August 18, 2007
Religion peddlars
I just got back from shooing away a pair of well-intentioned nuisances from my front door. They were wanting to 'share'. I gently suggested that they would do better to share it somewhere else. The elderly lady in the wheelchair asked why I didn't look happy. I was a good lad and did NOT tell her that I was really irked at being interrupted to accommodate her compulsion to 'share'.
To me, religion is a best-effort attempt to do something that isn't possible: to convey in words a kind of experience that the physical senses cannot grasp. Because language ultimately depends on mutual agreement on which symbol (grunt, glyph, gesture) shall represent a perceivable object or event (or a combination of previously agreed upon symbols), any symbol that we use to represent an internal, not specifically physical experience will lack certainty.
To record in words a body of experience that doesn't map to real-word experience or vocabulary, religious writers resort to analogy, poetry, or jargon. The result can be evocative, but not necessarily toward recreating the experience the writer tried to describe. To merely evoke emotion lets each individual's internal emotional world shape the final meaning that the individual saves and remembers.
Religious literature that uses jargon appeals to the intellectually pretentious, the would-be elite.
Those writers who combined analogy, poetry AND jargon tended to produce the fattest books. Maybe they got paid by the word? Madame Blavatsky and Alice Bailey come to mind as examples of this style. (Ron who?)
Religious works are ALL the product of human beings. Some of the writers may have been trying to pass along something from a source greater than themselves. Too many of the writers merely wrote down the form of the world that let them look down on any who disagreed with them.
Personally, I have experienced a reality that seems to be beyond the physical. YMMV. I prefer to not write about these experiences because just the nature of language itself would make whatever I write more likely to mislead or confuse than inform.
Comments are disabled.
Post is locked.
To me, religion is a best-effort attempt to do something that isn't possible: to convey in words a kind of experience that the physical senses cannot grasp. Because language ultimately depends on mutual agreement on which symbol (grunt, glyph, gesture) shall represent a perceivable object or event (or a combination of previously agreed upon symbols), any symbol that we use to represent an internal, not specifically physical experience will lack certainty.
To record in words a body of experience that doesn't map to real-word experience or vocabulary, religious writers resort to analogy, poetry, or jargon. The result can be evocative, but not necessarily toward recreating the experience the writer tried to describe. To merely evoke emotion lets each individual's internal emotional world shape the final meaning that the individual saves and remembers.
Religious literature that uses jargon appeals to the intellectually pretentious, the would-be elite.
Those writers who combined analogy, poetry AND jargon tended to produce the fattest books. Maybe they got paid by the word? Madame Blavatsky and Alice Bailey come to mind as examples of this style. (Ron who?)
Religious works are ALL the product of human beings. Some of the writers may have been trying to pass along something from a source greater than themselves. Too many of the writers merely wrote down the form of the world that let them look down on any who disagreed with them.
Personally, I have experienced a reality that seems to be beyond the physical. YMMV. I prefer to not write about these experiences because just the nature of language itself would make whatever I write more likely to mislead or confuse than inform.
Posted by: thornharp at
11:09 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 346 words, total size 2 kb.
5kb generated in CPU 0.0034, elapsed 0.013 seconds.
23 queries taking 0.0107 seconds, 19 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
23 queries taking 0.0107 seconds, 19 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.