Mars, Ares, Tiw/Tyr, God, Allah

You need Russell’s insight into the logic of language to solve this:

When you formulate a statement such as “the present king of France is bald”, for the statement to have definite meaning and a definite truth value, you have to rephrase it like this:
(a) There exists something that is the present king of France.
(b) There is only one thing that is the present king of France.
(c) Anything that is the present king of France is bald.

I think you can easily do this exercise for dragons, unicorns, Mars and even God.

According to Brian Ogilvie, modern descriptive biology got started in the 15th-16th century when people began wondering whether or not the flora and fauna in the ancient texts were the same as the flora and fauna around them. That lead quickly enough to the question of the whether the flora and fauna in Florence were the same as those in, say, Paris. So they developed a descriptive method that allowed them to answer those questions. The method involved three things: 1) specification of distinguishing features, 2) drawings and diagrams, and 3) reference collections of specimens.

Brian Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe, University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Somewhere in one of his essays, I forget which one, Thomas Kuhn points out that the modern concept of electricity involved figuring out that apparently different phenomena, such as ball lightening, static, and shocks from electric eels, were all examples of the same thing.

I think if I interacted with someone on a daily basis, and they regularly referred their actions to their understanding of God, it might be possible for me to conclude that their understanding of God was different from mine. Under some circumstances, even that the world had space for two “gods”, which were different.

However, if three religions shared a scripture and a philosophical literature that referred to the same God using the same contexts over a period of centuries, it would seem polemical to insist that the beliefs they don’t share means they “don’t worship the same God.” This would be a new definition of “God,” one that is excluded by the scriptural understanding of “God.” It could only mean one or mor of the religions was a fake and didn’t worship anything real.

and if y’all really THAT interested in all the different ‘gods’ –
there will be ‘HEAVEN on EARTH’ on the 1 August -(the Swiss National Feiertag)
on the Swiss-German border trying to correct the misconception that ‘god’ is ‘Swiss’
(or a man)-

And y’all invited –
NOT to meet ‘god’ -(Jenes Höhere Wesen Dass Wir Alle Verehren) – in person
BUT y’all will be able to see a few of Gods Waiting Rooms AND what type of Interior Design and Art he prefers.

AND you will be able to speak to a very good friend of ‘god’ –
ME!
(and I will post the invitation here in plenty of time that y’all can book y’alls tickets
to the Lake Constance)

Aquinas may be illuminating here: he treats the term ‘God’ not a proper name (like ‘Harry’ or ‘Jesus’), but as a noun signifying an idea (like ‘man’).

Another try: it is meaningless to say that people do or do not worship the same god. It may however be meaningful to say that people share certain beliefs about a concept that they refer to as god (or as Allah or Mars).

It is still not straightforward to define concepts like belief and shared belief (a belief exists in a consciousness, how can several people share one?), but one can argue that for example the Nicean creed expresses beliefs shared by many Christians about the concept they refer to as God. Whether these beliefs correspond to anything in the outside world (okay, another disputed concept) is irrelevant (and also impossible to determine) for identifying shared beliefs.

It seems that people identifiying as Christians and people identifying as Muslims do have shared beliefs about the concept they both refer to as God (in their respective languages), for example they both, as well as Jewish people, refer to this God as “the God of Abraham”. It also seems that there are beliefs shared by many Christians about the concept they refer to as God, that most Muslims do not share, and vice versa.

Still another question is how to determine whether the expression of a belief, like the Nicean creed, indicates something that has real meaning to the person expressing it. In my experience, many people express beliefs about the concept they refer to as God that they do not actually hold in any meaningful sense, in the sense that it has any discernible impact on how they live their lives.
[a few corrections]

TM — nope, Russell cannot help us with fictional names. He cannot explain why “Batman is Bruce Wayne” and “Clark Kent is Superman” are both true, but “Clark Kent is Batman” is false. On his analysis, there’s no discriminating among things what don’t exist.

But speaking of ineffectual logical Spitzfindigkeit, I have always thought that atheists should embrace the Shahada, which states that there is no god but God. Atheist-approved! After all, if there is no god, then a fortiori there is no god other than God. Look at all the non-Gods: clearly none of them are gods! That just follows from the fact that there are no gods at all. Of course, the atheist will deny that there is any God to begin with. But that’s okay, since the Shahada does not assert that there are any, it merely denies that a bunch of other things are gods, which atheists will heartily second.
Although this is just taking a new tack with taqiya, you may not want to market it in Mecca.

The only way to settle this dispute is by appeal to authority. There is none higher than Ibn Arabi (1165-1240 CE), who found that the statement in The Qur’an, 3:84 that the God of Abraham, Jesus and Islam are the same, was verified during his own ascent to transcendence. This assertion of the universality of the essence of all religions is rare among the classical Western mystics, and there is a detailed exegesis of this assertion in Ibn Arabi’s many writings in a remarkable recent scholarly work of comparative mysticism, Paths to Transcendence: According to Shankara, Ibn Arabi and Meister Eckhart, by Reza Shah-Kazemi (World Wisdom, 2006) pp. 118-129. Shah-Kazemi’s book should be at the top of the reading pile for “historians of religious ecstacy,” as James Joyce once put it. They will already be aware that around 1204 Ibn Arabi also wrote one of the best short handbooks of the mystical path in any tradition, Journey to the Lord of Power (Eng. trans. published by Inner Traditions, 1981).

I am glad to see Meister Eckhart mentioned, for he is said to have said that people talked incessantly about God (this was the Middle Ages) without knowing what they were talking about. This does seem obvious. He more famously remarked that God saw him through the same eye that he saw God; that is, God was an experience rather than an object.

As for the Shahada, the second part of it, ‘[and I testify that] Muhammad is the prophet of God,” implies belief in a God for Muhammad to be the prophet of.

The distinction between negative and positive atheism is the difference is the difference between a person who declares they do not believe in magic but they can’t say there is no such thing, versus someone who declares they do not believe in magic because there is no such thing.

Oddly, negative atheism is considered to be both moderate and reasonable. I find it extreme, because it presupposes a radical epistemological skepticism, which I find extreme. (And reactionary to boot, though for others that may be a feature, not the bug I see.)

The argument from authority, that is, the believers, tells us that Tyr and Tiw were the same. Or that Woden and Mercury were the same. And that Allah and the Christian God are the same, which is why Islam was generally deemed a heresy. The Muslims returned the favor, seeing the Trinity as a form of heresy which sneaked in other gods beside God. (The way some Protestants saw Mary as a de facto goddess sneaked in beside the Christian God.)

steven t johnson @ 19

“I find it extreme, because it presupposes a radical epistemological scepticism”

Perhaps off topic (and perhaps better saved for a future twigs and branches), but I am intrigued by this – would you care to elabourate, particularly with respect to “a radical epistemological scepticism” (I am unsure if you are referring to the idea that certainty is never justified, or a more nuanced concept)?

Not Trampis @ 20:

Not all Christians are Trinitarians. Indeed, I’d so go so far as to say that either Christians and Muslims worship the same God, or else they worship different Gods because there is no singular God all Christians have in common. There’s quite a lot of difference between the conceptions of God of e.g. Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Nestorians, Christadelphians and Gnostics and I don’t think the gaps between them are less than the gap between Catholicism and orthodox Sunni Islam.

If there is a sacred then our human concepts must be inadequate to represent it. And the difference between the atheist and the religionist is only about whether the sacred exists prior to our being, or is ‘only’ our response to the vast ineffable universe in which we are embedded. The names and concepts of gods give shape to something greater and stranger than any human can grasp. My hunch is the creative abyss of the sacred (and I don’t expect most people to agree with me) responds to humans reaching out to it. So the names of god are not entirely empty, nor entirely true. But if there is no creative field beyond us then the names of gods at least allow us to build the sacred onto nothingness.

I am reminded of Owen Glendower to Hotspur ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep’, ‘But do they come when you do call to them?’

I think they do, for whatever reason.

The only way to settle this is experimentally. Swap two gods, and measure what that does to the rates of crop failure, disease and defeat in battle.

Gibbon’s thesis was famously that had been done to the Roman Empire ~400 CE. But poor historical records makes the result unclear at best, foundering on the question of ‘is the Emperor of the Byzantines also the Emperor of the Romans’?

So it would probably be worthwhile to repeat the exercise under more controlled conditions.

It could be that “god” is the ancient name of the full consciousness that also occurs with the fully-lit brain shown in brain scans of subjects experiencing the breakthrough on psychedelic drugs. This suggests several avenues of research. The fact that afterwards, this higher state of consciousness can be reattained without drugs by practicing a traditional mystical path, and the fact that the phenomenological descriptions of the two experiences are apparently basically the same, underneath the variations from setting and culture, also suggests some philosophical reappraisals. Let’s suppose there is only the brain: let’s suppose there is no God and let’s suppose, to put it in a more physical way, that the brain is not a tranceiver to another dimension. (I don’t really stake either claim, as a thoroughgoing agnostic due to the inherent limitations in rational thought, but just let’s suppose.) Then we must acknowledge that science now shows that a fully-lit brain has oceanic feelings of oneness with the universe, cosmic love, the noetic (all-knowledge) feeling, can read or mirror other minds to an enhanced degree, enjoys better mental and physical health, etc.: the whole panoply of the responses on the standard transcendence questionnaires with the addition of the concomitants in biochemistry. Note that our everyday lesser consciousness (i.e. control by the “default mode network”) has an epistemological stance towards fully-lit consciousness, whether we have experienced it or not: this stance includes feelings of sacredness, the rightness of morals, awareness of sin, and responses to teachings. Insofar as good morals must be practiced to attain the highest state of consciousness, it might be claimed that there are “objective, real, moral, or ethical, standards.”

Interesting that there are different concepts on Non-Theism. I suspect that a lot of it is how aggressively oppositional we are to Theists.
I am pretty oppositional to authoritarian Theists.
To be honest, toward organized religion in general.
Just in case, I do have a daily prayer.
“Good morning, Creator. Thank you for making the Universe in all its strangeness and wonder. Now, go back to sleep”.
I think we are all better of when the Creator is not trying to fix its mistakes.

If historical reasoning has any place in this discussion, it is worth nothing that a) As far as we can determine, Mohammed’s first community of believers contained both Christians and Jews. b) Nothing in the Qur’an or early Islamic history indicates that Mohammed or his followers felt they were starting a ‘new’ religion, but rather following a worship pattern that predated them by millennia. c) Among the various early historical writers who note the rise of Islam, very few of them make any reference to Muslims as following a faith different from Christianity, although a few do.

Like Kiwanda, I recently spent a while reading Wikipedia’s pages about proto-Indo-European religion. I was surprised to learn that Greek mythology is assumed to have more intrusions from other sources (often Middle Eastern or Semitic) than Norse, Roman, and Vedic mythology. I hadn’t seen that Ares was from a local source, while Mars is from Perkwnos (I had assumed Neptune would have been from Perkwnos, if Jupiter hadn’t been a merger of Dyeus Pater and Perkwnos!)

But on the underlying philosophy of language, I like a version of Kripke’s idea. The meaning of a name is the historical tradition of name use that it taps into. The name has a reference iff the historical tradition has its origin in an ostension or description that succeeded in referring to something. This leads to some surprising conclusions, like the claim that if there were in fact no animals that the word “unicorn” historically referred to, then whatever creatures existed in alternate universes that look a lot like horses with horns on their heads wouldn’t have been unicorns, but would have just been a very similar looking species. (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-objects/#Uni)

The problem with Kripke’s view is that he leaves unspecified the difficult part, about how a historic tradition of name use can switch from one reference to another. He raises this problem with terms like “Madagascar” (which supposedly descends from a name that once referred to a part of the mainland) and “Santa Claus” (which descends from a name from a historic bishop in Anatolia, but now definitively attempts to refer to a different person, who never existed). Figuring out how much change in the community of use can change the referential and meaning facts of a name is exactly what we need to figure out whether the Roman/Norse/Vedic gods are in fact the same as each other, and whether the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish gods are in fact the same as each other.

But one thing we can say pretty definitively, is that despite the “interpretatio graeca” that J-D mentions above, Ares is not the same god as Mars.

(I guess maybe even this isn’t definitive – if the two communities merge long enough and start using the names interchangeably, then maybe they can in fact come to have the same meaning, just as “Saint Nick” now sometimes refers to the non-existent Santa Claus rather than the Anatolian bishop.)

Richard M–
“The only way to settle this is experimentally. Swap two gods, and measure what that does to the rates of crop failure, disease and defeat in battle.”

A story told to me by an archaeologist. The Greeks tended to associate Helios and Apollo, making Apollo the sun-god. One famous German archaeologist wrote extensively in opposition to their conflation, arguing that Apollo was not the sun-god. While on an archaeological dig in a temple of Apollo, he died of sun-stroke.

Case closed, I’d say.

I find many of the comments conflate the existence (or not) of a God(s) with the existence of a related religion. These are decidedly different constructs.

It could be there are many religions and no Gods. Its could be there are many religions and many Gods. There could be more Gods than existing religions. There could be fewer Gods than existing religions. In the aggregate one of these is true, none are inherently provable.

Humans construct religions for any number of purposes. There are those who take the Green Bay Packers as a religion, worshiping the team, paying tribute, honoring colors and traditions etc. but yet (as far as I am aware) there is no God(s) associated with that team. As far as I’m aware being key – because in fact there could be one who has just not made him/her/itself known.

Accordingly Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc. are factually all religions to which you, in your beliefs may choose to subscribe (or not). Whatever one does there are three outcomes.

There may not be a God
There may be a God(s) but its not the one you’ve aligned with or
You have aligned with an existing God.

The choices are readily available for all to see – free will and faith together will determine what choice you make and you may choose to judge the consequences of the choice as intrinsic to the choice. Only the choice is with certainty within your control.

Accordingly, in my opinion, it matters not if Mars or Ares, Allah or God are one, more than one or none. Your belief (or not) alone is all that matters and there is no one who can fully discredit your choice whatever it is.

I am reminded of Owen Glendower to Hotspur ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep’, ‘But do they come when you do call to them?’

I think they do, for whatever reason.

There’s no good reason to believe that spirits came to Owen Glendower when he called them from the vasty deep, but if they did they were evidently of no use to him.

If you do not believe in the trinity you maybe a lot of things but a Christian you are not by definition.

That’s less clear than you think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontrinitarianism

The largest nontrinitarian Christian denominations are The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Oneness Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, La Luz del Mundo and the Iglesia ni Cristo, though there are a number of other smaller groups, including Christadelphians, Church of the Blessed Hope, Christian Scientists, Dawn Bible Students, Living Church of God, Assemblies of Yahweh, Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, Members Church of God International, Unitarian Christians, Unitarian Universalist Christians, The Way International, The Church of God International, and the United Church of God.

We have the problem that if there is a vast number of gods, how would we tell them from an alien civilisation more advanced than ours? In other words, how do you tell a god from a sufficiently advanced technology? (Remember Michael Frayn’s comment on YHWH: “Small-time Stalinm with some of Castro’s showmanship”.) Only the idea of a god which rules the whole bang-shoot of the cosmos makes much sense as distinguishable from something which could have evolved from a technological civilisation.

Unfortunately, if that is the case and there can be only one, then it is fairly evident that the one cannot be simultaneously YHWH, Jehovah and Allah, no matter what the linguistics of the situation are. You can’t realistically be a god which tells three different groups of people that they alone are your chosen people and everyone else is dispensable.

Much more probably, however, we don’t know anything about the god of the universe yet because it has never manifested itself to us.

David J. Littleboy @ 42
This explains why Christianity has such a hard time in Japan, where (according to wiki) somewhere between 1 and 1.5% of the population buys into said religion: Japanese doesn’t require specifying a syntactic number on noun groups…

I very much doubt that. You are, for one thing, ignoring all the other (non-English) languages spoken by Christians and all the languages spoken by Muslims (who have the same “there is only one God” belief), all over the world. This probably amounts to hundreds of different languages, from dozens of different language families; it’s extraordinarily unlikely they all share this one peculiarity of syntax that so impresses you.

I would suggest that “Christianity has such a hard time in Japan” mostly because Japan has never been conquered and ruled by Christians — and because Christianity was explicitly outlawed in Japan for two and a half centuries, from the early 1600s until the Meiji Restoration.

Seems to me the concept of god moved from the external to the internal, and monotheism was the crux. It went from a prescientific explanation for the movements and forces in the external environment, to the description of an individual psychological change which may occur after the following of certain precepts and practices. It began with primitive animism – spirits inside of everything, the plants and animals, the wind and rain. Then, totemism – one or another specific animal provided the model for the life of your clan or your tribe. Developed into polytheism – certain gods rule certain things, the war, the harvest; you applied with offerings to their specific temples around the city, for specific propitiations and expiations. The Jews and the Hindus perhaps independently brought forward the concept of one major god who pervades all, and who, very importantly, can see inside you: “…the Jews believed in a purely spiritual God who can read human hearts, but the pagans believed in gods composed of bodies and minds who were incapable of this.” Vico, New Science (1725), 350. The idea that god can see inside us strikes me as a key invention, and given its comportment with the reality of inner psychological transformation, it still gnaws at us. Judaism opposed the other gods; the omniscience and clairvoyance of the one god was mapped onto the reality of inner psychological transformation and was expressed as the visions of prophets, written into the Old Testament. Hinduism kept the lesser pantheon with its separate temples; inner transformation was explained as the recognition of brahman’s reflection into atman and achieved by holy ones who could help you do the same by practicing devotion in their own cults. Next, both traditions got a major revision or renewal, with much closer emphasis on unifying the method of inner transformation: the Buddha, the Christ. Gautama discarded theism and gave a detailed psychological prescription for inner change (the four noble truths and the eightfold path) and became a personification of it. Jesus’ instructions for mystical practice are strewn disjointedly throughout the Gospels; he called higher consciousness the father, of which he was a son; and this was adjusted by his followers into his deification as the only son. Christianity kept a strong tradition of inner transformation alongside its exoteric devotional practices until the rise of science and industrial commerce watered it all down into the bourgeois virtues, and mysticism was sidelined and forgotten by the mainstream churches. Things took a crucial turn with the discovery, or rediscovery, of psychedelic drugs in the mid-20th Century, and now many people have experienced full-blown religious transformations without any application to god or theology. Subsequently there has been a lot of kooky theories and what we need is a proper book of postpsychedelic mysticism combining techniques of intentionality with neuroscience and biochemistry. So we may be on the verge of a very different new era. There was a question above about what it all means for metaphysics; I’m not sure we have progressed beyond the categories of Aristotle and Kant. But at present, it is pretty clear that our proper epistemology is dual: toward scientific knowledge, and toward expanded consciousness. They are not the same thing, and you need both.

Only the idea of a god which rules the whole bang-shoot of the cosmos makes much sense as distinguishable from something which could have evolved from a technological civilisation.

Here’s another view. Which is the better metaphor? To represent the holy as a single king-like being (who ‘rules’) or as a collective of diverse beings? Or perhaps as a void or field from which forms emerge and sink back?

On the linguistic part of the argument: natural languages are fuzzy by nature, so for example it is difficult to give a strict definition of “christian”: I personally would say that someone who doesn’t believe in the Trinity is not a christian, but as other pointed out above there are comunities of believers that don’t believe in the Trinity but call themselves christians.
Who is right? I think we are just using different meanings of the word “christian”: I mean someone who believes in the divinity of Jesus, whereas they mean someone who believe in the gospels, two different definitions.

If Ares and Mars exist only in the mind of their believers, they are different entities only as long as their believers believe they are different; once the Greek and the Romans start to believe they are the same entity they become the same entity (as they are purely cultural constructs). The same goes for the christian and muslim god (though I’ve never heard christians or muslims say that those are two different gods, only that it is the same God but the other side worships Him the wrong way).

If there is some entity that more or less corresponds to the concept of God, can we say that all religions more or less point to the same entity? Well it depends on how similar this entity is to what said religions say of God.
Also I don’t think God could be defined as an entity in the logical structure of the scholastic theology, which is a problem: I think most of our philosophy of language descends from theological arguments about this stuff from the middle ages, which came about precisely because of this kind of logical conundrums, that appear much more important when you have a vaguely platonic idea of the world and think that these problems refer to the world whereas they are problems of our logic.

Re: 47

If you want to find languages that don’t do a singular/plural distinction and whose speakers go in for Christianity (or some other monotheism), you’ll find such places few and far between. Simply because pretty much all the usual suspect languages/language groups have the s/p distinction (or a singular/dual/plural distinction). Indo-European, Semitic, Swahili, Arabic. The best counterexample would be South (but not North) Korea, where Christianity is popular and the s/p distinction isn’t. (China is said to be about 5% Christian, Taiwan probably more so.)

Also, FWIW, Christianity hasn’t been outlawed in Japan since 1873, almost 150 years. If anything, Meiji policy encouraged Christianity. It’s widely respected here; just not believed.

Simply claiming to be Christian does not make you a Christian.

What I wrote was not that claiming to be a Christian makes you a Christian; what I wrote is that it’s not as clear as you think. I cited the Wikipedia reference not as establishing clearly what is or is not involved in being a Christian but as illustrating the unclarity.

Few would believe Mormons are Christians for example.

I don’t know how you’d test that, but even supposing it’s true, the truth of a statement is not determined simply by how few or how many people believe it to be true.

The trinity is there in the bible.

That, too, is not as clear as you think. I can’t find the Trinity in the Bible.

If you contradict it you aint a Christian

The Bible contradicts itself. If contradicting the Bible makes you not Christian, then the Bible itself isn’t Christian.

I would ask XW if they believe that or want to believe it. I do find William Blake’s mystical universalist Christianity intriguing. Particularly the rejection of an authoritarian patriarchal deity (nobodaddy). Though I find believing in The Divine challenging.
Our Biblical literalist friend, Not Trampas, would say that it was not Christianity, however.
One general issue with the Abrahamic Faiths is their view of a monotheistic creator is filtered through the preconceptions of the authoritarian Patriarch of a tribe of migrant sheep herders.
Clearly if it is correct that in the beginning God created Man in his own image and Man returned the courtesy, we are stuck with God in the image of Father Abraham.

Jake Gibson @ 59
One general issue with the Abrahamic Faiths is their view of a monotheistic creator is filtered through the preconceptions of the authoritarian Patriarch of a tribe of migrant sheep herders.

The tribal leaders of pastoralists tend, I think, to not be as authoritarian as you might imagine, often having to lead by consensus-building. It’s just as likely that the Abrahamic faiths were strongly influenced by the contemporary ideals of supreme/divine kingship in Near Eastern urban societies (e.g., Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia).

Wondering about this:

“I exist, and my neighbours and students successfully refer to me with the term “Harry”.

The ones you’ve met, perhaps. But you have another neighbour, whom you’ve never met, but who has heard about you. One day, this neighbour sees a person who looks vaguely like an academic sort walking down the street. This neighbour decides to start referring to this person as ‘Harry’ because, after all, he seems like he ought to be the Harry he’s heard about. In a subsequent conversation with your other neighbours, this neighbour even says ‘why not ask Harry?’, gesturing to a man present and known to everyone else as Winston, since in fact the man is not you, but Winston.

That Hesperus is identical with Phosphorus is true – necessarily true if you accept the Kripkean account of rigid designation – but at the same time it was discovered to be so.

How dare you deny the Great God Tyr. You’ll be hearing from the Faerunian pantheon!

Is it time to invoke Sapir-Whorf?

“That Hesperus is identical with Phosphorus is true – necessarily true if you accept the Kripkean account of rigid designation – but at the same time it was discovered to be so.”

Whoever discovered this was very smart.

The same discovery was made independently in more than one part of the world (although probably only once by people who were using specifically the names Hesperus and Phosphorus), but it is unlikely that the identity of any of the discoverers can be established with certainty.

Here are the question and answer to the final exam in Religious Studies 101:

Q: Osama bin Laden answered the Lord’s call to blow up the World Trade Center. So hats off to the devout brother. Right or wrong?

A: Wrong!!!

@67:
“Is it time to invoke Sapir-Whorf?”

Sapir-Whorf gets a bad rap in the linguistics world, largely for good reasons. As stated, at least with the examples usually given, it’s problematic. Similarly, I find myself distrustful of linguistic arguments based on “there’s this aboriginal language Y that does X”, where no one can check up on whether or not language Y really does that. The old anthropology joke “I’ve found this language that uses the same word for everything!!! Uh, have you figured out what the word for finger is yet?” is apropos, nasty, and spot on.

But if you learn Japanese as a second language, you’ll find you need to deal with it on it’s own terms. It really is a very different beast. And the Japanese don’t seem to find Christianity anywhere near as compelling as a lot of other places do. Maybe it’s just coincidence (e.g. by the time the government stopped suppressing it, other forms of religious expression/belief were well enough developed that there was simply no need for it.). But that the language doesn’t give you an emphasis on the singularity of concepts for free strikes me as significant in Christianity’s failure to capture the Japanese imagination.

So to get back to Sapir-Whorf, I suspect that there’s room for a more sensible/more sophisticated hypothesis. Languages really are different, but many of those differences may end up merely resulting in differences in what sorts of things are convenient/easy to talk about.

Jake Gibson “The only thing that might give us any ideas about its nature is the Universe it created.”

I find this an odd statement. One of the principles of complexity theory is that you really can’t do such reverse engineering. And I see no reason even if there are creator(s), to believe that they have any continuing relationship to their creation(s). All this seems like projection starting from a particular narrative.

When I was in university I had to study an exam of semiotics, and the example of the morning star was on the textbook (Eco’s “Semiotics”, an extremely boring book differently from other stuff written by Eco).

Now I don’t remember what the book said about Hesperus and Phosporus, but I remember the distinction between “intensional” and “extensional” meaning: intensional means something like “fishes are all the animals who have fins and live in water”, so in this definition if an animal lives in water and has fins, like a dolphin, it counts as a fish, whereas extensional means “this, that, and that other animals are fishes”, from which we can ceck the three animals and see what properties they have in common.

Problem is that as natural languages are fuzzy, we constantly switch from intensional and extensional uses of words. This is not a bug but a feature: we now know that dolphins are not fishes, but it took many centuries of scientific developement to discover this; if we hat to wait until scientific biology before using the word “fish” in the intensional way we would never had developed language in the first place, and neither biology; on the other hand a purely extensional use of language would make any generalisation impossible and therefore again we could have no language.

So when we deal with concepts used in natural languages, we have to accept that a purely intensional or extensional conception of meanings or thruth value doesn’t cut it.

A general idea though is that when we use concepts like fishes Christianity or Mars we postulate the existence of a referent (even if that referent doesn’t exist or is fuzzy).

So in this sense if the Greeks postulated the existence of Ares, the Romans of Mars, and then they got together and postulated that the two are the same, or that Osiris is the same of Dyonisos, then the postulated extensional referent is the same and thus the extensional meaning is the same, even if the divine dude in question dosn’t actually exist.

Another way to put the same concept is that when we speak we postulate a discoursive world, and check it either against reality or against another discoursive world.

If we check our discoursive world against extralinguistic reality, as science is supposed to do, we get empirical thruth, so the question whether Harry has red moustache can have an empirical thruth value but the question whether Bruce and Batman are the same person doesn’t have a thruth value; if we check against a discoursive world like the DC universe the question whether Batman and Bruce are the same person has an extensional thruth value, but this thruth value is limited to the discoursive world of DC and is not the same of an empirical thruth value, otherwise we enter in the logical problems of the ontological proof of the existence of God: suppose that I postulate a turtle whose main a intensional property is that of existing, then that turtle exists, but only in my discoursive world not in reality.

Going back to Mars and Ares, in the discoursive world of the Greek and the Romans after a certain point they were one an the same, also extensionally, but this is independent from the existence in the real world.

“Non-Christian proselyting by sending out the Christian book does seem odd”

An old Joke:

A Rabbi asked a Priest about career prospects in the Catholic Church.

Priest: Pretty good! I start out as a priest then there’s bishop to go for, and then– if I make cardinal–I could even become Pope.

Rabbi: Pope? That’s the highest it goes?

Priest: Well, there’s God of course, but a man can never become God.

Rabbi: Why not? According to you, one of our boys made it!

Mormons believe that all human beings have the potential to become God in their own universe. So they are happy to distribute the Christian version of the book. For Mormons, it’s a handbook.