LANGUAGES, GRAMMAR, VOCABULARY, MEANING, KNOWLEDGE AND THE TECHNOLOGY OF TESTING MEANING
(why our religion fails)
It was a very long time ago, and that the levant was a very poor and backward ghetto of the empire, and that while we had roman rule, law, and commerce, and greek philosophy, reason, mathematics, the primitive people had only their primitive language to speak with and they did the best that they could – they spoke in primitive language.
Like the few primitive people living today, they had no reason, no philosophy, no science, no mathematics. And so they had to say something was good or ‘true’ because it was commanded by the gods, not because it was reasonably comprehensible, rationally consistent, philosophically sound, scientifically demonstrable, or mathematically consistent.
They had only ‘because the boss says so’ to use as ‘this is true’. We can, today, say the same things without primitive language, and by making truth claims using reason, rationalism, philosophy, science and mathematics. But … our words, grammar, and pronunciation, are not the only content of language, but the meaning, values and emotions that we describe with those sounds, to produce those words, using that grammar.
So just as we have difficulty losing our accents, and our grammar, we have difficulty losing the ideas that we learned with which to produce those sounds, words, grammar and language. We all have trouble losing our vocalized and intuited ‘accents’ – what we call ‘biases’. They are the foundations upon which all our consequential words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories depend.
So just as the chinese sound very differently from region to region, yet use the same character set for writing, we can, in the same culture, do similarly: use the same words and grammar despite very different meanings, and values in our minds that we describe them with. And so, if someone is raised using english, but learns archaic semitic parables; or someone is raised using english but learns historical and biographical parables; or someone is raised using english but learns scientific and mathematical principles “parables”, then these are very different internal meanings using very similar words.
The difference between the ancient parables, the historical parables, and the scientific parables, is that we can empathize with anthropomorphized parables without much general knowledge, empathize a bit less with historical parables with quite a bit of general knowledge, and empathize with sciences only if we possess very specific knowledge in addition to general knowledge. So that the cost of learning to speak each language increases in time, and effort.
And so we tell primitive people and children parables of animals and people and gods and heroes. We tell young adults rules that require reason. We tell adults about law that is internally consistent requiring rationalism. We educate specialists in the sciences where specialized knowledge is necessary. And the old and wise, among us who have studied all of the parables, the histories, the laws, and the sciences, can try to provide answers for all those groups in the languages that they can hopefully one day understand.
Once you grasp that we use spoken languages with common, uncommon, and specialized terms, across all people in a political system. But within that system we use multiple languages of MEANING. And that each of these languages of meaning, relies upon that universal spoken language; and that each of these languages of meaning uses a technology of ‘validation’ or ‘truth testing’, that varies from the primitive and experiential, and anthropomorphic, to the historical analogy, to the legal evidence, to the scientifically precise; and that it requires much more knowledge and often, much more intelligence, for each additional level of precision that we add on top of the anthropomorphic.
Then you realize that while we use the same basic words and grammar, we do not use the same vocabularies; and that vocabularies tell us which technology of understanding that a person relies upon, the relative inferiority or superiority of that language in solving problems of increasing precision; how much general knowledge is requires for that person to retain that technology of meaning; and the likelihood of the intelligence of that person who employs that technology of meaning. And this is what we do.
We form hierarchies and classes and each class uses the same root spoken language and grammar, but uses the language of meaning suited to his upbringing, his degree of ability, and his degree of accumulated knowledge. So we do not only judge people by their dress, and by their body language, and by their manners, but by the spoken language, and language of meaning that they rely upon. Because these are demonstrated rather than reported evidence of the person who acts, speaks, and thinks by those dress, actions, manners, and words.
6 responses to “Why Our Religion Fails”
Ah! to you, what we, living now, have received as the techne employing the form: religion no longer generates the effects it claims to, if it ever did. The claims do not match the performance. Religion, you propose, taking the role of consumer advocate, should be labeled a defective product and all factories that are producing this widget or output should be placed under receivership and the resources allocated to these operations be employed elsewhere, on the grounds that continued audience of the claims of Christianity frustrates the emergence of the ubermensch, your high IQ high will high force data driven market oriented biology transcending western european religion free committed to truth as means of decidability sovereign being.
Religion, and as a historically Western Europe occupying ancestored man this is Roman Catholicism and the declensions there of, aka Christianity, has failed because, you claim, lies have been employed in the premise claims that constitute the motive for adopting the group of proposed operations it seeks to have the population occupy their valuable time with. Worse, Christianity, and Christianity being the subject of your ire and not so much the other religions because Christianity can be taken as the exemplar of religion, does not have the capacity to speak the truth or new techne supersedes or makes obsolete the truth telling capacity of the heterogeneous (and therefore conflated) category of truth production factories: Christianity, where truth get considered as the product of that group of operations that produce sovereignty. And one could here put a list of characteristics that the typical Christian has been, you’d say defrauded, into accepting as true about himself that illustrates the shoddiness of the output from the Christian factories, aka churches.
Yes?
I am not accepting these claims just attempting to demonstrate that I understand what you are claiming the grounds for prosecution to be.
not an argument. give me an argument to work with.
Ancient Levant was relatively wealthy, not poor. Whole Near East was relatively sophisticated in trade, finance, tech, math, astronomy, clear that good portion of Greek enlightenment borrowed from Egypt/Levant/Babylonia. Thales was Phoenician. Alphabet. Temples were share-based corporations. Most sophisticated sailors on the planet, circumnavigated Africa. Greek high civilization far more recent, til 1453, so far, far more surviving sources.
Europe lagged until High Middle Ages.
That’s not what we see in calorie consumption. (GDP per capita.) Europe doesn’t lag except for 1000.
That’s not correct, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain. Grain wages higher in West Asia than Europe until High Middle Ages. It’s not absolute, of course, the Italian peninsula had high grain-wages during Roman heights, and during the classical era looks like Greece city-states had quite high living standards, but if we’re sticking to a fair comparison of regions what I stated holds with current research. See Maddison.
Many historians claim that higher wealth was a big factor in the survival of East Roman Empire vs West.
If I’m mistaken I’d be happy to update my understanding with a cite.
I went back to Maddison and it is more complicated than I remembered. It seems that while no European place except Italy was much beyond subsistence, Italy was so beyond subsistence and sufficiently dense that it brought Western Europe just above West Asia.
So I should write with more precision: nearly all of West Asia was wealthier than nearly all of Europe, but Italy was extremely wealthy in 1AD. I doubt this holds pre-Roman empire, but I’m not sure without further research. But this doesn’t fit with the statement that the Ancient Levant was a very poor and backward region of the empire.