Why Do Intelligent people still believe in religion? 21: Humans suck at comparative language | GinaConspiracy
I ran a little experiment the other day, it is horribly non-scientific but I did it to prove a point I went to babble fish and I typed in the following phrase
Then I translated it into greek since much of the bible was written in greek Then since I didn't have any other translation option I then converted that sentence into french Then I converted it to italian since it is the child of latin and the KJV of the bible was translated from Latin Then I translated that back into english Now compare the two
You can sort of get the meaning that the original translation had, but at the same time the precision and intensity of what you were originally trying to say is completely lost This is because words themselves have differing and multiple meanings depending on the area, people or point in time Therefore a direct translation is pretty much useless when it comes to language This is why I have to laugh at King James only christians, their book is translated from old Hebrew, greek and aramaic then translated into Latin then into middle english Forget what you may miss from the movement of middle to modern english, the translation jumps across 2 languages has been proven to have very harsh effects on the meaning from the origional text
KJV is one of the most inaccurate versions of the bible, very pretty to read, but sorely lacking in context and clarity The most accurate is probably the American standard version, world english bible or the revised standard edition KJV only people claim that these other versions are frauds made by the catholic church to suppress the truth of the real bible If you cross enough languages and enough time the original meaning could be completely lost or be interpreted to mean something entirely different Many times just to catch a meaning in a text or movie you have to actually live in the area to get the meaning
I knew a girl from the UK who loved American movies, and visited the US Upon arriving here she was ridiculously disappointed All of our movies show American as being glamorous, and almost futuristic with amazing architecture Upon her arrival she was shocked to find out just how cookie cutter all of our architecture is In the US we don't preserve our old buildings, we knock them down so we can build a mall that looks just like every other mall
Our movies fill that gaps for us in some ways so we can enjoy good architecture without actually having much This gives a false impression to people abroad and we don't even think about it here One of my bosses is Mexican and uses the phrase “Best regards” ending all of her emails This isnt exactly inaccurate, but it appears stuffy as the word is usually used when either you are sending a business letter to someone you will never meet or as something you say to someone who is going away and you will probably never see or here form again There is an implied meaning that will not be picked up unless you live in the thick of it Crossing cultures and languages will awaken just how fluid and imprecise a language is without actually living in the culture
It is when I went to the middle east and europe that I began to question my faith in the absolute truth of the bible I began reading it in the middle east the area where it was written, and all of the nice happiness and hopefulness it always gave me, drained out, it became a rather dark and cynical book, one written not for people of luxury but of a people who had survival on their minds Even if it was absolute truth there was no way I could get the exact meaning of what was being said unless I traveled back in time Even if you can comprehend language differences you now have to think 4th dimensionally about it Look at any book from just 100 years ago and many words will not have the same meaning Queer, fag and gay in those days mean completely different things today
Oral tradition without literacy fluctuates with even more volatility One of the reasons why Ebonics is not considered a real language is because it fluctuates and changes way too fast to set any established rules Ebonics and slang are many times used as a way to challenge the ruling power, and as the Hebrews were quite often not the ruling power, who knows how ridden the bible is with slang even when a good scribe will try their best not to use it If you try to translate a bible passage from the wrong era, the meaning could be completely different Just take the Gettysburg address, To a person of the future who didn't understand the change in language and tried to do a direct literal translation “Four score and 7 years ago” may be interpreted as a game was being played 7 years ago with a scoring of 4 points
Quite a lot different from just being a fancy way of saying 87 years ago Language mutates and have a quantifiable and predictable mutation rate just like genes do They can't predict what changes are going to occur, but they can predict the rate of change with an extremely close accuracy This is why we can link english as being a distant ancestor of indian sanskrit which evolved from another language that developed around the Iranian Kazakh regions which is how we can trace probabilities of certainty of history of human migration It is also why English is considered an Indo-Aryan language as opposed to a Semitic language
Language evolution also goes against the bible as all language were created at the tower of Bable, but you never hear a creationist railing against this theory However now that I brought it up and made them aware of the evidence they may rail against it as well Just like with species, language evolution is dependent on terrain, environment, neighboring languages, invasive languages We borrow and exchanges words with other languages and if social or political pressures call for it, or new discoveries occurs we will invent a new word or reinvent an old word and give it the new meaning This is called Jargon, every field or job you have ever worked has jargon, the military is especially rife with it If you tried to directly translate military words to regular English you would be lost as it is filled with slang, tradition and large quantities of acronyms In their field these are time savers and everyone knows what you are talking about, but to an outsider it would sound confusing and crazy
Science is nothing but jargon, one of the reasons it is confusing and hard to understand, why trick was so easily spun against the scientific community in the terms of the hacked climate change letters Trick is a mathematical term for a creative way to approach a problem, it has nothing to do with dishonesty or level of accuracy Theory is another of these words that confuse the public and because of it, I have had to make 2 videos on the subject and I still get that evolution is “JUST A THEORY” Anyone who can base their entire future on an ancient book that has been mistranslated over and over again, much of which was originally written at the beginning of that language's literacy causing ridiculous ambiguity, such as the fact that ancient hebrew doesn't have vowels, without full understanding or the eras, cultures and languages is living in a world no different from someone who makes up their own imaginary world to live in They both have equal evidence for their belief one just does not have an ancient book to back it up
However because we are prone to blind faith and belief, as well as the parochial effect where we assume that because the world is a certain way where we are then the entire world must be that way Only through travel, experiencing diversity and study of our vast world and knowledge can we begin to destroy our own delusions based on ignorance, none of which was our fault, but it kept us trapped nonetheless
Source: Youtube
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