Skip to main content ↑ ↓
Topic: The Awesomesauce with Religion (Read 219964 times)

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #825 –
It is sad the direction re the national church in Sweden. If you are referring to the Russian orthodox to the "east" it has been growing considerably since the great collapse of the USSR days. Choices given back multiple extension and return of senior clergy positions and so on. It plays it's part and encouraged to do so. It is very ritualistic and maybe even more than Romanism (although statue worship stuff is not allowed - just icons). In the Western part of the Russian Federation it is much grown and is re-emerging elsewhere so it would be wrong just to think things are practically much as in the terrible Soviet days. It is well in the public eye and is represented too in things loike presidential  swearing in days and the army has Orthodox chaplains. So change days!
"Quit you like men:be strong"

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #826 –
Quote from: rjhowie on
It is sad the direction re the national church in Sweden. If you are referring to the Russian orthodox to the "east"...
No, I am referring to something more comparable: Lutheran Churches in Finland and the Baltic countries, as the Church of Sweden is also Lutheran. Lutheran churches in different countries seem to be all over the place on gender issues, and for example they accept female priests now everywhere, but the definition of marriage has remained compatible with natural law in the Eastern spectrum.

Both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox are different animals compared to Protestantism. The top leadership in RC and OE hardly ever accept innovations, but some organisations affiliated with them come up with new ideas all the time. Whereas in Protestantism the leadership seems to be easily swayed by the spirit of times, overriding a significant internal conservative faction.

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #827 –
Quote from: ersi on
Let's suppose so. But then what is "hen" and how is it any better or different? As a recent concoction with no real-life referent, "hen" is a delusion and impediment of grammar. (English equivalent appears to be ze.)

It's Church of Sweden you are talking about. From your point of you, they were illogical wishful thinkers to begin with and now they are just adding to it. From my point of view, they are destroying the last thing that could have allowed them to stand a little longer.

Sad to watch how Church of Sweden, where the majority of the population still belongs to it, is desperate to be hip in the false hope of making itself relevant for the society at large, while a bit more to the east, where just a fraction of the people belong to the churches, the churches are far more conservative and thus demonstrate more backbone and consequently also more relevance.

It is the Diocese of Västerås (seat pop. 120k). Not that I think the head office would mind, mind you, but it is of local/minor interest. The writer has put her argument up here

Quote
Det viktiga med det lilla barnet som föds i krubban är inte könet, det viktiga är att vi i det barnet ser Guds närvaro och Världens hopp.
What's important with the small child born in the crib isn't the gender, but that we in that child see the presence of God and the hope of the World.
Christology and the relevance of the nativity scene to Christianity is of passing interest to me, but for the more engaging topic a non-gendered personal pronoun is hardly "the delusion and impediment of grammar". Assumedly Proto-Indo-European didn't have a gendered pronoun, though assumedly Proto-Germanic had and most modern European languages have. Languages can manage pretty well with either alternative.

It is certainly more convenient than writing e.g. "s/he", and I kind of prefer that option to singular "they", but will it be a fixture of language? Pronouns rarely change, but they do occasionally. 

The Church of Sweden is huge because until the year 2000 this was the state church of Sweden, everyone were a member unless they, or their parents before them, had actively left the church. So while 60% of the population belongs to it, it only means that they haven't bothered to do anything about the membership, not that they are Christians. The actual active number of church members is far, far lower.

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #828 –
Quote from: jax on
It is the Diocese of Västerås (seat pop. 120k). Not that I think the head office would mind, mind you, but it is of local/minor interest. The writer has put her argument up here
Yes, along with false apology,
Quote
Om någon blivit sårad av vår formulering, så var det inte avsikten. Avsikten var att öppna för ett samtal...
Didn't mean to hurt? It's false because it's followed by "the intention was to open discussion" i.e. to stir up a deliberate controversy.

Quote from: jax on
Christology and the relevance of the nativity scene to Christianity is of passing interest to me...
It's not even a matter of Christology, but of basic decency. Representatives of that church do not know how to be decent.

If you just want to greet, then you do it in traditional terms. Otherwise it's not a greeting, but at best a joke, at worst an insult - and you know it! If you want to stir up a Christological controversy, assemble a circle of appropriate experts whose job it is to take it on.

Quote from: jax on
...a non-gendered personal pronoun is hardly "the delusion and impediment of grammar". Assumedly Proto-Indo-European didn't have a gendered pronoun, though assumedly Proto-Germanic had and most modern European languages have. Languages can manage pretty well with either alternative.
As far as I know, all European languages that have the silly grammatical gender, also employ a neutral pronoun among them - it, das, det... To invent a fourth gender only makes it worse. If the grammatical gender poses problems, then abolish it, instead of exacerbating it.

Anyway, all linguistic inventions have to be cautious. They have to make sense both soci(olinguistic)ally and (onto)logically, not just ride on some current fad.

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #829 –
Yes you are in a way right ersi and my Protestantism has got itself carried away with too liberal a direction. The Church of Rome is stronger on the issues raised but it is also as corrupt as hell in hard facts of life on sexual stuff. The RC corner could take lessons from the orthodox.
"Quit you like men:be strong"

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #830 –
Quote from: ersi on
The top leadership in RC and OE hardly ever accept innovations,
The top leadership in RC is the Pope. I suppose that even in Letónia you've heard about Francis. Not the first to innovate.
Quote from: ersi on
Both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox are different animals compared to Protestantism. The top leadership in RC and OE hardly ever accept innovations, but some organisations affiliated with them come up with new ideas all the time. Whereas in Protestantism the leadership seems to be easily swayed by the spirit of times, overriding a significant internal conservative faction.
Very wrong way trying to compare protestants with Catholics and Orthodoxes. Like comparing fake Chinese production with Rolls Royce.
Very elegant to call them "easily swayed by the spirit of times". They deserve to be called much worst.
A matter of attitude.

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #831 –
The Church of Rome has tried things with the Russian Orthodox but get nowhere. For all their ritualistic side the Orthodox has a less bloody and painful history than Rome.  In Russia the Old believers were shunned when the Orthodox changes some of their practices and apart from small persecution were eventually allowed to plod on and still do. When you compare what happened to early reformers with Rome what a vastly different deathly history!

I would agree with our Portuguese friend that the present pope is into some reforming and boy has he got a mountain (!). There was another modern Pope who did try that. He was the one before that wee imp, Pope John Paul. The Pope just prior to him died after a couple of months . He was into the changing mind and his secretary a Cardinal was a member of the rogue Italian Masonic Lodge that was as corrupt as hell. When the nun came in at morning time she found the Pope sitting dead in his bed and that cardinal was called. He removed the glasses, cup and papers. The nun later asked if there would be an autopsy and told "no."  When John Paul later as Pope visited the USA he met the Cardinal of Chicago (who had been suspended by the recently passed away Pope). John Paul had immediately suspended that senior man and was give a presentation box with money as a donation.

The pope who died so soon after election was a man in the mood for change and he was shocked at what he discovered about moral and political/economic corruption. RC's should not have been in the Freemasons yet that pal secretary was. The same rogue lodge had a member discovered hanging under Blackfriar bridge in London and masonic symbols laid beside him.  As for the Vatican bank that was another dodgy corner shocking that poor lost man in the Vatican. The Pope who died as said was no doubt in the same mood as the present incumbent. Even the Masonic lot did not want that lodge.

Now I know that there are plenty of decent people in the RC Church and I do not deny them rights whilst there is so much still going on inside it that is head-shaking. As much as I disagree with it's principles I go along with them having the same rights as I have. Decent people and so on while I praise the great Scots Reformer John Knox! There you are!
"Quit you like men:be strong"

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #832 –
1. AFAIK, according to all mainstream Christian churches' doctrine, Jesus is not an angel. He is resurrected and he ascended to heavens with(in) his body. It's supposed to be a glorified body. Otherwise he could not enter locked rooms, or survive the lack of oxygen in outer space. No information whether his dong ascended with him, although he surely had one before having been crucified.

2. Since some years ago, Lutherans in Brazil insist on calling everybody by two genders as a norm, such as: "welcome and welcomess, people and peopless, everybodiers and everybodiesses!" (It sounds crazy even in Portuguese, and it's hard to explain it in English. Portuguese does not have a neutral gender particle.)

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #833 –
Quote from: Barulheira on
AFAIK, according to all mainstream Christian churches' doctrine, Jesus is not an angel.
Evidently. I probably failed at implying that they might be unintentionally revealing Paul's original intentions that were so unclear in Corinthians, presumably because they were only accessible for those properly initiated into the mystery cult. Of course Corinthians goes either way. Corporeal or incorporeal? Earth or Heavens? Who can tell. I'm almost as confused as the Corinthians about what the original Christians may have thought.[1] ;)

In any case, calling Jesus an "it" clearly implies something about Jesus himself, does it not? The more interesting option being that he was supernatural, as the original Christians may have thought. Or more boring, a Christian atheist's point of view that he's symbolic.

Quote from: Barulheira on
Since some years ago, Lutherans in Brazil insist on calling everybody by two genders as a norm, such as: "welcome and welcomess, people and peopless, everybodiers and everybodiesses!" (It sounds crazy even in Portuguese, and it's hard to explain it in English. Portuguese does not have a neutral gender particle.)
Could you write the phrase in Portuguese? Are the Lutherans afraid to offend transsexuals by saying something like "ladies and gentlemen"?
1 I lean slightly toward the supernatural interpretation of the texts. It seems more sensible that way.↵

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #834 –
What those Lutherans are doing is a groan and shows what happens when you go too far into the so-called word liberalism and what it does in practice.
"Quit you like men:be strong"

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #835 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
In any case, calling Jesus an "it" clearly implies something about Jesus himself, does it not?
It clearly implies something about those who call him that way. Would you call angel Gabriel "it"?

Quote from: Barulheira on
Since some years ago, Lutherans in Brazil insist on calling everybody by two genders as a norm, such as: "welcome and welcomess, people and peopless, everybodiers and everybodiesses!" (It sounds crazy even in Portuguese, and it's hard to explain it in English. Portuguese does not have a neutral gender particle.)
Are you saying Portuguese does not even have the equivalent of French "on"? In that case, I assume, Portuguese must drop pronouns a lot, at least Spanish does. This is yet another way to keep things neutral.[1]


In Estonian, omitting the third person singular pronoun (i.e. omitting the subject altogether) is a modern (no earlier than the 80's, I think) way of creating an impersonal sentence. Oh, and naturally there is just one third person singular pronoun, without any implication of gender, grammatical or otherwise. Why anyone would make up two or three or even four like "hen" or "ze" is beyond me.
1 This would work provided that finite verb forms do not have any gender attached to them. But this still leaves the participles and other gender-infected elements dangling and you have plenty of those, certainly in writing.↵

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #836 –
Quote from: ersi on
It clearly implies something about those who call him that way. Would you call angel Gabriel "it"?
I would use masculine pronouns unless I were consciously trying not to for some reason. But that doesn't change the fact that he's neither male nor female, whether in biology[1] or gender.[2]
1 Obviously.↵
2 I suppose there's some wiggle room for disagreement on that one, albeit probably more in your definition of gender than of Gabriel.↵

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #837 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
I would use masculine pronouns unless I were consciously trying not to for some reason.
This is what normal people do. And there has to be a good reason not to, such as gay mafia threatening their life.

Yes, grammatical gender is glitchy vis-a-vis objective reality (particularly with regard to inanimate things) and it may occasionally appear that a gender gets neglected,[1] but it's a grammar thing - otherwise you are neglecting grammar!

Inventing a fourth gender to fix a problem that is not there (or, from another POV, is too bad already) is not a normal thing to do. Edit: There are other more drastic developments in languages, such as effectively the loss of plural nouns in (spoken) French. The same seems to be happening in Spanish as we speak: I keep noticing how Spanish and Latin American singers drop the s-sound whenever it should occur in the end of the syllable.

Quote from: Frenzie on
But that doesn't change the fact that he's neither male nor female, whether in biology[2] or gender.[3]
There's biology, there's definition of gender from several angles, and there's also theology. The last has very much to do with the definition of Gabriel (or of angels, rather).
1 And sometimes it's the masculine that gets neglected: In French, "a/the person" is une/la personne and nobody whines. In German and Greek, plural articles and plural pronouns have feminine-like declension and nobody whines. ↵
2 Obviously.↵
3 I suppose there's some wiggle room for disagreement on that one, albeit probably more in your definition of gender than of Gabriel.↵

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #838 –
Quote from: ersi on
There are other more drastic developments in languages, such as effectively the loss of plural nouns in (spoken) French. The same seems to be happening in Spanish as we speak: I keep noticing how Spanish and Latin American singers drop the s-sound whenever it should occur in the end of the syllable.
With the redundant plurality markers in those languages I suppose it stands to reason that something's got to give. In Dutch and English we only have de/the without any special plural determiner like les/los. Of course since that's my background I'm inclined to think it'd be a whole lot easier to simplify that shenanigans than to get rid of the -s. :P

Quote from: ersi on
There's biology, there's definition of gender from several angles, and there's also theology. The last has very much to do with the definition of Gabriel (or of angels, rather).
Sure, but pretty much only the latter-day types disagree on the basic nature of angels in this matter afaik. According to the regular Abrahamic religions angels are created spiritual beings quite distinct from humans without gender, and neither Christian nor Islamic developments from Judaism question that. Parenthetically, Islam has its spiritual but gendered jinn in addition to angels.

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #839 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
With the redundant plurality markers in those languages I suppose it stands to reason that something's got to give.
The important point is that it's the same invariant s everywhere that serves as a plural marker and now it's the s-sound giving way, regardless of what it's marking, if anything.

For example, Old French feste(s) became modern fête(s). Not only did the plural marker s disappear (in speech), but also the word-internal syllable-final s. The same universal reduction of s's in syllable-final positions is going on in Spanish right now. Portuguese likely does not qualify for this development.

Ladies and gentlemen

Reply #840 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
Could you write the phrase in Portuguese? Are the Lutherans afraid to offend transsexuals by saying something like "ladies and gentlemen"?

"Be welcome, everybody"

used to be:

"Sejam todos bem vindos"

but now they say:

"Sejam bem vindos e bem vindas, todos e todas".

It's crazy.

In Portuguese, every noun has a gender. Woman is female, man is male. Interesting enough, vagina is female, clitoris is male. Person is female, human being is male. Country is male, land is female. One exception is for geographic proper nouns. Some of them are genderless, and so you cannot use an article before them. Brazil is male (o Brasil). Germany is female (a Alemanha). Portugal is genderless (o Portugal? a Portugal? No...) Lisbon, Berlin, New York are genderless. Rio is male. Once you want to qualify a genderless location, you have to put a gender to its adjective. I'm not sure on how it works. I suppose, if you want to say "Portugal is beautiful", the adjective will be male or female depending on whether you are referring to the country or to the land... usually male.

Os plural

Reply #841 –
Quote from: ersi on
For example, Old French feste(s) became modern fête(s). Not only did the plural marker s disappear (in speech), but also the word-internal syllable-final s. The same universal reduction of s's in syllable-final positions is going on in Spanish right now. Portuguese likely does not qualify for this development.
In Brazil something similar has been happening for a long time, but since the government or president Lula, it has widespread like a plague. When the article or pronoun is plural, the noun used to be plural, but now, not only the final "s" has been dropped, but the plural altogether.

"the women" = "as mulheres" > "as mulher"
"two trucks" = "dois caminhões" > "dois caminhão"

Though it sounds just disgusting.

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #842 –
You're doubtless aware, but of course that aforementioned les is also pronounced /le/.

The English squirrel is also unrecognizable as the modern French écureuil. (Something like sciurus → scurellus → escuirel → écureuil.)

For French people all of that ê stuff is probably a complete nightmare, but it definitely makes things easier for me. All of those loanwords like Nl feest/En fest are much easier to recognize that way.

Quote from: ersi on
but also the word-internal syllable-final s.
I'm not sure if that the -s should be singled out. The final vowel disappeared in all cases except syllables ending in -a (turned into ə), which also disappeared completely in Modern French.

Internal syllables were dropped wholesale (insulata > île)
Several intervocalic consonants (maturus > mûr, augustus > août)

lactem > lacte > lait > le
vocem > voce > voiz > vwa
pontem > ponte > pont > põ

Lexical markings have (annoyingly to me) long since shifted completely from end to beginning.

I wasn't aware this was also happening in Spanish. :)
 

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #843 –
Quote from: Barulheira on
In Portuguese, every noun has a gender. Woman is female, man is male. Interesting enough, vagina is female, clitoris is male. Person is female, human being is male. Country is male, land is female. One exception is for geographic proper nouns. Some of them are genderless, and so you cannot use an article before them. Brazil is male (o Brasil). Germany is female (a Alemanha). Portugal is genderless (o Portugal? a Portugal? No...) Lisbon, Berlin, New York are genderless. Rio is male. Once you want to qualify a genderless location, you have to put a gender to its adjective. I'm not sure on how it works. I suppose, if you want to say "Portugal is beautiful", the adjective will be male or female depending on whether you are referring to the country or to the land... usually male.
In Dutch and German, a girl is neuter. Suck on that. :P

Vagina is feminine, so is clitoris.

I believe most countries are neuter, if only by association,[1] and Dutch has no "its". So in Dutch you'd say "it Brazil of the 19th century and his whatever" (the Brazil of the 19th century and its…)

The girl example above is a rare example of deviating from grammar in this matter, however. Logically it would be "it girl and his toy" but we actually say "it girl and her toy" by a different, ungrammatical logic.

To make things difficult for me, many words that are masculine in the Netherlands are feminine in Belgium. So I'd say "the pigeon and his breadcrumb" unless I explicitly knew it was a female animal. A Belgian does the reverse.
1 Land and rijk are neuter, so Duitsland is neuter by definition, as is Frankrijk. But so are places like China or Portugal, and I can't think of any counter-examples.↵

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #844 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
You're doubtless aware, but of course that aforementioned les is also pronounced /le/.
You mean as in les fêtes [le fɛt]? The result of the loss of s's (which happened to serve as plural markers) is that the vowels of the article will have to bear the burden of serving as plural markers [la fɛt] versus [le fɛt]. Spanish may end up with the same result (the article shows the plural, not the noun) or a new marker may crop up.

Quote from: Barulheira on
"the women" = "as mulheres" > "as mulher"
"two trucks" = "dois caminhões" > "dois caminhão"

Though it sounds just disgusting.
So it's the number or article indicating the plural, not the noun. Looks like you are already living with it.

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #845 –
In Indo-European languages the subclass animate (people and animals)/inanimate (other living/non-living things) may have come first, before the appearance of gender. That was a real-life distinction unlike the genders, though hardly a useful one that incurs information. That of course goes for genders as well, so English could drop them with no ill effect.

Grammatical gender-assignment was hap-hazard for inanimates. The hypothesis that Germans thought differently about their feminine bridges than the French on their masculine doesn't seem to have worked out. The Norwegian word for woman, kvinne (related to English queen and Greek gyne) is masculine, but Norwegian was halted in the process from three genders to the two genders Danish and Swedish got (common and neuter), so kvinne is common more than masculine.

From grammatical gender to pronouns, he is derived from this (*hi-), she from the (seo). I would give a word like hen (han/hon) something like a 20% chance of long-term survival.

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #846 –
Quote from: jax on
I would give a word like hen (han/hon) something like a 20% chance of long-term survival.
That's too much. I think if the invented form were something like "hön" or "hån" then it would have 15-20% chance of survival, because that's funny at least.

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #847 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
Land and rijk are neuter, so Duitsland is neuter by definition, as is Frankrijk. But so are places like China or Portugal, and I can't think of any counter-examples.
A night's sleep has provided me with a counterexample. It's de Oekraïne, although I couldn't tell you if it's feminine or masculine. When in doubt the answer is usually that it "should" be feminine.[1] The dictionary says it can be both.
1 NB If you're not a native speaker of Dutch, when in doubt always, always go for masculine. It's only for a native speaker like myself that a nagging feeling of insecurity in matters like these carries meaning. There's the natural side of me that thinks it's masculine, and there's the educated side of me that might consciously try to use the "proper" feminine form in writing. Only Brabantic speakers maintain most of these feminine words naturally, and the masculine form has indeed been part of Standard Dutch for decades. It's primarily abstract nouns like government that maintain their exclusive femininity in all varieties of Dutch.↵

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #848 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
A night's sleep has provided me with a counterexample. It's de Oekraïne, although I couldn't tell you if it's feminine or masculine.
Apparently the feminine or masculine is not explicit in the article or in the name, so where is it? What difference does it make whether you call it feminine or masculine? Would it make a difference when you add adjectives? Do participles in Dutch have some sort of gender distinctions/markers?

Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion

Reply #849 –
Quote from: ersi on
What difference does it make whether you call it feminine or masculine?
The difference lies in the referential pronouns. "Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe and her president is Petro Poroshenko." This is what makes French so confusing from our perspective, because they say "the woman and his étui à lunettes." (Because étui is masculin, even though his refers back to feminine woman.)

Dutch is similar to English, except Dutch has the neuter determiner het (usually [ət] or just t), missing in English, and English has the neuter pronoun its, missing in Dutch. And of course the actual genders are different than in English, which has a distinction between objects (neuter) and live things (either way). But in Old English, it was very similar to Dutch, with gender being perfectly opaque.[1]

PS Wo-man (or rather wifman) is a masculine word in Old English, so in English it should arguably indeed be the woman and his étui, but that aside.
1 That's a bit of an understatement, considering there are debates about some particularly short Old Dutch texts regarding whether they're Old Dutch or Old English.↵