tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post115893598517180518..comments2024-03-07T12:57:35.296-05:00Comments on Varieties of Unreligious Experience: Oral TraditionConrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-1159024387272190322006-09-23T11:13:00.000-04:002006-09-23T11:13:00.000-04:00Yes, I agree, the thought-experiment would be bett...Yes, I agree, the thought-experiment would be better without the citations, so long as we assume the definitions to be perfect--we also would have to eliminate any diachronic element, ie. the word's evolution over time.<BR/><BR/>I think the text-mysticism of Judaism is what makes it so much more interesting and appealing to me than, say, Christianity, with its motto, "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life".Conrad H. Rothhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-1158998328949307782006-09-23T03:58:00.000-04:002006-09-23T03:58:00.000-04:00That is a very interesting and provocative questio...That is a very interesting and provocative question. You used the OED as your example so it is also worth noting the tremendous number of passages from other published works that also line its pages, with some entries having several lines from novels and the like supporting their definitions.<BR/><BR/>I think that I would find the question more profound were those examples lacking, but I don't know of any other dictionary with similar scope to the OED.<BR/><BR/>You mentioned as well (in the post dealing with <I>Finnegans Wake</I>) that many have traditionally viewed the Bible in a related manner, treating it as a repository of all world knowledge. Just to link that idea back to this, mainstream Biblical scholarship until less than a hundred years ago was also want to read the Bible in much the way your hypothetical character reads his dictionary.<BR/><BR/>Poring over every word, again and again, they derived conclusions about the ancient world on the basis of what the weighing-up of the Bible's words taught them. In the Kabbalistic tradition, this is done by the permutation of letters; in the academic, through the comparison of verses.<BR/><BR/>There's little difference between the two methods and I think that one could just as easily establish a religion (not to mention, deriving concrete historical fact) from a similar reading of the OED.SFHhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09549983078343070107noreply@blogger.com