What Do You Believe? (Big Questions) Hardcover – March 21, 2011

First let me start by tooting my own horn a little, because I think it adds merit to my review. I have 3 degrees (History, Religious Studies, and History Education), I teach social studies in (which we cover many of these religions), and I am an atheist.I think this book is a great tool for kids, young adults, and even adults to learn some of the most basic and important aspects of various religions. It is essentially a kid friendly coffee table book that is easy to consume (you could open to any page and quickly find an interesting fact) and a fairly quick read if you chose to sit down and go from cover to cover.It is true that when it comes to religions very little is cut and dry/black and white, because when studying many religions what is myth and what is historical can be hard to separate. Still, this book does a good job of representing a "birds eye view" of these religions without pandering or being overly bias.I think the best aspect of this book is that it is informative enough to use as a teaching tool to a student or the casually interested without overwhelming the reader with the grittiness of a detailed scholarly work. At the same time I hope it encourages readers to ask questions, start conversations, and seek out more information.

I purchased this book because my 9-year old was starting to ask those existential questions. This book is organized well and does a great job of breaking down large concepts in to easily digestible segments and graphics! Highly recommended!!

This book. What can I say? I recently started to question my religion and what it actually was. I wanted to learn more about what others believed since I was deprived of the knowledge of world beliefs. This book made it interesting for me and I read it front to back. It includes the main religions and smaller lesser known ones. I was particularly interested in the religion and science part which was mentioned briefly. It starts with the origin of religion and where it started and why we have religion or beliefs. This book mentioned native American beliefs, science, atheism, agnosticism, earthly understandings, and Hindu/Buddhist type beliefs. If you're interested at all in why people dress, act, or worship the way they do this is for you. If you're interested in the afterlife(or lack of),the meaning of life to people, or any big questions like that, this book will tell you religions or non religions view on the tough questions of life. This book is great for conversations as well. It informs you on your friends religion that you know nothing about. You can have knowledgeable discussion on religion with people who believe or don't believe in something. It includes charts comparing beliefs, comics, and blurb boxes with further info to go deeper into things. I feel like I've gained so much knowledge from this fun, educational book.

This is a valuable book: it has a lot of information and it is quite well done in its choice of topics and the accuracy of the information, as far as I can tell. Unlike so many reference and introductory books for children, the writers and editors appear either to be, or to have worked very closely with, subject matter experts. (And if not—hats off.)The difficulty is that the scattershot approach of the "encyclopedia/reference book spread" format means that the narratives that make up the background information about all religions are given very short shrift. In short, there's only so much information that can be conveyed in boxes and lists and tables and timelines. Sometimes you simply have to write long strings of connected paragraphs, or the story isn't told, the doctrine isn't explained, etc. That's the case here.Basically, this book took the format about as far as it can go.

Easy to read, good content for kids

We are not a religious family but we respect religion and belief, and want our kids to choose their own path.When the 6yo and 3yo started asking “what is a god?”, I got many books about religion and belief for children. My favorite by far is “What do you believe?” It is similar to the kid encyclopedias by National Geographic. It explains the concepts of belief and deity academically, without judgment (including atheism). It covers the main belief systems (eg, ancient Egyptian, christianity, sikhism, atheism, native religions, new movements like rastafaris, etc), main traditions, main rites, main practices, different answers by various religions to the same question, etc. All organized in simple 1-2 page “chapters” such as “Why do you wear that?” “What happens when you die?” It’s probably best for 7yo and up, but even my 3.5yo was fascinated by it as long as we only read one short section at a time.Other books presuppose that the child is religious (“god is what we feel when...”), or place judgment in certain belief systems (“people believed that the sun was god, but now we know that that is wrong”), or have inaccurate information (“Buddhists believe that god is...”). Even in the best of cases, they only focus on explaining what a specific belief is about without dealing with the concepts of belief and deity.“What do you believe?” is accurate, academic, straightforward, and nonjudgmental.

Although I chose to keep the book as it covered religion quite adequately, it DOES NOT offer an introduction to any of the philosophers mentioned in the description at all. There may be a quote attributed to one philosopher or another or a name might be mentioned, but other than an explanation of Atheism and Agnosticism, there is no philosophy of substance (or at all in my opinion). I would strongly recommend that the description be re-written to replace "from ancient philosophers such as Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, to modern thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kant, and Sartre" with "atheism and agnosticism." Without the misleading description, I would have given this more stars.

good information about all the major religions and faiths and beliefs ..very informative for children to know and form an informed view on the subject ..