Wrestling with Religion

Why was Christianity so transparently bogus--or, at least, without substance--to me as a young adult--and to some of my intelligent, well-read friends but not to others ? It's easy to say that people believe whatever makes them feel good, to dismiss faith as mindless conformity and intellectual shoddiness.  As social media makes clear, people often read a sentence as meaning how they feel when they read it, not as what the grammar and definitions factually add up to. The mainstream media make everything into a crisis , a friend wrote yesterday. Everything ? I missed CNN coverage of my afternoon nap. OK, my forty years as a comp teacher are showing. Climbing off my pedagogical high horse, I'll note that two kinds of reading, his and mine, yield two distinct meanings, one absurd and the other reasonable. One is nonsensical, the other merely a hyperbole--a figure of speech. Seeming credulity may be this kind of difference: reading religious language, not as word-for-word m...

Cultural relativism of language is a historically new idea. Rabbinic Judaism taught that Hebrew was the language of Adam, God, the Angels, and all humanity before the Tower of Babel—a view accepted by Christian scholars through the Renaissance, though Adam’s naming the animals suggests that the divine tongue was incomplete. In the Book of Genesis, words are God’s tools of creation, and his coeternal Word (allegorically, at least, a unit of speech) is a person of the Christian Trinity. Language is in God's innermost nature. Ptah, the Egyptian craftsman god, also created the world using language. He spoke words and the world came into being. Sacred words—sound patterns perceived as instruments of power rather than just as tokens for ideas—are deeply imbedded in religion. YHWH really is God’s name in orthodox Judaism, not a noun like the other words he is called by. Vedic tradition considers Sanskrit the language of the gods, and an Arabic Quran is believed to co-exist with God i...