ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses primary religious claims and comments on the effect of the conclusions upon world views in general, both secular and religious. Indeed the classical Indian schema of three main pramanas is a convenient framework for analyzing the developing crisis in the concept of religious knowledge. Criticism, which is the leading edge as it were of a different epistemology and cosmology from that which had previously dominated the faith tradition, stimulates differing moves. One is to evolve a form of liberal Christianity which takes an inductivist view of revelation. There are of course differing kinds of religious experience — numinous visions, inner mystical states, shamanistic ecstasies, moral conversions, panenhenic apprehensions, and so forth — but some recent discussions of mysticism help to illuminate some main issues which apply across the whole field. The numinous suggests authority, commandment, mercy, dynamism; the mystical suggests illumination, self-discipline, compassion, quietude.
