What the hell are you talking about?

Love is just a word, for when the fun begins... 
a word we use to cover up, a multitude of sins

-Dory Langdon, "Goodbye Again"
performed by Diahann Carroll

Words, Words Words.... Language is all we have, to get the idea in my head, into yours. 

Yes, I can wave my hands, raise my eyebrows, and feign a frown or smile, but language is primary. The fact that I am able to peck out some symbols on a screen and (presumably) concomitantly have ideas arise in your mind, almost like sunshine on a cloudy day, is quite remarkable. 

I bring this up because I think our most sacred words are largely undefined and ambiguous. The amorphous concepts we hold closest to our hearts have no shared meaning. I remember two years ago when I looked through the Bible to sort out how it defined God, I repeatedly came across the word "holy." In the original hebrew, it just means "special." How is that for ineffable?

I think this happens all the time when we discuss the world, politics and religion. What is meant by fairness, justice, care, respect? Too often we have very precise interpretations which often vary dramatically from the person we are speaking with. I need to remind myself to spend more time on the obvious. These are our real values, not the conclusions we reach.

More time on the axioms and less on the theorems. 

Here is an interesting passage I came across on Wikipedia that highlights this very problem:


Ignosticism or igtheism is the theological position that every other theological position (including agnosticism and atheism) assumes too much about the concept of God and many other theological concepts:

• It can be defined as encompassing two related views about the existence of God:The view that a coherent definition of God must be presented before the question of the existence of God can be meaningfully discussed. Furthermore, if that definition is unfalsifiable, the ignostic takes the theological noncognitivist position that the question of the existence of God (per that definition) is meaningless. In this case, the concept of God is not considered meaningless; theterm "God" is considered meaningless.
• The second view is synonymous with theological noncognitivism, and skips the step of first asking "What is meant by 'God'?" before proclaiming the original question "Does God exist?" as meaningless.