Religious belief and the Western cultural structure

It will surprise many people who look at me and notice that I'm white, and that I seem to have a fairly good grasp of the English language, to learn that many aspects of the logic of Western culture are still quite alien to me. I experience them as a puzzle -- and sometimes with a jolting sense of disappointment, and a feeling of having been "foiled again".

One extreme puzzlement I have concerning thinking is what I will refer to as its Kantianism. There is a sense in which culturally conditioned Westerners renounce the sense of being able to take in the qualities of a person as a whole person. Instead of this, it seems that they perceive flashes in the pan of sudden goodness or a sudden quality of evil -- which impact on the perceiver in a revelatory way.

It seems that Western culture is still a culture of revelatory knowledge, which somehow undervalues (and casts under suspicion) even the very possibility of knowledge that is derived from ongoing processes of perception capable of making sense of a person as a whole. Rather, ongoing perception produces only a mechanical and (in the human sense) meaningless result. What produces meaning is something entirely different -- revelation.

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In the Nietzschean sense, then, it is possible to say that Western culture tends to adopt the perspective of the 19th Century German Feminine.

As Nietzsche so graciously informs us, "a genuine woman" [as opposed to all the fake ones out there] "sees science as an enemy."  Excuse me if I cannot remove the tongue from my cheek.  I'm a trifle lopsided.
One finds that the Romantic and the Scientific are compartmentalized also in the Western mind. Indeed, it would seem that they cancel each other out if they get too close.

In terms of the Romantic way of experiencing the world (which pertains to all that is human about human relationships), knowledge of the other person's character should be revelatory. According to the Scientific approach, reality is purely mechanical and has no human meaning.

To spell out the logic of this epistemological bifurcation, human knowledge is always revelatory knowledge, but scientific knowledge is the genuine article -- ie. it is true knowledge.

You can see that there are further ramifications with regard to this typical Western bifurcation concerning knowledge.

Knowledge that relates to the human and is also meaningful on that level is cast as merely Romantic by some of those who have gone a bit further with drawing out conclusions about values and ideas within the existing framework of Western culture. Conversely, Scientific knowledge -- as a form of quintessentially anti-human, mechanistic knowledge -- is that which ought to dominate (like the male in a patriarchal family) and have its say.