In his introduction to Imagining Religion, Jonathan Z. Smith writes: “While there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religiousthere is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy. What does he mean by this? Do you agree with his judgment? If there were no there there, what then would be the raison d’être for religious studies? Is there no religion and only religions?