The Bible has its own narrative of the origin of language, or at least the origin of its diversity, and it paints a problematic picture both of God and of language.
Month: January 2019
The Tragedy of Christian Science
Sometime when I was very young, my mother began bringing me to church. The church was of the Christian Science denomination, in which she herself had been raised. She did not adopt the doctrine of the religion wholesale, but rather maintained a loose and abstract belief in God and Jesus. She told me many years later that she was not trying to indoctrinate me into the religion, but rather only to expose me to religion in general and to give me some moral grounding
The Great Flood
What’s interesting to me is that the story of a great flood is one that many people have been telling for a very long time. But in many traditions, and in the Abrahamic tradition in particular, there is an aspect to the story that is particularly troubling: God became displeased with us. So They murdered almost the entire world.
Summa: A Satanist Reads the Nicene Creed
Summa is a choral setting of the Latin translation of the Nicene Creed, composed by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt in 1977. He later arranged it for strings, and that rendition is perhaps the more popular, but I have never been able to appreciate the music apart from the text. It is one of my favorite works of music, but I can’t listen to it without hearing the ideological dissonance within it. The music seems to be expressing something to which the text is antithetical.