Evaluating the World's Religions

The founders of the great, durable religions of the world were not philosophers. The intuitions that our deeds will be judged when time has run its course, or that our deeds are indeed judged in the course of time and constantly rebound upon us, life by life, or that the path of the Tao is inscribed into cosmic reality, are not philosophical, metaphysical, or properly ethical insights. Nor are they “theological”: These are not prophetic illuminations following upon God's self-revelation, or rational reflections upon that self-revelation. They are, rather, the result of our religious awareness, putting out its feelers and blindly making contact with some umbral, barely seen reality. Our religious sense does not make a rational analysis of the real (philosophy), nor does it reflect in faith upon God's self-revelation (theology).