The Religions Proper and Quasi-Religions

Abstract

No serious discussion of religion, East or West, in relation to society and the contemporary world is possible without taking into account a distinction between religion understood as a pervasive dimension in human life and the world historical religions — such as Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism. These religions have defined themselves through their respective objects of worship, their religious communities, their sacred literatures, sacred persons, and their systems of morality. These particular religions represent historical traditions that, under individual cultural, political, geographical and other conditions, came into being as expressions of the human response to the sacred, the transcendent or whatever reality was regarded as Ultimate and worthy of an unconditional devotion. With respect to religion itself as a pervasive fact in human history, we must resist the nominalist tendency to say that ‘religion’ is merely a collective noun or name for these historical religions because that obscures the fact that religion is a distinctive dimension of human life and experience and that, as such, it is not exhausted in the particular religions that have appeared nor is it confined to the lives of those who adhere to these religions. Just as ‘morality’ is not identical with, nor merely a name for, the many ethical systems that have developed throughout the world, but the dimension of evaluation and appraisal of human conduct and the good life, religion likewise is not merely a name but an enduring facet of experience that concerns what is believed to be the reality on which human life and destiny ultimately depend.