Religion or Reality

The Word of God?

"To ask whether Moses actually parted the Red Sea, or whether Jesus truly raised Lazarus from the dead, or whether the word of God indeed poured through the lips of Muhammad, is to ask irrelevant questions. The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is 'What do these stories mean?'"

Reza Aslan, No god but God

They say that humans are social creatures. We like to sing, to dance, to write, and to speak, but all of these are simply tools for our greatest joy: storytelling. From the tales our ancestors told around campfires to the movies we watch today, we humans can't resist a good narrative. Although dance and spoken language are great devices to spread our stories, nothing has been as important as the adaption of language into the symbolic structure we call writing. Through this process we are able to make our words immortal, creating information that anyone from anytime can read, so long as they can crack the code. 

The earliest evidence we have of writing, which I'm classifying as containing some sort of alphabet as opposed to just numbers, can be traced back to the ancient people who inhabited Mesopotamia around 5000 years ago. By using a technique known as radiometric dating, the building blocks of substances, called atoms, are analyzed in order to determine their approximate age. This is done by comparing the ratios of very specific atoms present in a given substance. Don't worry if this seems a little technical, it'll make much more sense once we perform a more thorough investigation into the theory of atoms in chapter 7. And I promise it won't be as boring as it sounds.

Anyways, like I was saying, writing is a rather 'handy' development (get it?) because it allows us to transfer information to other people without actually meeting them. This is kind of a big deal. Once this door was opened, our ancestors undertook the task of documenting the stories that had been passed down orally from their predecessors, thus ensuring the continuation of their ancient tales. 

Or so they thought. 

Have you ever played Telephone? Stay with me, this is going to tie in, I promise. In the game of Telephone, a group of people, ideally 5 or more, sit in a circle. One person begins by whispering a piece of information to somebody else. The receiver of the message then proceeds to whisper the information to the next person, who whispers it to the next, and so on and so forth until the message travels back to the originator. The message more often than not becomes distorted, meaning that it is not exactly the same coming back as it was going out. If this happens with under ten transfers of the same message, imagine what would happen if a message was transferred over a hundred, or a thousand, or even a million times.

But we're talking about written words, not spoken ones. 

Yes, and spoken words are easier to distort because there is no proof of the initial message. Writing, on the other hand, leaves behind a paper trail that you can follow back to the original in order to verify any doubts, right?

Left. 

Nice try, but when I said right, I meant something I deserve, like my right to bear arms. And by 'bear arms' I mean the limbs of an animal, but not from the furry creatures that hibernate, I mean from a barbaric person.

Wow. Words are tricky, huh? And those are all words from the same language. Now imagine if they were words from a different language. If you are multi-lingual, you already know that perfect translations are not always possible due to the linguistic differences between the languages. Simply put, what you say in english isn't exactly what would be translated to or from another language. Take for example the following phrase: