! Is celebritism a word? Here I am, a vocabulary nut, and I may have accidently made up a new one. I am sorry!