Today, The Ride will stand as a salve for the diatribe I took against CNN yesterday. It seems that at least some of the material posted on their website is worth-while.
From CNN.com: Do You Speak Christian?
With a look at a fascinating short film from Kirby Ferguson, creator of the Vimeo series Everything is a Remix, and the book Speaking Christian by Episcopal Theologian Marcus Borg, CNN takes a moment to investigate the fascinating language of the Christian faith.
Now, I'm not going to chop up the article and put it back together for you here all piecemeal. I'll let you read CNN's article yourself, but the basic idea of the story goes like this. With a history over two thousand years long, the language of the Bible, and of the pulpit, has undergone a lot of changes. Words that were used thousands of years ago to evoke a certain definition have evolved through culture to have entirely different meanings.
Think of it this way. Everyone had to read a little Shakespeare in high school. If Shakespeare, less than a thousand years old at this point, is so difficult to access and comprehend in this day in age, what makes you think the Bible would be any easier? At least Shakespeare wrote in English, there's no knowing how many translations the Bible has gone through before reaching your pew, or how talented those translators were.
So the next time you hear some pious, self-obsessed zealot talk about how they were "Born-again", take comfort as I do that they likely have no idea what the hell they are talking about. Simply regurgitating words that one has heard without any knowledge of their meaning does not imply comprehension. Just ask any tropical parrot about that one.
Fakers.
No comments:
Post a Comment