Data source: Gina A. Zurlo, ed., World Religion Database (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2024).
| Glossary item | Definition |
|---|---|
| neo-paganism | Revived or new paganism, as in Iceland. |
| Neoreligionists | Adherents of Hindu or Buddhist sects or offshoots, or new syncretistic religions combining Christianity with Eastern religions, mostly in Asia. |
| net | See language net, culture net. |
| New religionists | Followers of the so-called New Religions of Asia, mostly founded after 1945. Mainly Hindu or Buddhist sects/offshoots, or new syncretistic religions combining Christianity with Eastern religions. Sometimes termed Neoreligionists. |
| New Religions | The so-called Asiatic 20th-century New Religions, New Religious movements, or radical new crisis religions (new Far Eastern or Asiatic indigenous non-Christian syncretistic mass religions, founded since 1800 and mostly since 1945) including the Japanese neo-Buddhist and neo-Shinto new religious movements, and Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese and Indonesian syncretistic religions, et alia. See Neoeligionists. |
| New Thought | A mental healing movement embracing a number of small groups and organizations devoted to spiritual healing, the creative power of constructive thinking, and personal guidance from an inner presence. |
| New-Religionists | Neoreligionists (qv). |
| nirvana | (Sanskrit). In Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, the state of freedom from karma, extinction of desire, passion and illusion. |
| nomenklatura (Russian) | Privileged bureaucratic elites in Communist or formerly-Communist countries. |
| non-adherents | Persons who are not adherents of any religion; non-religious, agnostics or atheists. |
| non-believers | Persons who are not adherents of or believers in any religion; non-religious, agnostics or atheists. |
| non-native language | Any language understood by a people although not their mother tongue. |
| non-native speakers | Speakers of a language as a second or third or other language. |
| nonreligion | Absence of religion, replaced by either non-militant agnosticism or militant atheism. |
| nonreligionists | Term encompassing both (a) agnostics; and (b) atheists. |
| nonreligionists | Term encompassing the 2 varieties of unbeliever: (a) agnostics or secularists or materialists, who are nonreligious but not hostile to religion, and (b) atheists or anti-religious/anti-religionists militantly opposed or hostile to religion. |
| non-religious Buddhists | Persons whose family religion is Buddhism but who as individuals profess to have no personal religion. |
| non-religious quasi-religionists | Adherents of non-religious quasi-religions (some forms of agnosticism, fascism, humanism, liberal humanism, nationalism, Nazism, some forms of non-religion or secularism). |
| nonsighted persons | The blind. |
| nonsovereign country | A political entity or country which is not free of external control, hence not a nation but a colony or other dependent territory. |
| Northern Buddhism | Mahayana (qv). |
| Nusayris | Alawites (qv). |
| occult | The mysterious, supernatural, secret, esoteric in religion and magic. |
| organized religion | A religion as formally organized by subdivisions, schools, sects, denominations or other bodies or groupings requiring membership. |
| Oriental Jews | The third major group of Diaspora Jews, after Ashkenazis (German-rite) and Sefardis (Spanish-rite); sometimes treated as a sub-division of Sefardis; Arabicspeaking Jews from North Africa and the Middle East. |
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