One-Line Religions
In the course of a novel-writing career, one frequently is obliged to describe an entire novel in one punchy sentence. "The accidental release of a bio-warfare virus will destroy life as we know it if Bo-Bo cannot convince his band of chimps to risk everything in a mad scientific gamble to save his species." Or, "This is Die Hard in Fantasyland with a talking donkey in the Bruce Willis role."

It is perhaps this bit of my personal experience that provoked me, when a dear friend asked me about my religion, to begin trying to find one-line descriptions of the world's religions. The thing is, such a description necessarily depends for brevity on certain shared references that must come from outside the religion if it is to make sense to strangers to the religion. For example, my friend, a Lutheran, gave a brief sentence to describe her religion, and it relied so heavily on references understood only to Christians that it made no sense to me. All I remember is that it was something about a trinity.

In her place I might have said, "Christianity is based on the premise that a loving god produced a son and then sacrificed (or permitted the sacrifice of) him so that any who believed in him as the son of the god might enjoy eternal benefits." Which may be wrong, but makes reasonable sense to me and is I hope not offensive. Any religion may look like superstition to those outside it, but all should be condensible to something comprehensible.

I don't do particularly well at it, though. For Buddhism the best I've been able to come up with is that the Buddha was a man who discovered a way to freedom from the suffering inherent in this world and was willing to try to show the way to others when asked. That doesn't even touch on what exactly that "way" is, but like references to the Christian trinity, everything I can think of that does address it tends to make sense only in the context of more information unavailable to most non-Buddhists. (Of course anyone can become a scholar of any religion without following it; but as most don't, I blithely disregard scholars.)

Even if you accept those descriptions, that's only two religions. Anybody else have any others? Or better versions of these two?