Friday, May 13, 2011

How the King James Bible has shaped our language

Some advocates want to remove religion from society. Good luck trying to remove it from the English language.


4 comments:

James R said...

Do they really want to remove religion or remove the institutions which have interpreted these words in some very strange ways?

Big Myk said...

I think that with book titles like The God Delusion, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, the target is not a few aberrant sects, but religion itself -- even in its most sophisticated and profound manifestations. Sam Harris calls religious moderation "an elaborate exercise in self-deception." In some ways, he reserves his harshest criticism for what he calls "religous moderates" because they give some kind of cover and permission to the real crazies.

James R said...

Let the book burnings begin. They would rid the world of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Bonhoeffer, Tillich? That seems strange for big believer in the intellect. Although I like Harris' disdain for the religious moderate. That Jesus fellow would definitely pass that test.

Big Myk said...

Baba, Heidegger does not really belong to the list above. He did not consider himself to be a religious writer per se and was officially agnostic. There is, however, a mystic streak in Heidegger, for in various places he indicates that ultimate being is a mystery that will always be beyond the grasp of finite beings. Thus, Heidegger says, in rejecting calculative thought, that “Calculative thought places itself under compulsion to master everything in the logical terms of its procedure. It has no notion that in calculation everything calculable is already a whole whose unity naturally belongs to the incalculable which, with its mystery, ever eludes the clutches of calculation”