Believing

A friend's post on his blog mentions preconceived ideas that many people have of what believers believe. What I believe differs vastly, sometimes even with fellow Baha'is, from many believers. The reason for this is because we each "hear" differently as we all can see from reading one another's blogs, from reading the news, from reading a book. We interpret even the most "obvious" things completely differently.

Take the remark "a woman without her man is nothing". Outragous as it stands, but is this how it was said or meant? What about, "A woman: without her, man is nothing." Back in the day when oral tradition reigned how many things were passed down that were changed in the interpretation, in the inflection, the tone, the syntax?

When we think about who was writing down the oral stories of that time and place we can understand how these men would have a hard time believing many of the things they were being told. To change an inflection would have been relatively easy, especially if you have one superpower telling you to come up with one "true" book to read and follow. You can also understand the inclination to try to make one set of books the authorative one when you have hundreds of small booklets running around with thousands of sentences with millions of punctuation marks changing the meaning of a sentence.

Even in the languages that didn't use punctuation inflection is [was] used and when interpreted from oral to written would reflect the transcriber's idea, reflecting his prejudices and predilictions, of what was meant. Interesting that much of it was done by men, in self-imposed segregation.

Try writing an idea that you think is self evident and play with the punctuation. Say something to someone in one tone, say the exact same thing to someone else using a different tone. What are the results?

Now, write something meant for all the cultures of all the people of the world. For those words to have a chance of being interpreted correctly and with the highest regard for the most people it has to start with a common foundation. For many, it is with belief.