20/04/08

Third visit to my new church today. I like it. A nice mix of traditional and modern, without going too far in either direction. Though I question why they've painted the wall behind the altar that particular shade of green. I would have gone for, uh, something else.

So anyway, I was sitting there during the service and I got thinking about words. Which is not to suggest I wasn't listening to the sermon, since that would clearly have been both bad and wrong. But the sermon was about buildings and tools, and that made me think about words as tools and how in some ways they are ineffective, and what a lot of trouble that's probably caused over the years.

Religion is, of course, a prime example. I know a lot of people reading this probably don't believe in God, and that's cool - but just for a moment, let's work on the assumption that God exists. And one day, you're going for a walk ... and you see God. This is rather remarkable, so you immediately run home and tell everyone what's happened (at this point, we better assume that you're also living in the past, where people won't lock you up for being a nutter). So, you tell them and they're dead impressed because it's not everyone who sees God, and they say to you "So tell us, we're dying to know - what did God look like?". And you think, and you say "Well. I suppose God looked a bit like ... "

What?

What do you say?

If you're completely honest, you'd have to admit that God looked like nothing you've ever seen before. You have no words to describe what you saw. But your friends won't be satisfied with that - I mean, you've seen God for God's sake, you can't just come back and say "I dunno. God looked like God." So you think of all the things you've seen in your life, all the things you do have words for, and you try to use them to describe God.

And that point there, is where the trouble starts. Because who are you, when you answer this question? We've already made the assumption that you're in the past, not the present. But which country are you from? What culture were you brought up with? Are you British? Chinese? Brazilian? Are you young or old? Rich or poor? What experiences have you had, that you will now use to attempt to describe the indescribable to people who will never see it for themselves?

People get so angry about the differences between religions, but is it really that surprising? We think that if God exists and different people across the world have seen God, they should all be describing God in the same way. But why? Do we do that with anything else? If I show you a fruit today that you've never seen before, you might go home to your American family and say it looked like a tomato, and your friend might go home to her Japanese family and say it looked like a persimmon. And then when the descendants of you and your friend finally meet up again two hundred years later, well, I suppose they could all go to war about who was right. But that would be stupid. Because the fruit I showed you was clearly a varglesplat. And why should everyone have a huge punch-up, simply because neither of you had a word for that?