World Religions: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives

This book is titled World Religions rather than The World’s Religions because I am not trying to canvass all of the religions in the world, only those religions of the world that are more or less products of what Karl Jaspers called the axial age, roughly 800 to 200 BCE. These are religions with long literary traditions that have a global influence. The religions discussed in this book have all crossed cultural boundaries, in the reach of their ideas if not in establishing permanent communities in lands far from their origins. Christianity and Islam fall outside the designation “axial age,” but they continue the traditions of western religion that began in Zoroastrianism and Judaism and, like the other religions discussed in this book, they have long literary traditions and have crossed cultural boundaries. Of all of the religions discussed here, Zoroastrianism has suffered the greatest loss in terms of number of adherents since the height of its power many centuries ago. Because I have circumscribed the topic to axial religions, I recognize that one of the limitations of this text is that other religions with a global reach such as Sikhism, the Bahá’i Faith, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, have been ignored.

The subtitle, Historical and Philosophical Perspectives, is an announcement of the book’s strengths and limitations. The book may serve as an introduction to world religions, but it is not an encyclopedia that tries to summarize every aspect of each religion covered. In the first chapter, I outline what I take to be the salient features of religion taken gen- erally. My approach is most indebted to Ninian Smart’s multidimensional model. Unlike some introductory texts, the concern here is not with religion in all of its variety; my twin emphases—various enough in themselves—are history and philosophy. Religious traditions are not static collections of dogma. They are more like open-ended stories involving main characters, thematic elements, and dynamic tensions. The “stories,” moreover, involve all of the elements of philosophy as traditionally understood: met- aphysics (inquiry into existence and its explanations), epistemology (inquiry into the nature and sources of truth and knowledge), and axiology (inquiry into the normative dimensions of value, including the aesthetic, the moral, and the governmental). However, the role of philosophy in religion is subservient to the living of life, so there is no question of a merely intellectual exercise.