In this text, I introduce the special feature of Religio: Revue pro religionistiku 20/1, 2012, "Religious Studies as a Scientific Discipline: A Delusion?". I briefly summarize the main argument of the original article "Religious Studies as a Scientific Discipline: The Persistence of a Delusion" by Luther H. Martin and Donald Wiebe, and those of the five responses by Hans Gerald Hödl, Hubert Seiwert, Radek Kundt, Tomáš Bubík, and Kocku von Stuckrad. At the end, I return to the EASR conference 2011 in Budapest, Hungary, where Martin and Wiebe's paper was originally presented, and comment on this event.
This response deals with some aspects of Luther Martin and Donald Wiebe's paper "Religious Studies as a Scientific Discipline: The Persistence of a Delusion". The authors think that the human mind in general constantly tends towards religiousness and thus comprehensive scientific inquiry into religion is actually impossible. They argue that "such study is not ever likely to occur in that or any other setting" (p. 9). They also stress that they were deluded in the past and argue that especially (or only) the cognitive approach can help us to elucidate the proclivity towards religiousness. I partly agree with them, particularly that the promotion of "extra-scientific" agendas in Academia is questionable, but I do not see it as such a serious problem. The reduction of the biases to only "religious" agendas is mistaken. The history of the field is a history of diverse "extra-scientific" agendas which change in accordance with social development and prevailing political interests. I present the situation from a central and eastern European point of view. At the same time, I argue that many scientific fields deal with the same issue, even if not to such an extent. This is because religious studies, more than other disciplines, attracts scholars with a special inclination toward religion. I also argue that scholarly results are much more important than "personal" agendas. Also, the aspiration of religious studies as presented by Martin and Wiebe seems to me too idealistic, perhaps utopist and thus unrealizable.