Insanities
Now!- where were we? Let's see here.........................ah!:
Meph:
You seem to be saying that language, due to its inherent abstractness, supports and fosters the belief in gods and the supernatural
I was cheesing ear to ear when I first read this. What was it somebody said to me once?
"WUUUUUUUUUT!". Exactly.
But first a little modification- remember that I'd said "recursion allows for introspection. Its the backing behind insight........It's coinded the term
sin"? Scratch that. The coin termed is"
consciousness".
You’re saying that by means of language we control the mysterious.
You’re saying labels depreciate the value in something.
You’re saying we were once more in tune with instinct but language has bleached it of us in a way.
Bingo.
You’re trying to show what fear
did. I’m trying to show
how. Well, trying anyway.
I move to say that language was simply a renegade experiment that was by circumstance allowed to runaway unharnessed. Imagine booting up a program with a nested loop in it. It puts out a bunch of junk on the screen and you let it go on unsupervised until you come back some thousand years later.You didn’t have the leisure to tend to it at its beginnings. And so it went on neglected.
"Leisure" is the only reason you came back, and having done so you find a gigabyte file filled with letters.
Enter probability and chaos theory that says a pattern is inevitable in any multi-factored field in flux.
You can’t explain the pattern but to you, having genetically developed by now to appreciate beauty, the pattern seems ghostly and poetic. And so, a simple hairy hominid’s invention of grunts and snorting interchanged sequentially thousands of years ago now suddenly ascends the throne and becomes the stuff of legends.
Why?
Neglect.
See?
This invention of ours has generated many wonderful things but it has also allowed for the haunting of the mind by abstractions.
And aren’t abstractions the universal basis for religions?
Those three vexing properties in language:
vicariousness, displacement and incursion have made all of this possible.
Before, fear was only an immediate whiff of horror alive only for that second, that moment. The way it is for the animal out on the Sahara.
Language has solidified fear’s fluidity and made a god out of it. How?
I'm saying these 2 things (language and religion) were born on the same day but were seperated by circumstance.
One became a common specimen for the laboratory, swimming in formaldahyde and put to the scalpel. Its materialistic nature became the stuff of science; you
see words on paper, make them with ink, you
hear it on tounges, you speak language, you
think and
play with it so there's nothing magical about it. Everyone's Ok with it being used and abused because its just language.
It serves
us.
The other one became a spiritual byproduct of these vexing three properties. The very fact that you cannot see it, hear it, speak or play with it has further mistyfied the hell out of it and so we placed it on Olympus. It became the stuff of Zeus and the soothsayer. The focus of control having long ago been misplaced by our little invention made this all the more easily possible. And so with time we allowed its untouchability, the same untouchability found in language, to elude us and now it no longer serves us.
We serve
it.
Why? How? Because the
focus of control had been shifted long ago, the same exact trait found in the superstitious.
You may say I've contradicted myself by saying just now that language has untouchability when I just finished stating that the material properties of language are so readily availabe- on paper, on tounge, in mind, in ear.
But its reach goes far beyond the laboratory.
Isn't it odd that when you correct someone's grammar and they ask you why it should be that way you can't exactly pin point why it should be? It just 'feels' better 'corrected'. The neatest thing is that this also happens in music, as when a pianist hits a wrong note or plays slightly off bar. You've never heard the tune before but your brain is not in sync with it for some odd reason you can't quite put your finger on and yet you've never composed a damn thing in your life.
Here's the most striking thing in all this: modern theories on grammar are incredibly complex and to this day they are incomplete. It takes years to master not only the ins and outs of much more complex languages (Aboriginal, Native Indian, pueblo indians) but its just as hard to master the complex rules of your own language........which is ironic because children somehow take easily to grammar and are using it by the time they're only 5. Could this 'feel' for language be explained by analytical "magic" of the the left side of the brain? And if so, can we leapfrog and tie this "feel" for religion back to language and so explain the damn thing with language by proxy? Could it be that simple?
Or would that make me a raving heretic needing to be shot by a Catholic?
The word ‘leisure’ I've been using in all this is key. That was language’s gift to us. That’s what she gave us: leisure.
There's more but you know how I am about ..uhm..."long wind". So.... Still with me?