The Name of God

The Jehovah's Witness who rings your door bell makes a fuss over the god of their sect having a name: Jehovah. The Jews, from whom this god is derived, have been making a fuss for millennia over the name of their tribal deity: Yahweh. And of course Jehovah is an illiterate corruption of Yahweh: so, actually, they're talking about the "same" god. (Nothing is ever the same, pk, except to the blind.) (Note: translate derived as "borrowed" but translate borrowed as stolen!)

Now to this religious, me, pk, when I was a tyke, the name of my god was important: so said my indoctrination. God name was Jehovah (though we were also told that it was a mis-transliteration: from Yahweh). I soon saw that the Bible also used a few titles. Washington could be called "George," or "George Washington," or "Mr. Washington"; he could also be called "General Washington," then "Mr. President." So God, who was called Yahweh by the Jews, and was called Jehovah by the Christians, was also called "Lord" by the Jews (Elohim) and by the Christians (Lord, from the English, not the Semitic). (Note: Elohim in Hebrew is a plural! Think of the Bible's "let us ..." (Some monotheism!))

(Meantime the Arabs call their Semitic god Allah!)

Now the tyke pk believed (as he was indoctrinated) that God (or Jehovah, or Yahweh, or Lord, or Lord God ...) (or Allah) cared about these trivia: that God was a magical, old, male magician (whose name) was not Lilith, and certainly not Beatrice) who "made" the world with magical incantations. Eventually God manifested himself to me, after a suitable period of development, alternate training, and reflection, and communicated to me (not in words, and not by graphics either) that all that was primitive ignorant supposition, harmless if you think of thinking, particularly ill-informed thinking, as metaphor: as modeling. Thus I came not to reject the idea of god, neither to quarrel about diction in a theological semantics controlled by the intolerant and unimaginative) but to translate the terms into equivalents of theory: an idea never fully tested, always refin-able.

Think of this: To a magician, "abracadabra" may turn the water into wine. It must be spelled right. The sorcerer doing the translation must have fasted the proper number of days, have deprived himself of the company of women for the proper portion of his lifetime ... But: the mathematician calls the ratio of radius of a circle to its circumference, by the formula pi r squared, "pi." What if he called it "Sam"? or "Barbara"? Wouldn't the value, wouldn't the ratio, still be the same?

God introduced himself to me in terms of my developing, always imperfect, never fully mature sense of reason. "God" is a principle more than a principal.

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More coming, but the alert reader should be able to develop the implications whether or not I drop dead before returning.