Epilogue: Religious Belief and the Future

Abstract

THE comparative study of religion is an academic discipline and is not properly undertaken in order to promote or boost any one particular kind of religious belief. What such study can do, however, is to provide us with a less restricted and parochial view of religion than that in which we were brought up (this includes those brought up as humanists or atheists), a wider range of evidence than we might have had otherwise, and some understanding of the historical development and consequences, good and ill, of the various forms of religious belief which exist in the modern world. In this way the comparative study of religion can materially assist the religious thinking of the modern generation.