The teaching assistant who taught the course-real professors were already starting to think of themselves as above such things-spent most of an hour talking about theories that claimed to explain why people have religions. I’m thinking just now of a conversation I had just after a class session of my first comparative religions course at the University of Washington in Seattle.
The oddities aren’t accidental-far from it-and they have quite a bit to teach that’s of relevance to the project of this blog. Certainly my own encounters with the academic field of comparative religion, first in my university days and then in decades of reading since then, have left me scratching my head more often than not. When a fundamentally irreligious society takes up the comparative study of religion, it’s a safe bet that the results are going to be weird.
