The basic categories of interreligious consciousness: from pretended self-evidence to scrutiny

The concepts most often used to refer to the modes of attitude toward the “religious another” most closely resemble effaced coins, and, even more, the labels used to distinguish “black”, “gray” and “white” in the ideology of political correctness; such appraisal labels, as a rule, cannot be subjects of critical research. In this article, the author attempts to show that the most important of these concepts - exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism - allow and require much more elaboration than is usually assumed from the height of ideological bird’s flight. It turns out that the first two of these terms cover completely different types of relation toward the “religious another”, and the third, which is mythologized as the newest mode of interreligious consciousness, is an expression of deistic consciousness that has by no means gone down in history together with the early New Age and the Enlightenment. The author of this article also unearths the archaic roots of so-called religious relativism and touches upon the compromise character of so-called humble confessionality