Words are just words. (translation, America, atheist, protestants)
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Religious beliefs do not need words. Before there was a written language there were oral traditions and people have had a faith in a creator for 1000s of years. The native americans do not need books for their traditions and belief in a creator.
A book is a book written down by man. rules are rules written down by man.
We get lost in books and truth and we miss the spiritual connection to our creator.
Religious beliefs do not need words. Before there was a written language there were oral traditions and people have had a faith in a creator for 1000s of years. The native americans do not need books for their traditions and belief in a creator.
A book is a book written down by man. rules are rules written down by man.
We get lost in books and truth and we miss the spiritual connection to our creator.
I failed to make myself clear, I meant all words, including spoken words. The question has more to do with the language we understand either written or spoken.
So to rephrase would our beliefs still be the same if we used a different language?
I apologize for the confusion, I seem to have a knack at confusion.
Going back and reading the replies by Jazzymom and Whippersnapper am I correct in understanding that belief in God(swt) needs no verbal or written teaching?
If I am understanding both of you correctly, very interesting thought. I know that some faiths seem to agree that even newborns with no teaching are born with an awareness of God(swt)
I would say that any shared belief needs a means of communication, whether written, verbal or art. A person with no means of communication may have some sort of theistic belief of his own, but how could one know?
Some fundamentalist Christians study the ancient languages so as to experience the 'original' meanings. There is doubtless some loss in translation.
Going back and reading the replies by Jazzymom and Whippersnapper am I correct in understanding that belief in God(swt) needs no verbal or written teaching?
If I am understanding both of you correctly, very interesting thought. I know that some faiths seem to agree that even newborns with no teaching are born with an awareness of God(swt)
Exactly right. You dont need dogma to be able to reason in your mind that that there is a Creator. Dogma is an invention of man.
I dont know about newborns or infants, but I do know that there are a great many who feel " drawn " to a creator including myself. Admittedly though, this could merely be psychological.
Last edited by WhipperSnapper 88; 07-04-2011 at 08:01 AM..
Or are they? Could religious beliefs exist without words?
Just how much does our language determine what we believe? Would we believe the same things if we had a different birth language?
I doubt if any of us can really answer these questions.
If we read our scriptures in a language they were not originally written, will we understand them as the original readers did?
Considering how different our languages are it is surprising how well we are able to convey particular concepts in various languages. Perhaps that implies a sort of basic rightness in the concepts since pointed at them with words will allow them to suddenly pop into our heads as a workable concept. f the basic isdea is workable of course.
That's why I say concepts before terms. Words indicate concepts but concepts are not subject to words. You cannot make a ship less large by referring to it as a boat and you cannot turn the human imagination into a god by calling it 'god'.
Considering how different our languages are it is surprising how well we are able to convey particular concepts in various languages. Perhaps that implies a sort of basic rightness in the concepts since pointed at them with words will allow them to suddenly pop into our heads as a workable concept. f the basic isdea is workable of course.
That's why I say concepts before terms. Words indicate concepts but concepts are not subject to words. You cannot make a ship less large by referring to it as a boat and you cannot turn the human imagination into a god by calling it 'god'.
Years ago I was teaching a course on empathy and if it was possible to teach empathy. One sideline we got distracted to, is how inaccurate language is, yet for some reason it works. My own theory (which I never could prove) was that most communication is non-verbal.
Now I am sort of at the point of thinking that we all have some level of communication with God(swt) possibly at a non-cognitive level.
Just trying to see if others have a similar concept and that our "Language, words etc" is actually secondary communication, not primary. In terms of our belief.
I do appreciate that atheists will differ and explain what I am talking about as natural explainable phenomena of the interaction between the various neurological systems and perhaps as communication between the hemispheres of our brain.
I have yet to come to any conclusion about if language shapes our religious belief, but I suspect that most of us would still have a concept of God(swt) even if language did not exist.
This is an interesting topic. I think that words give us ways to interpret what we experience or believe and that they kind of give a creative flow to how we process our environment. I go one step further and say reality. I believe that part of the problem humans go through is that we attempt to objectify everything and as a direct result of that, we give definition to things we do not understand. Sometimes things are better off if we just observe them and don't try to label everything so much.
This is one of the main reasons why there are literally 100,000 different religions. People interpret things different ways through language or how they attempt to wrongly label things they don't comprehend.
To illustrate how this is a huge problem let's look at two different versions of Christianity. Very minor discrepancies in bible translations lead to two different religions with nearly identical beliefs. Standard Catholicism believes in praying to saints whereas Protestants believe that is a sin. Different ways of interpretting the same bible with supposedly the same "god". Well in Ireland throughout the 1900's, Irish catholics and protestants have been warring, rioting, and killing one another over fear of one majority ruling over the other.
From the outside looking in, there are only a few minor differences in those religions based on a few different interpretations of the same book and yet it leads to civil wars and bloodshed. People inherently don't like things that are different from themselves weather that be ethnicity, religion, or political affiliations. All based on how people interpret the little things through language or, as I personally believe, humans attempt to label everything when they simply don't understand it.
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