Chicago’s Zoroastrian center boasts a membership of 600 with more people from surrounding states interested in attending as often as possible.
There are 125,000 to 200,000 Zoroastrians worldwide, most of them in Iran and India, where they fled persecution in Islamic Iran and during the Mongol invasions.
But since the 1950s, the immigrant streams of Zoroastrianism have been reuniting in the United States, Australia, Canada and other parts of the West.
Those of Iranian heritage make up about 20 percent of the temple in Burr Ridge, and the rest are from India.
“So [we] now have a Western diaspora, and that diaspora is bringing Iranians and Indians together,” said Roshan Rivetna, an Indian immigrant whose husband, Rohinton, founded the temple. “After 1,000 years of being separated, we are together.”
I don’t know much about the faith, so a bit of hunting netted me a few factoids
According to religioustolerance.net most followers believe it’s a faith one should be born into so they don’t seek converts. They don’t do interfaith marriages and they don’t proselytize. What they do is celebrate spring equinox as their new year, follow a tenet of “Good thoughts, good words, good deeds” and it’s considered to be the first and oldest monotheistic faith. It also influenced faiths that followed it – Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Heaven, hell, and the coming of a savior are all beliefs that were likely lifted off Zoroastrianism.
Altreligion offers more. They pray five times a day and they perform a ceremony very similar to bar/bat mitzvah when kids are of age. Much of Leviticus can be blamed on them, apparently. They were very into rules and regs. Hell is only temporary. They also put great importance on fire as a symbol of their god and altreligion mentions that there are scholars who’ve theorized that Moses was likely a follower of Zoroastrianism, on account of god speaking to him via burning bush. The Zoroastrians are still waiting for their saviour, who’ll also be born of a virgin.
I’ve been an atheist for a lot of years, but nothing really solidified the feeling until I started learning about all the faiths and similarities between them – more than can be written off as coincidence. Plus, there’s the fact that Christians in general tend to take what they learn at face value and never seem to get curious about the roots of their faith. They don’t want to know how much of their faith is based on imitation, mutation, and invention. I don’t blame them, I guess.
