The fact that there is a plurality of religions is significant in different ways from different points of view. From a skeptical point of view their different and often incompatible beliefs confirm the understanding of religion as delusion. Thus, Bertrand Russell wrote that "It is evident as a matter of logic that, since [the great religions of the world] disagree, not more than one of them can be true" (1957, xi). From the point of view of an exclusive and unqualified commitment to any one religion the fact of religious plurality is readily coped with by holding that all religions other than one's own are false, or false insofar as their belief systems differ from one's own. But from a point of view that sees religion as a worldwide phenomenon that is not to be dismissed in toto as delusion but as the human response to a...