Religious Text Analysis

Disclaimer:

1. Please note that all analysis steps have been hidden in this report for readability purposes, but because this is quite a sensitive topic, I will - without fail - make the actual analysis-steps used available upon request at: * christiaan.viljoen.datasci@gmail.com *

2. Also note that I am not associated with any religious tradition, and that the aim of this report is purely an objective look at religious texts in these traditions; it does not however account for modern members of these religions, their actions/ opinions, or what is said in sermons, speeches, statements, etc. in various sects/ traditions within these religions.

3. This is published entirely in my personal capacity.

Introduction

This report attempts to do some text-based analysis of 4 major world religious traditions, in the form of their major texts, as downloaded from Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org)

The religions I’ve looked at, and the texts I used for each one, are as follows:

• Buddhism: The Dhammapada (Translated by F. Max Müller)
• Christianity/ Judaism: The Bible (King James Version) - these two religions are treated in this analysis as one religious tradition, for practical reasons related to ease of analysis, not because of my own philosophical stance regarding their similarity
• Hinduism: Hindu literature: Comprising The Book of good counsels, Nala and Damayanti, The Ramayana, and Sakoontala
• Islam: The Koran (Al-Qur’an) (Translated by John Medows Rodwell, 12 ed.)

Word Frequencies

In the texts I was looking at, these were the most-common words used; I removed common words found in all texts, like: “and”, “thee”, “thou”, “thee”, numbers, etc.

World Clouds are a fun way to get a quick overview of the most-used words in each religious tradition, but they are not very quantitative…

Buddhist Wordcloud

Judeo-Christian Wordlcloud

Hindu Wordcloud

Islamic Wordcloud

Next, we take a more objective look at the most-used words in the religious texts we looked at

It is interesting to note the preponderance of words associated with “God”“, in the religions that are focussed on a deity/deities; and a focus on”the World" in Buddhism, which is supposedly a more philosophical tradition…

Next, we make an attempt to assess the positivity/ negativity of the words used

• We use the common “bing sentiment dictionary”: a sentiment lexicon created by Bing Liu and collaborators. A list of words are labelled as “positive” or “negative”. More details here.
• Words that are not contained in this dictionary are simply marked as neutral.
• I’ve taken negation into account, e.g. if a word is preceded by “not”, it’s sentiment is reversed (“not good” has a negative sentiment, even though “good” on its own has a positive sentiment)
• Because these texts differ in length, the sentiment-scores were scaled (by subtracting their means, and dividing by their standard deviations), so that they lie on the same scale

According to this analysis, it is fair to say that (according to the literature consulted and the sentiment dictionary used), Judeo-Christianity is objectively more negative than Islam in its teachings, despite common modern opinion that Islam is a very combatant tradition. Buddhism and Islam appear to be quite neutral actually, while Hinduism seems to be extremely posistive and Judeo-Christianity extremely negative, relative to the other religions in this analysis.

Finally, for the purposes of objectivity, we use the more comprehensive “nrc dictionary”:

• This is a crowd-sourced sentiment lexicon by Saif Mohammad and Peter Turney. Words have specific emotions associated with them, e.g. “anger”, “anticipation”, “disgust”, “fear”, “joy”, etc. Read more here.

• Here, we see more similarities in the religious texts: a marked emphasis on “Trust”, and an avoidance of “Surprise”, accross the board.

• Buddhism has an equal focus on “Joy” and “Sadness, whereas the other religions emphasise”Joy" more than “Sadness”…

• Anger and disgust seem to be avoided in all cases; and in each tradition there seems to be a “healthy splash of anticipation”

• Fear, on the other hand“” appears to be more of a feature in Islam and Buddhism than in other traditions…

Final Comment:

I hope this has been an insightful report to read, please feel free to send me any comments at my abovementioned e-mail address…

I leave you with the words of Mahatma Gandhi: