Often different religious traditions offer very different pictures
of the world. In fact, religions are so fascinating partly because
they present alternative pictures of the nature of time, space,
persons, food, community, life, death, and so on. How are we to
make sense of this radical diversity of belief? The most common
response is to say that religions are alternative conceptual
frameworks or schemes, whose categories organize experience in
sometimes diverse ways. On this view of the framework model of
religious belief we cannot map religious frameworks onto a single,
comprehensive grid because they themselves function as the maps. In
this sense, the Buddhist and Baptist are sometimes said to live in
different worlds.
Religion, Interpretation, and Diversity of Belief traces the
history of the framework model from Kant to Durkheim, and then
argues for its replacement. Rather than seeing religions as
all-encompassing grids, we must recognize that they themseleves are
constrained in at least two unavoidable ways: first, by the formal
rules that make human experience possible at all, and second, by
the fact that as language users we must presuppose that we hold the
vast bulk of our beliefs in common. Given these constraints, we can
then see religious differences, however dramatic, as relatively
limited and largely theoretical.
The framework model is deeply entrenched in those disciplines
central to the study of religion, especially so in philosophy,
sociology, anthropology, psychology, and theology. The negative
thrust of this is to suggest this allegiance needs to be
reconsidered. Positively, the book sketches a picture of linguistic
interpretation on which our differences,religious or otherwise,
stand out against the background of what we have in common.
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