The Ecology of Religious Knowledges

Bibliographic Data

ID3304801
AuthorsJuan Morales (0000-0001-7824-0491), Juan Diego Morales (0000-0002-9561-6419, University of Cartagena, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume13
Issue1
Pages11
Publication date2021-12-23
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueReligions (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/rel13010011
OpenAlexW4200350498
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited30

Different religious traditions, beliefs, and experiences claim to have epistemic contact with the ultimate source of reality. However, this epistemic claim has encountered one of its most significant obstacles in the initial incompatibility of its multiple accounts. I argue that from the ecology of knowledges, the idea that intentions, body, and physical and social environments are constitutive elements of our experience and knowledge, we can understand both the veridical, as embodied and extended, and pluralistic, as essentially limited, nature of religious experiences and knowledges. I characterize the mystical religious experience as a state of consciousness that (allegedly) allows direct epistemic contact with the supreme reality, articulating its essentially non-ordinary nature on the basis of the radical otherness of the sacred realm, namely, its character of being eternal, infinite, and with supreme ontological, ethical, and aesthetic value. According to this proposal, the different religious perspectives are understood as different epistemic approaches dealing with these numinous features in a gradual continuum from their most impersonal to their most personal specifications. I conclude that the cognitive relevance of any religious knowledge implies explanations and interventions that, although compatible with, go beyond those of both other religious knowledges and the knowledges of the non-sacred domains

Consciousness · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Mysticism · Numinous · Realm · Religious experience · Sociology · Embodied and Extended Cognition · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Law · Philosophy · Psychedelics and Drug Studies

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