Mon, Jun 13, 2011 Permanent linkGreat essay! I especially liked this:
When the New York Times uses the phrase in headlines without discussion, which version of the phrase does its readership infer? It's impossible to know, and this rattles me. Language has a hypnotic, iterative power: with every use, a word becomes more engrained into its new context, increasingly impossible to view objectively.
This is all the problem of mythology. Words, myths, icons — the fact that we understand anything via those means that the knowledge we gain is always an ever-more complicated metaphor. Perspective doesn't really shift, and everything continues to be anthropomorphized and made to fit into the shape of the day.
You suggested in another essay that metaphor was a great way to teach. It's true. It worked for Sagan, Feynman, etc. It's great for introduction. I just wasn't sure if I was with that idea all the way because I think there comes a time for shifting. For realizing that apple pie is, (or in this case, maybe God as we know him is) a construct that isn't going to last beyond present-day understanding, beyond current-human understanding (as opposed to alien or trans- or post-human, etc.)
Maybe, then, I'm only interjecting with my own perspective of things, because part of that above task has always been assigned to the artists.
God is a verb