چکیده:
The science of religion or comparative theology is one of the important fields that has emerged in the modern era. The main goal of comparative theology is to understand the nature of all different religions and analyze their common elements. As an independent academic discipline, it has five basic approaches to religion and its study: the historical approach, the anthropological approach, the psychological approach, the sociological approach, and the phenomenological approach. What is presented in this article is the introduction and analysis of the science of religion and each of the aforementioned approaches.
خلاصه ماشینی:
In facing religions, humans often act in three ways: with a devotional view of religion to prove their own beliefs and reject the religious perceptions of others; with a philosophical view of religions for the purpose of interpreting them based on intellectual endeavor; and finally, with a research-oriented view for the purpose of better understanding and recognizing different religions or the phenomenon of religion in general.
) Mircea Eliade, one of the prominent contemporary scholars of religion, also says: The study of religions, as an independent discipline dedicated to analyzing the common elements of various religions and seeking to deduce the laws of religious evolution, and especially to discover and define the origin of emergence and the first form of religion, is a very new field that has been added to the sciences.
) Religious studies or the science of religion, which draws upon phenomenology, history, psychology, and the sociology of religion in its work, is essentially a descriptive science that seeks to grasp the nature of all religions.
7. ) Therefore, the difference between the historical-comparative method, which is the essential characteristic of the science of religion, and theology, relates more to the specific mode of research and investigation than to the selection of subjects and cases for study and research.
) In the second half of the nineteenth century, along with the growth and development of comparative studies of religions—which, as an interdisciplinary science, benefits from various sciences and knowledge such as linguistics, archaeology, psychology, sociology, history of religions, and philosophy of religion—a new method emerged for examining religious phenomena and achieving commonalities and perhaps the unity of religions, which they called "phenomenology of religion.
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