Comparative Religion and the Humility It Requires
Reading more than one tradition does not relativize them. It reveals what they are each, separately, struggling to say.
Against flattening
The lazy version of comparative religion concludes that "all religions are basically the same." They are not. The Buddhist analysis of suffering, the Christian doctrine of grace, the Jewish argument with God, and the Vedantic non-dualism are doing genuinely different work.
What comparison earns you
What reading widely *does* give you is calibration. You begin to see which questions every serious tradition has had to answer (death, evil, meaning, community) and which answers are local accidents of geography.
A reading list, briefly
- *Tao Te Ching* (Lao Tzu) - *Dhammapada* - *Confessions* (Augustine) - *Bhagavad Gita* - *Mishnah*, selected - *I and Thou* (Buber)
Read one slowly. Then another. Notice what they are arguing *with*.