What is the Right Word?

/ Tim Wakefield

Well, since many of you may be starting to get a little bored with my seemingly endless God-bothering, I thought I’d head back over to the meaning of words and see if that gets us any further. The last post proved miraculously unpopular. Oh well.

So, let’s look at the humble word shall we? We all use them.

The word ‘word’ is related etymologically to the latin word for ‘word’, which is ‘verbum’. This word is preserved in English as ‘verb’, which specifically means a word that describes some kind of happening in space-time, rather than an object in space-time.

(actually, the more observant amongst you may have already noticed that Universe does not contain ‘nouns’, that is to say ‘objects’ – there is no division between anything and anything else, except in our languages)

The latin ‘verbum’, if you look it up in a latin dictionary, shares a page, a column with a load of other words that begin with the ‘verb-‘. For example:

•    verber
•    verberablilis
•    Verberatio
•    Verbereus
•    Verberare
•    Verbero

These mean, respectively:

•    Whip, scourge, thong, blow, shock
•    That deserves a beating
•    A beating
•    That deserves blows or stripes
•    To beat, scourge, chastise, torment
•    One that deserves stripes, a scoundrel

Does anyone notice a theme here? Is it any wonder that the Christianity of the Middle Ages, which bears uncanny resemblance to much modern Christianity, and unfortunately Islam too, was so obsessed with punishment and sin? What’s this got to do with Christianity? Well it’s the old Gospel of John isn’t it?

“In the Beginning was The Word and the Word was God and the Word was with God.”

Now, the Gospel of John was, we think, originally written in Greek. In the Latin Vulgate Bible, like I said, the word is verbum – the word that shares a first syllable with all those words of punishment we see above.

In Greek the word for ‘word’ is something a little different. It’s logos.

Perhaps the problem we have here is simply one of mistranslation?

What does logos mean exactly? Well, here’s something I grabbed off the net, to save me copying out from my Liddell and Scott:

 reason, the mental faculty of thinking, meditating,  reasoning, calculating 

This is just one of the meanings of logos. Another is story.

Now, my Liddell and Scott also points out that in the New Testament, the sense of logos is both Word and Reason.

It even gives the Latin equivalent of logos as ratio. This word as come down to us as an expression of a mathematical relationship, and is also present is words like rational, reason, reasonable etc. This is not dissimilar to the words we get from the Greek logos I.e. Logical, any words ending in -ology.

So, put briefly, my argument is that the New Testament argues that reasoning is divine. The logical faculty of man, the ability to deduce things is in fact the highest and most sacred thing we have, and it is not separate from the force or power that brought everything into existence in the first place.

Of course, I’m at least four parts Daoist to one part Christian, so I can’t help but think of the opening to the Dao De Ching, which I am going to paraphrase:

The Reason which can be reasoned is not the true reason.

The idea here is that there is some kind of reason for everything happening, and that reason in your life for the things you do is the most important thing you have. Crucially, however, we will never completely grasp the Ultimate Divine Reason ourselves. What that means, I reckon, is that no one is ever going to be able to wrap up the meaning of Life or the Origin of Life or whatever in some way that can be grasped by the mind of man, and taught to the masses so we can have peace on earth. That is not going to happen. Anyone who claims to be doing that is a bullshitter, and a False Prophet, IMHO.

I think a lot can be achieved, however, by teaching people how to think for themselves.

We should, in short, think for ourselves, and have our own reasons for doing what we do – this is the truest expression of the Divine Will that there can be. Those who blindly accept anything are the ‘servants of darkness’, whether they know it or not.

I think, with this interpretation of the Gospel, we can all agree that those who fudge medical trials, for example, so that Big Pharma can make more money out of poorly people are, by misusing the scientific method, and claiming to have used sound reasoning, actually the Servants of Satan in a literal as well as figurative sense.

We talk of the ‘light of reason’ with good reason. Jesus claims to be Light and Love and Life. In Chinese the ideogram denoting ‘cleverness’ is a symbol combining the ideograms of the sun and the moon. We say someone is bright, when we mean they are clever and their reasoning powers appear to be in good working order.

So, my bombshell is that the materialists and the atomists and the scientists and even the atheists are all, for my money, better candidates to be called those of the True Faith i.e. those attempting to map out reality by studying it and reasoning out the whys and wherefores of existence and refusing to fudge the results just because they don’t like them or won’t get paid for them. Those that have actual standards because they understand that their work is for the good of all are the Servants of the Lord – Angels in Labcoats.

I choose to characterise things like this because I like them that way. I prefer to think of things as an eternal interchange between light and darkness, and that those of us who love the scientific method actually love God, and that there is some kind of Natural Law in the Universe that will, ultimately reward those who think and choose and do for themselves, because that is exercising the great gift: Free Will.

So there you have it people. The etymon of Life, the Universe and Everything was mistranslated, by the Roman Church. Christianity, a doctrine of reason, sanity, of education, of personal responsibility was stolen by the crumbling Roman Empire, mistranslated and used as a doctrine of control by stressing the aspect of Divine Punishment or Torment as the root of existence.

What I contend is that it is okay to have both reason and hope, both faith and scepticism. Only have faith in the ultimate ineffability of things, in the idea that nothing, ultimately can be known completely, that there is a thing about which we will never know, and it’s on our team, and treat everything else as data to be evaluated accordingly.

As I said in a previous post, and as anyone who has regularly meditated, or danced until they forgot themselves, or been transported by a piece of Art or Music, there is a boundless Good in the world, there is Deity, and it is available to all of us, any time. Whatever it is, it will not heal all the world’s suffering until we allow it work through us, by which I mean, there is no man on the white cloud who can wave his hands and declare world peace. I’m afraid we’re all going to have to work for it, think about, try to reason it out, and for God’s sake don’t believe everything you see and hear  – work it out for yourself!

Peace brothers and sisters and may the Etymon shine bright all the days of your lives.

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