h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yesterday I listened to a bit of Karen Armstrong http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Armstrong talking on CBC's 'Tapestry' http://www.cbc.ca/tapestry/ and I think I'm finally getting a handle on what this sort of person means when they talk about 'ways of knowing' other than by means of reason. They mean 'knowing' in the sense of, for example, 'knowing how to drive' or 'knowing how to juggle': religious 'knowing' is about 'doing' religion until you 'know how to do' religion.

Now, to me, if one is having a rigorous discussion, knowing how to juggle is not the same as knowing the mathematics of the motion of a sphere following a ballistic trajectory, nor is it the same as knowing the functioning of the neurons and muscles involved. 'knowing' how to juggle is not 'knowledge': it is training, conditioning, habit. And 'knowing' how to juggle does impart communicable insight into gravity, neurology, mathematics or anything else. From personal experience, however, I 'know' that *rational analysis* of juggling can, however, provide such communicable insights which can be a help when a friend wants to train themselves to juggle.

Religious 'knowledge' of the type Ms. Armstrong discussed on the radio yesterday seemed to be of a similar sort -- I must say that Ms. Armstrong's concept of religion seems to be far narrower than that of most religious practitioners, consisting simply of being nice to everyone all the time -- her idea of gaining 'knowledge' of this religious sort is explicitly incommunicable, being the product exclusively of experience or what I would call 'training'. Religious 'knowledge' is something for which there are no shortcuts -- you just have to do it until you come to 'knowledge' and all you can tell others about the path to this 'knowledge' is 'do what I did and if you don't get there you're not doing it right.'

I don't really have too much of a problem with this sort of religious thinking, except that I would not call the result 'knowledge'. I do, however, think that this sort of thinking is very, very far from the huge mass of religious thinking that has been produced over the millennia. Religion and religious persons have spent most of their time espousing descriptions of the world and the way it works, of human behavior, of history, cosmology, biology, physics, etc. Religion has certainly regularly said 'be nice to each other', which is Ms. Armstrong's fundamental devotion, but religion has certainly been concerned about far, far more than just the Golden Rule. Frankly, I don't agree that real, useful, workable, repeatable and communicable knowledge of most of the subjects that religion has concerned itself with can be derived from simply 'doing religion'.

One doesn't come to an real understanding of gravity by simply taking a few days to devotedly practice juggling. An understanding of gravity comes from rigorous and repeated experiment and analysis. One doesn't learn how to build an automobile by passing one's driving test, or by winning the Paris-Dakar rally.

Certainly, the only way to learn to juggle or to drive is to practice it. Once one 'knows' how to juggle, there's not a lot of practical use, but it's fun. Once one 'knows' how to drive, there are lots of practical things the skill can do. I'm not sure, however, that the limited religious 'knowledge' that Armstrong speaks (acting compassionately always) is anything other than a very good habit to try to have or that it is a habit that is necessarily or in any way exclusively religious.

Underlying what she was saying I couldn't help but sense the ugly bigotry the religious so often show toward the non-religious: 'if you aren't religious *in precisely the way I mean* then you can't be moral and, if you are moral, then you are actually secretly religious *in precisely the way I mean*'

It makes me a little sad.

I'll come back to this. We've discussed it before (somewhere).

In the meantime, kinda, sorta related: http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2009/11/religion-metaphor-trekkies-secular-jews.html

TRiG.

I think you may well be right.
I've been having some interesting discussions with my father recently. He's religious, always has been, ordained priest in the church of england which he then sort of left to go to the methodist church where is is also an ordained minister (currently is both) and has a PhD in liberation theology. Needless to say our approaches to life and knowledge are very different.

I'll quote three things he has said here which I think agree with what you say above:

"...belief in God – but that is experiential – not based on philosophical debate...Finally – religious faith is praxis not reified knowledge. The ‘kingdom of god ‘ vision of “good news to the poor, sight to the blind, release and social justice”(Luke 4:18) is not a concept to be understood and debated as to its veracity; it only has meaning in its working out. "

and

"We are here into phrases like "the failure of the enlightenment project" and the "battle of the paradigms". Positivism (including the scientific method) is not the only game in town and the phenomenological paradigm can be argued just as strongly. Indeed, given that the setting up, running and analysis of the results of 'objective' research are still all processed through human perceptions - the phenomenological/ constructivist paradigm would seem to have the edge."

and

"The scientific method seems to me to be a very limited basis for life decisions – the word "reified" springs to mind with knowledge separated from the lived experience in all its uncertainty and provisionality. I believe praxis – the constant interaction of experience and 'theory' in life - is a far more robust basis for life decisions."

of course, I disagreed with the later. But the focus seems to be on the experience and the 'it feels right' factor. I'm not sure I fully understand it though