religion is not the sole cause of violent conflict in many of these cases. Unscrupulous
politicians manipulate religious animosities to serve their own purposes. Class
differences and ethnic divisions also play causal roles. But religion makes a real causal
contribution to violent conflict in the present as it has in the past. What is more, it seems
unlikely that religious conflict will be eliminated by the withering away of religion at any
time in the foreseeable future. Unless diverse religions can learn to tolerate one another,
religious conflict will surely persist, and it might assume global proportions under
unfavorable conditions. There is, therefore, an urgent need for good philosophical
arguments for religious toleration. To be sure, philosophical arguments would not by
themselves produce widespread toleration. However, they might reinforce settled habits
of toleration and justify teaching toleration to the young, and they could thereby make
toleration seem attractive to thoughtful people and help to stabilize the practice of
toleration where it has already gotten a foothold in society.
Comparison of religions, or of parts or aspects of religions, seems to presuppose that we
can classify things as religions antecedent to comparing them. How else could we be sure
that we were comparing two religions rather than a religion and a science? The ability to
classify seems to presuppose in turn that we have a concept of religion that might in
principle be analyzed or defined. Defining religion by conceptual analysis would
resemble what epistemologists do when they try to define knowledge. Starting from the
proposal that knowledge is justified true belief, they note that Gettier cases in which
justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge are counterexamples to the proposal,
and they then try to refine the proposal until it specifies conditions that are conceptually
necessary and sufficient for knowledge. Proposals are to be tested against intuitive data
consisting of cases we confidently classify as being instances of knowledge or as not
being instances of knowledge. Thus understood, the task of defining religion would
involve applying this familiar method of analysis to the concept of religion. Successful
completion of the task would yield a set of conditions that are conceptually necessary and
sufficient for being a religion. The problem is that there is disagreement not only about
what the definition of religion is, assuming it can be defined, but even about whether
religion can be defined in this fashion.
But even if we do not have a general definition of religion, we surely can pick out some
clear and uncontroversial cases of religions. So perhaps useful comparisons can be made
even in the absence of an agreed-upon definition of religion. Balanced comparisons
would no doubt reveal a pattern of similarities and differences, and fine-grained
comparisons might make manifest differences within the similarities and similarities
within the differences. Such patterns would in their
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own right be of interest to some people. Comparisons might also serve more constructive
purposes for the practitioners of the religions under study. One possibility is the
discovery of unanticipated concord. The adherents of both religions might learn that they
had, by different historical and cultural paths, arrived at similar destinations in terms of
their understandings of the human condition. By eliminating sources of mutual mistrust,
comparison might reduce friction. Another possibility is a challenge to one of the
religions being compared. Its practitioners might come to recognize the inadequacy of