Many years ago, an historian friend engaged in what I thought was and remain to believe was “soft relativity”. He had read Max Weber on the sociology of religion and come to the conclusion that Weber was a relativist. Each of Weber's books, one on ancient Judaism, one on ancient China, one on ancient India, using the best available scholarship of the time, were describing the distinctiveness of the various religions. The particular points of view and quirks of each are insular and therefore incomparable on a common yardstick. They were therefore all culturally equal and all that could be said was that human society was splendid in its diversity. But that was to read Weber incorrectly. Weber was showing that most great religions were each defective in that they came short of being rational, while Christianity was different in that it was wedded to reason, as Pope Benedict said a century later than Weber, by declaring that Greek rationality was an essential part of Christianity rather than simply a cultural artifact of the time with which might then over time become antiquated. Weber would and did go further. Only Protestantism was rational, for the reason, I suppose, that all Protestant experience is mediated by consciousness and so belief is an expression of thought, people feeling in their hearts that they have heard the voice of God, while Catholics insist on believing in  miracles and other transactions between the natural and the supernatural. To Weber, some religions are superior to others rather than subject to a putative equality that is  to be identified with the concept  “relativism”.