Knowledge and Ignorance - Research Article from Encyclopedia of Religion

This encyclopedia article consists of approximately 41 pages of information about Knowledge and Ignorance.

Knowledge and Ignorance - Research Article from Encyclopedia of Religion

This encyclopedia article consists of approximately 41 pages of information about Knowledge and Ignorance.
This section contains 11,680 words
(approx. 39 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Knowledge and Ignorance Encyclopedia Article

KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE. A cognitive element is essential to most religions and probably to all, but exactly what constitutes religious knowledge is problematic. Strong belief, for example, may be subjectively indistinguishable from knowledge. In a 1984 BBC interview, Billy Graham asserted that he knows there is to be a second coming of Christ. At a lecture, the Hindu scholar Swami Bon declared that "transmigration is not a dogma, it is a fact." This article will examine the various and conflicting conceptions of religious knowledge that have emerged in the major traditions through history.

Primal Peoples

"It appears," Dominique Zahan has written, "that every religion, however primitive, contains a cognitive element" ("Religions de l'Afrique noire," Histoire des religions 3, 1976, p. 609). In primal religions, according to Åke Hultkranz, religious knowledge rests on a fundamental division of experience: "A basic dichotomy between two levels of existence, one orderly or...

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This section contains 11,680 words
(approx. 39 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Knowledge and Ignorance Encyclopedia Article
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Knowledge and Ignorance from Macmillan. Copyright © 2001-2006 by Macmillan Reference USA, an imprint of the Gale Group. All rights reserved.