As I have mentioned countless times before, religions can be absolutely anything, as it is up to the creator of the current use of the term religion. This allowed me to chose many different paths of renaming the “World Religions”.
I chose to rename “religion” to the term “exercise”. The definition of exercise is “a process or activity carried out for a specific purpose, especially one concerned with a specified area or skill”(Oxford Languages). With what we had mentioned in class and throughout the readings religion is something you do that can give you a purpose or has some activity or higher power related to it. Of course, this is not an all inclusive definition, but through Prothero’s readings and class discussions, I have noticed this to be a main theme through everything we have considered religion.
To break down the broad term exercise into what will be considered the dominant world exercises I will use: 1. Mental exercise 2. General cardio 3. Exercise classes/groups 4. Weight lifting 5. Sports
Mental Exercise
Mental exercise can account for many things. I could define this as doing mental math, studying for an exam, or doing activities like meditation that allow your mind to relax. Relating this to religion, this is something you must practice time and time again to be in this state. Not many people realize what mental exercise is, but do it without realizing. This can be what happens with religion to. There may be some moment where someone is hoping something will happen in a moment they manifest or ask something out loud to an unknown source and that is religion without realizing it. Mental exercise must take place in my opinion all around the world. To include on my map I am going to include places with the best education system because in my opinion mental exercise is grown the most in a school setting. The four places where this will be most evident it the UK, USA, Australia, and the Netherlands.
forms of exercise.
General Cardio
General cardio can also include many different things, similar to mental exercise. This can include walking to class, going on a run with friends, or going to the gym and going on the cardio machine to listen to your favorite podcast for 45 mins. General cardio is slightly more of an intentional exercise than mental exercise. With cardio, you must put in the effort to walk a certain amount of steps or just get your heart-rate up to a certain level. This can be more directly related to attending a service in a place of worship. You must seek out putting in this effort, and it is still classified as exercise, but there are higher levels of exercise that could be done. When looking at where to put general cardio in on my map, I looked at which countries partake in the most physical exercise which could technically include any of the categories coming up, but most of those categories do include general cardio but expanded. I chose the Netherlands, Germany, Romania, and Russia to include in this area of my map.
people who have similar aspirations as
you because you share a similar happy place.
Exercise Classes/Groups
Now exercise classes/groups also include many categories within this broader category including: cycling, HIIT, barre, kickboxing, etc. I actually took a barre class for the first time a few weeks ago which made me realize how much of a community these exercise groups are. While many people thought that group exercise classes would start to die off after the COVID-19 pandemic began, companies, like Peloton, found a way to bring these communities together during the pandemic and afterwards. This is similar to the religious communities still found a way to be involved with each other and support their bigger mission throughout the pandemic when they could not physically be together. When deciding where to put this in my map I used the countries that Peloton was most popular in, USA, Australia, UK, and Germany. I know that other classes exist besides Peloton but not every exercise class is recorded making it more difficult to find data on that.
Weight Lifting
Weight lifting is a very specific form of exercise that does not have many other categories underneath of it. Aside from group classes I would say this would have the most community and direct relation to religion under it. Two of my good friends are weight lifters and it is 100% part of their personality and religion is part of some peoples personality. They schedule time out of their day to know when they will be lifting, who with, and what direct area they need to focus on. They become good friends with those who help them build the strength by supporting them in the gym and pushing them to become their best version of themselves. The exact same can be said for most religions. When choosing the map location for this category, I looked at the Olympic results from all years. Russia, China, Bulgaria, and the USA have the top 4 most titles, so I am going to classify them as having the most active weightlifters.
and safe place for many people who lift,
similar to places of worship.
Sports
Sports is going to be interesting to analyze because there could be two ways I can look at it: people who watch sports and people who participate in sports. Because I have been looking at exercise, I am going to do people who participate in sports, but people who watch sports can also argue that that is a religion. This is slightly a combination of other categories, but the community that a team forms along with the dedication that must be put in to prove not only to yourself, but everyone else that you care and are your best self. Practice is every day, sometimes multiple times a day, and is something you have to put your whole heart in, or there is no point in doing it. To relate this to religion, you cannot half believe a religion. You either believe in it and associate yourself with it, or there is no reason to say you do. There are many different versions of sports and where each respective one is popular, so I am going to also rank this also which country has the most overall world titles, similar to the weightlifting category. The top 5 (summer and winter) countries would be USA, Russia, Germany, UK, and Norway.
My Map
While there is going to be many flaws with my map because a lot of these categories included many countries, I tried to arrange it to how I saw best. (I also very much struggled on how to make the colors go with the country so I am very sorry with how messy it looks). Overall, while I do not know if I completed my map correctly, I did put the effort in to show how there are many different places that share similar exercise categories, just like they may share similar religions while still having one dominant religion. In the Tree of Knowledge reading this week it talks about the knowledge that homo sapiens have which is why they reproduced and were successful in life. They used knowledge they had to educate other people without having any other background knowledge.
To end off, honestly this was more difficult than I expected it to be. This is because I feel that as a person I have the term religion as a specific thing rooted in my brain, and this class is teaching me to stretch that boundary and it makes me uncomfortable in a good way. I am sure there are many other ways I could have gone with this prompt that could have made more sense than exercise, but with the knowledge this class has given me I wanted to see if I could successfully relate religion to exercise.
Sources
https://www.healthline.com/health/depression/mental-fitness#takeaway https://leverageedu.com/blog/best-education-system-in-the-world/ https://www.pelobuddy.com/other-countries-peloton-launch/ https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-producing-the-best-olympic-weightlifters.html#:~:text=China%20has%20always%20led%20the,Championships%20and%20Olympic%20Gold%20Medals
Religion 105 
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