searching for meaning, or confronting fundamental issues of war and peace, freedom and bondage, good and evil.” With so much at stake, can the study of religion safely be left to anybody but a religious person? Can such study be left to a person (i.e. a non religious person) who has no faith in anybody or anything but himself? I think not. This line of thought is following the argument that because religion can be said to be a “totally distinct and unique category of human experience” it is “beyond the comprehension of those who have not felt this experience directly”. This is put most succinctly by Otto when he says:- The reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of consciousness. Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested to read no further; [my italics] for it is not easy to discuss questions of religious psychology with one who cannot recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or, say, social feelings, but cannot recall any intrinsically religious feelings Otto. R. (1970, 2nd edn) The Idea of the Holy, Oxford University Press Of course, there are those people (according to Gwilym Beckerlegge writing in Section 6 of Units 14/15) who, “regardless of whether they are religious or not, strive for an impartial approach not shaped by their own beliefs”. But this takes us into the realms of “Religious Studies” – something which, it could be said, is not within the parameters of the question which has been set here. Most religious people are devout, serious, honest and trustworthy. If they carry these attributes into their study of religion then surely their work on religion will be all the more worthwhile and respected. With faith in their own religion in particular, and understanding of religi...
