Funny, I'd just been trying to get the "Theorizing Religion" class to imagine what a Buddhist theory of religion - might look like. Perhaps one could see the religions (but not "Buddhism") as so many ways in which people flee from the realities of suffering, impermanence and non-self. (I had Walpola Rahula and David Loy in mind) Such attempts are understandable but doomed, ultimately extending and compounding the suffering they claim to transcend - how pitiable! You can't build a house on sand, at least not a house that will last very long. Better to understand the sand, and the ways we might yet come to terms with living on it. But that might be better conceptualized not as another kind of "religion" but as something qualitatively different... psychology, perhaps, or philosophy! Then we found something very like this argument in Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion (p129), as he surveys the "religious" emotions which respond to intuitions of dependence.
