This article deals with the issue of using concepts and categories in social sciences with particular focus on the concept of "religion". This concept has been critically analyzed by several authors, e.g. by Timothy Fitzgerald, Russell T. McCutcheon and Daniel Dubuisson. The category of religion is seen by its critics as a biased and manipulative socio-cultural construct, originating in the specific social and cultural environment of Western (Euro-American, Christianity-based) societies. However, the critique of the notion of religion as a socio-culturally constructed concept does not necessarily mean that the concept itself should be abandoned or that it is of no practical use for the description and analysis of non-Western social and cultural phenomena. This contention is evidenced with examples from the Japanese context. The notion of religion (shūkyō) cannot easily be proclaimed to be a Western import into Japan; it has older roots in Japanese history. The extent and content of this concept, as well as its place in a wider conceptual network, have certainly been transformed in the process of cultural exchange with different Euro-American environments but this does not imply that this concept is simply a tool of colonial powers, nor does it preclude its analytical usefulness.
The historical record shows that no undergraduate departments of Religious Studies have fully implemented a scientific program of study and research since such an approach was first advocated in the late nineteenth century – much less has there been any broad establishment of such a disciplinary field of study. And we argue – on cognitive- and neuro-scientific grounds – that such study is not ever likely to occur in that or any other setting. In our judgment, therefore, to entertain a hope that such a development is, pragmatically speaking, possible, is to be in the grip of a false and unshakeable delusion. And we "confess" that we ourselves have been so deluded.
The proposal for a scientific study of religions (Religionswissenschaft) was born of the scientific impulse that swept Europe from the mid-nineteenth century and that gave birth to the study of history itself as a scientific and autonomous discipline. Increasingly, however, historians of religion abandoned historical methods altogether and the study of religion became associated with an a historical approach in which "history of religions" became a synonym for assembling a phenomenological corpus of truncated and decontextualized cultural data, the temporality of which was disregarded in favor of claims to their being manifestations of a sui generis sacrality. A history of religions, informed by the insights of the new cognitive sciences, can draw upon well-founded theory that can supplement and provide correctives to traditional historiographical tools. Nevertheless, the weight of the 150 history of the study of religion suggests that the future of the study of religion will inevitably differ little from that of its past.