ABSTRACT
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan argues that intuitive knowledge based on religious experience is a feature of both Eastern and Western religious traditions. The study of religion, like the study of any other organized human activity, can be approached from a variety of standpoints. The sociologist is concerned with discovering what societal values are expressed in a religious tradition, how the religious beliefs of a group provide cohesiveness in a society, and how stratifications within the society are affected by its religious traditions. Philosophy of religion is not a systematic statement of religious beliefs, but a second-order activity focused on the fundamental issues of a given religion. All religion is symbolic, and symbolism is excluded from religion only when religion itself perishes. The importance of experience in the genesis of religion continued to be a theme found in writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
