Teleidoscope

Tue, Dec 12, 2006

Call Him Lord?

Posted at 11:23 pm MST to Miscellaneous

It seems to me that in American religious discourse the word "Lord" has become semantically denatured. In current practice, it is effectively just a synonym for "God", with no other weight. Or else the preachers aren't really thinking about what they are saying.

It might be interesting to take a few sermons by well-known preachers and replace every occurence of the word "Lord" with the word "Master". And then do the same thing with the word "Boss" as the replacement.

I pay attention to words. And texts. I own translations of primary and secondary religious texts from lots of religions and cultures: Buddhist, Hindu, Norse, Confucian, Shinto, Judaism, Islam, various flavors of Christianity, and others. The semantics of divinity are complicated, and do not translate well across languages and cultures.

I own four different translations of the Bible. I had read our family Bible from cover to cover before I finished high school (not something Catholics were particularly encouraged to do in those days). And one of the things that finally severed my emotional attachment to the Catholic church was parish priests who essentially lied about scripture in their sermons in ways that could not be explained by translation problems.

My copy of the Koran is printed in Arabic and English on facing pages. I think the Arabic is considered to be the Koran proper, while the English translation is technically considered commentary. The Koran is always supposed to be transmitted in the original language. This addresses some of the problems with having divergent translations of scriptural texts. But I don't think it addresses the problem of cultural semantic shifts.

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