#knowledge production

Religion has historically been both a preserver of knowledge and a constraint upon inquiry. Philosophically, the stagnating effect of religion on individual knowledge-seeking does not arise from spirituality itself, but from how religious systems structure certainty, authority, and doubt.

At issue is not belief—but finality.

1. Revelation as an Endpoint Rather Than a Question

Many religions are grounded in revealed truth—knowledge presented as complete, divinely sanctioned, and unquestionable.

When truth is framed as:

already known

already spoken

already perfect

the search for knowledge risks becoming interpretation without investigation.

Inquiry shifts from:

“What is true?” to “How do I align with what is already true?”

This replaces exploration with compliance.

2. Authority Replacing Curiosity

Religious systems often assign epistemic authority to:

sacred texts

clergy

tradition

divine command

When authority becomes absolute, curiosity becomes disobedience.

The individual learns:

not how to question

but who is allowed to answer

This discourages independent reasoning and trains the mind toward epistemic submission.

3. Moralization of Doubt

In many traditions, doubt is framed not as a stage of learning but as:

weakness

temptation

sin

lack of faith

This moral framing creates internal censorship.

The individual does not merely fear being wrong—but being morally flawed for asking.

Once doubt becomes guilt, inquiry collapses.

4. Closed Metaphysical Systems

Religions often provide:

origins

purposes

cosmic explanations

ultimate destinies

While comforting, these systems can become explanatory monopolies.

When every question already has a metaphysical answer, new explanations appear unnecessary—or threatening.

Knowledge stagnates not because questions disappear, but because answers arrive too quickly.

5. Fear of Existential Consequences

Religious belief often ties knowledge to:

salvation

punishment

eternal consequence

This raises the stakes of inquiry beyond truth-seeking.

To question becomes to risk:

identity

community

meaning

eternity

When the cost of being wrong is infinite, epistemic risk-taking ends.

6. Identity Fusion with Belief

Religion often merges belief with identity.

To challenge belief is to challenge:

family

culture

selfhood

belonging

Knowledge-seeking requires psychological distance. When belief becomes who one is, inquiry becomes self-erasure.

The mind defends identity before it defends truth.

7. Sanctification of Tradition

Religions tend to preserve ancient frameworks.

While tradition offers continuity, it can also freeze paradigms.

When age is mistaken for truth, innovation becomes heresy, and revision becomes betrayal.

Knowledge stagnates because the past is treated as superior to the present.

8. The Comfort of Final Meaning

Perhaps the deepest reason religion can stagnate inquiry is that it offers existential closure.

To believe one already knows:

why suffering exists

why death occurs

why the universe is ordered

removes the discomfort that drives philosophy and science.

Inquiry thrives on unease. Certainty anesthetizes it.

9. Important Clarification: Religion Is Not Inherently Anti-Knowledge

Historically, religion has:

founded universities

preserved texts

inspired science

motivated moral inquiry

The stagnation occurs when religion becomes:

unquestionable

totalizing

fearful of revision

The problem is dogmatism, not spirituality.

Conclusion

Religion stagnates the individual search for knowledge when it:

treats answers as final

replaces inquiry with obedience

moralizes doubt

fuses belief with identity

makes uncertainty dangerous

Knowledge requires openness, fallibility, and risk.

When a worldview forbids those qualities, it may offer comfort—but at the cost of discovery.

The enduring philosophical tension is this:

Does one seek truth—even if it destabilizes meaning? Or preserve meaning—even if it limits truth?

Instead, what if we embrace fandom and art practice as a site of “worthless knowledge” (Jenkins), which is when art and fanfiction stops operating under conditions of “immaterial labour” or as “a service” and becomes something else: let’s call it an “affective knowledge”; a textural knowledge felt and sensed by individuals and communities over knowledge inscribed by institutions of power.

. . . .

Fans have spent decades harbouring shame over their exploits because “[f]ans are seen as devoting too much time to obtaining useless knowledge and place too much importance on ‘devalued cultural material.’ ” Spending excessive amounts of time reading or writing fanfictions about boy-on-boy romance, fans are not at work doing something more productive like contributing to capitalism’s productive regime. Just as when female fans are fantasising about boy-on-boy romance, they are not participating in heterosexuality’s reproductive regime. ( . . . ) As Tonya Anderson points out in her article “Still Kissing the Poster Goodnight”:  “dominant cultural politics characterise such female fan behaviour in adulthood as pathological.” In such instances fans are operating in “excess” and at best – in counter-to-knowledge.

From here, art and fandom might be better understood as affective communities that form around a shared feeling, that might not only be defined by our social or biological identities or by knowledge, but by an unproductive pleasure that undermines our productive desires, or to put it simply: by “being in love with their love” (Karukara).

I walk around with utopian visions of a different world, but also ideas for a better world that could be put into practice right now or in short order if the political will existed.

One proposal that I know many others agree with is the limitation or even elimination of corporate involvement in academic publishing.

Corporate for-profit academic publishing is another instance of capitalist enclosure - the quasi-theft of public goods that are then priced at high gatekeeping levels, exacerbating inequality and generating myriad harms, all for the sake of the profit of a few.

Examples abound of extortionist pricing, but the one I came across today was pricing on the Journal of Global Ethics. Here's what Taylor & Francis, a for-profit corporate publisher widely disliked for its price gouging, wants to charge:

Here's the institutional rate:

The continuation of this racket represents an implicit choice whose mutually antagonistic terms are: private wealth accumulation vs. academic and scientific research and the dissemination of knowledge for human betterment. The more examples you see of this the more concerning it becomes.

I'm curious about whether anyone has attempted to elaborate the opportunity costs of this form of capitalist enclosure.

How much is scientific research impeded due to researchers being unable to access journal articles? How many early academic careers thrown off course due to questions not asked, ideas not seen, connections between people and ideas not made, because it's too expensive to find out? To what extent are multidisciplinary possibilities closed off? To what extent is professional competence undermined and expertise narrowed?

I know an academic librarian who recently told me that their institution canceled a Taylor & Francis "product" - a bundled collection of journals - because of its exorbitant price. One of the journals in this bundle was a leading journal of nursing. How many nursing and public health students will miss key information and knowledge in their educational and professional careers all because a corporate grifter wants to privatize knowledge? How will patient care be effected? Capitalism is primitive to the extent that these kinds of necessary social systems questions are simply ignored.

It's already the case that human intelligence, generally conceived, always fights an uphill battle against ignorance, tradition, and predatory political and capitalist actors. Price gouging academic publishing is another instance of this struggle, but one that exists at a more structural level.

It has protocols of active listening, mutual respect and building on what others have said rather than openly contradicting them or debating their ideas. There is no firm protocol of only one person speaking at a time, although the mutual respect protocol ensures that interjections are in support of what a speaker is saying, enriching what is being said. There is no ‘talking stick’ protocol. (The talking stick idea was appropriated by the West from Native American culture.)

This back-and-forth yarning style neutralises the unpleasant phenomenon that occurs in many conversations, meetings and dialogues of one person grandstanding and waffling on while the rest of the group drowns in polite boredom. (Monologues are rare in Aboriginal culture unless a senior person is telling a long story or an angry person is airing grievances.) There is a lot of overlapping speech that makes yarning vibrant and dynamic and deeply stimulating. It is non-linear, branching off into diverse themes and topics but often returning to revisit ideas in ways that find connections and correlations between diverse sets of data that would otherwise not be found in more analytical modes of dialogue. There may be periods of comfortable and communicative silence that are reflective and not considered to be awkward. The end point of a yarn is a set of understandings, values and directions shared by all members of the group in a loose consensus that is inclusive of diverse points of view.