What Can We Know About Religion?

When answering the question ‘what can we know about religion? , we must first understand that which we are addressing. There are limits that bound us in our capacity to answer. We, as religious scholars, must be completely objective observers in all aspects of our study. We must only discuss what we see, what we read, what we observe for ourselves, without assigning any particular meaning. We also must differentiate that which we are able to know from the unknowable. We, being human, can only know what other humans do, and how they think. As Jonathan Z. Smith notes, “ Religion is an anthropological not a theological category. … It describes human thought and action, most frequently in terms of belief and norms of behavior.”
In these terms we can determine a few things that we are not able to know about Religion. We cannot know if there is on true religion. To answer that question we must ascertain Divine thought. In our realm of study, by the borders that we have ...