ABSTRACT
A world religion involves a distinctive process of the conquest of death. The gaining of merit and its subsequent deployment in achieving salvation of many differing kinds underlies religions that may be quite diverse when it comes, for example, to belief in God. From a social scientific perspective within religious studies, merit needs to be understood as an aspect of power in religious systems. Buddhism assumes that, if persons live according to the firm tenets of the religion, they will generate merit, a kind of positive moral commodity. The old nature of individuals is transformed into their new ontological state in close association with that power, often identified as merit, derived from processes of ethical vitality. Mormonism is not simply Christian truth set against a pagan world, but the purest of Christian truth set against errant traditional forms of Christianity.
