ABSTRACT
According to the Book of Genesis our ancestor fell from astate of natural innocence when he ate the ambiguous fruit. To attain knowledge of good and evil is still the god-defying and distinctive goal of human beings. And always we find ourselves unable to bear the knowledge, and always erecting filters to protect the idea of our own interior innocence. One such filter is the strong resistance made by many scholars to the very notion of sodal determinants of belief. They would rather think of beliefs floating free in an autonomous vaeuum, developing according to their own internallogic, bumping into other ideas by the chance of historical contact and being modified by new insights. This is an inverted materialism. In the name of the primacy of mind over matter, spirit over flesh, content over form, its adherents evade their own responsibility for choosing the cireumstances for their intellectual freedom. To ensure autonomy of mind we should first recognise the restrictions imposed by material existence.
