The Common Ground Project
The Method
This is not interpretation. This is documentation.
The difference matters.
Joseph Campbell interpreted myths to find universal meaning. Mircea Eliade constructed theoretical frameworks for understanding sacred phenomena. Karen Armstrong contextualized religious history within its social and political conditions.
All three produced significant scholarship. All three began with a thesis and arranged evidence to support it.
The Common Ground Project does not begin with a thesis. It begins with a question: what does the record actually show?
The answer — that eighty-five traditions independently documented the same twenty-two structural values — was not the answer the author expected. It emerged from the source material. It was not imposed on it.
The Four Selection Criteria
A tradition was included in the dataset of 85 only if it met all four of the following criteria.
1 · Documentary Sufficiency
The tradition must have sufficient documentation — oral or written — to identify structural values rather than individual practices. A tradition represented only by fragments of material culture was excluded. A tradition with rich oral record that has been academically transcribed and sourced was included.
2 · Geographic and Temporal Distribution
The dataset spans all inhabited continents and multiple historical eras — from traditions that developed fifty thousand years ago to traditions that crystallized within the last two thousand years. Overrepresentation of any single region, era, or tradition type was actively avoided.
3 · Contact Zone Management
Where two traditions developed in historical contact with each other, shared values were documented but not counted as independent confirmation. For a value to be considered independently documented, it had to appear in traditions separated by geography, time, or verifiable absence of contact. This is the most stringent test in the methodology.
4 · Representational Scope
The dataset includes all three tradition tiers — Indigenous and oral (Tier I), ancient written (Tier II), and living world religions (Tier III). No tier is treated as more authoritative than another. The oldest oral traditions carry the same analytical weight as the most widely practiced living religions.
What “Independent Documentation” Means
The phrase “independently documented” is precise, not rhetorical. It means the same structural value appears in the source record of traditions that could not have borrowed it from each other — separated by oceans, millennia, or documented absence of contact.
When the Kongo dikenga, the Lakota medicine wheel, the Maya four-directional cosmogram, the Celtic wheel cross, and the Vedic solar wheel all express the same structural concept through the same visual form — without any of them having encountered the others — that is not coincidence. It is not borrowing. It is independent documentation of the same underlying reality.
The argument is not that all religions are the same. It is that all civilizations that lasted long enough to leave a record independently found the same structural principles necessary for human life.
The Three Tiers of Tradition
Tier I
Indigenous and Oral Traditions
Transmitted orally across generations, some for fifty thousand years. Warlpiri, Lakota, Maori, Yoruba, Aboriginal Australian, and dozens more. Academically transcribed and sourced. Not treated as less authoritative than written traditions.
Tier II
Ancient Written Traditions
Civilizations that left written records — Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Vedic, Mesoamerican, Persian. Primary texts analyzed directly, not secondary interpretations.
Tier III
Living World Religions
Traditions practiced by billions today — Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and others. Examined through source texts, not institutional expressions.
A note on what this project is not
This project does not argue that all religions are equally true, equally false, or interchangeable. It does not ask anyone to abandon their tradition or adopt another. It does not claim that because 85 traditions share structural values, those values are therefore divine or inevitable.
What it claims is simpler: every civilization that built something that lasted independently found certain structural principles necessary. That is a historical and anthropological observation. The interpretation of what it means is left entirely to the reader.
The author started this research hostile to religion. He ended it unable to make the argument he set out to make. The documentation did that. Not a conclusion he imposed on it.