A Non Authoritative View

The phrases religious approach and religious thinking are not terms I have seen anywhere. They are only descriptions I've landed on to characterize the difference between how ancient people tended to think, and what I see as the better ways of thinking we more commonly, but not always, use today.

In my view of it, religion is based on the idea that knowledge can be established by way of authority; that if you can find a perfect source for knowledge then you will have perfect knowledge.

But is this how knowing really works?

Can knowledge, or the truth about a situation, be established in this way?

And if not… then why do we think it can?

My guess is, this idea of getting knowledge from above comes from how we as children look to our parents for help and instruction. A method which works very well when we're little, So then it seems natural that we would think power and knowing are part of the same thing.

As it really is, any source we get information from is really just a report on how other people have dealt with similar situations to ones we might be in now. Knowledge is an awareness of our true environment. It is finding out how things really are. We have our ideas about things, our guesses, but knowledge is when a guess finds its correlation in the world. There really is no other kind of knowledge.

The thing is, this is a different view of what knowledge is than many people seem to have, so it might take a little time to get used to, but I think is true to the extent that if we could follow a path back through all our various sources of information to where the events and the reactions originally came from, what you would find is a progression of, for one thing, human discovery, but then also, people getting past their own difficulties and then passing their findings along. Whether it is in books, pools of data or stories passed verbally among people, all our knowledge is basically this. And the same has always been true for all our inherited information, including our religions, which means there is both true and relevant and false and irrelevant information in all of it.

This information then is not made true or false by where it comes from. What we call knowledge is just an awareness an occurrence or condition in the world, a report on an interaction of some kind, or an idea for something that might be tried. Its truth then is strictly a matter of its correlation to that which it is referring to. We imagine, or in other words make models of, external conditions in our minds and how accurate these models are is there amount of correlation. But they are still just relective models of real things, which can be clear or skewed. For a thought to 100% accurate it would have to become the thing that is being modeled. Even the most refined thoughts are still best characterized as models or reflections.

So, though important, this accumulated knowledge only plays a supportive role to how we actually learn about the world. The more important element, and the initial instance in all cases, is when we have experiences that lead to thinking critically in order to form questions for further learning and then to get the clearest, first hand, impression as possible. We advance not by always guessing right the first time, but by continually correcting the errors that are inherent in our guesses.

Knowledge is not a product of authority; it comes through investigation into the extent that something either has happened or can happen given the physical nature of the world we find ourselves in.

This is not to say authority is not needed. There is a need for best practices in almost any given situation. Even if it is only giving your own thoughts authority over the way you feel. But granting this authority does not make the beneficiary of it, more likely to know or to tell the truth. To the contrary, as in the case of people who are given authority, there must always be limits. Authority can only operate by way of current best guesses and these guesses must give way to better, more recently informed, guesses.

So, even though it seemed right to our ancestors to think of knowledge as something that came from revelation and authority, we can now see that knowledge comes from matching what we think with what we find to be true in the world. There really is no other kind of knowledge than this. True answers about the great mysteries of 'what and where we are' will eventually come by way of investigation and increased understanding, not by beief in the authority of our past guesses.