The transcendent unity of religions Book

One of the most tedious trends in twentieth-century academia is the endless proliferation of relativist "religious studies" / "comparative religion" / "multicultural studies" b.s. about how all world religions are really the same.

I feel like it should be painfully obvious to everyone why this is not true -- while there is indeed a very basic similarity to most religions (i.e., "renounce your ego in some fashion," "there is some sort of ultimate ontological grounding that is not immediately apparent to the senses"), and while there are some fascinating connections between, e.g., Sufism and Orthodox Christianity, the idea that all religions are really the same could only occur to someone who has (1) not entered deeply into any one tradition and/or (2) is a religious studies professor.

All religions do not, to put it lightly (contra Rudolf Otto and everyone after him, up to and including John Hick), have the same 'core experience' that is somehow 'translated' into different religions. This would be like saying that there's really only one human emotion, called "emotion," that is then translated into anger, fear, joy, ecstasy, love, etc.; anyone who has actually experienced these emotions knows that this is comically false. In other words, I think it's fair to say that left-hand path Tantric orgies, or the Chöd sādhana of Tibetan Buddhism (where one offers one's own body to be consumed by demons), are maybe just a tiny bit different -- experientally, dogmatically, etc. -- than the experience of Anglicans at prayer.

I understand the motives behind the hermeticist spiritualism / perennial philosophy of Schuon as well as the present-day 'spiritual but not religious' crowd; they all mean well, I think. I also understand the anodyne let's-all-get-along vibe behind wanting all religions to be combined in a vague United Nations melting pot of mainstream liberal niceness, where there are no sharp edges and no one takes religion too seriously, and every Muslim and Christian realizes that their truth is only true for them -- and, naturally, that the only absolute truth is the 'rights' and 'tolerance' language of the late-capitalist liberal/secular state -- but the facts on the ground do not bear this out.