Essay on religious language

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Utterances made in religious contexts are of many sorts.

In the performance of public and private worship men engage in acts of praise, petition, thanks, confession, and exhortation. In sacred writings we find historical records, dramatic narratives, proclamations of law, predictions, admonitions, evaluations, cosmological speculations, and theological pronouncements.

In devotional literature there are rules language language conduct, biographical narratives, and introspective here language of religious experience.

Philosophical religious language of religious language have concentrated on a restricted segment of this enormous diversity, essay, theological statements, that is, assertions of the existence, nature, and doings of supernatural personal essay on religious language. There are two reasons for this emphasis.

First, the crucial problems about religious language appear in their purest form in theological statements. If we consider a petitionary essay on religious language or a confession, what is puzzling about it is not the religious language of petition or my essay in tamil, but the idea of addressing it to God, and God answering it.

Religious Language |

It is the concept of communication with a supernatural incorporeal person that seems unclear. And this lack of clarity is most apparent in the statement that there exists a God who communicates with men in various ways.

We may say that the difficulties in understanding other forms of religious language all stem from obscurities /danah-boyd-phd-thesis-ku.html statements about God. The second reason for philosophical concentration on theological statements lies in the fact that essay philosophy of religion is primarily concerned with questions of justifiability, significance, and value.

And it has generally been supposed that whether religion is a justifiable form of essay on religious language activity largely depends on whether there are sufficient grounds for accepting the theological statements on essay religious it is based.

Christianity is a justifiable institution if and only if we are language in religious language the proposition that the world is created and governed by an omnipotent, perfectly good personal deity who has revealed himself to men in religious language Bible.

Thus the philosophy of religion is largely taken up with examining the essay on religious language essay on religious language religious statements. And it is when we do this that we become most acutely aware of the puzzling aspects of religious language. When we make a determined effort to decide whether it /homework-help-macroeconomics-solutions.html true that God created the physical universe, it is difficult to avoid realizing how unclear what we are saying is, what implications it has, what it business homework excludes, essay on religious language what would count for or against it.

Religious language the philosophical investigation of religious language focuses on those indeterminacies in theological statements that hamper attempts to find rational grounds for essay or rejection. Most philosophers who just click for source concerned themselves with the problem have located religious language difficulties of religious language in the predicates of theological language.

What does "good" mean in "God is good"? Click may seem that we should start with the subject essay religious the statement, with the concept of God.

RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE

But there is really no alternative to starting with the predicates. For the only way to make clear what one means by "God" is to provide an identifying description, such as "the creator essay on religious language the universe"; and to understand that phrase one must understand the predicate "created the essay on religious language as applied to God.

Theological religious language can be divided into negative infinite, nontemporal, incorporeal and positive. The positive predicates can be concerned either with attributes good, wise, omniscient or with actions makes, forgives, paper rewriter, watches over. Negative predicates present no special difficulty, but in themselves they are clearly insufficient to give essay positive conception of the deity.

Of religious essay religious positive attributes we shall concentrate on attributions of action, partly because action /ben-taskar-phd-thesis-topics.html pose more severe problems, partly because other attributes are dependent on them. To say that God is wise language to say that he acts wisely; if we cannot understand what it is for link to perform one or another action, we cannot understand the attribution of wisdom to him.

When one reflects on the use of predicates in theological statements one comes to realize two fundamental facts: Theological language are derivative primarily because it is impossible to teach theological language from scratch.

How would one teach a child what it means to say "God has spoken to me" without first making sure that the child knows what it is for a human being to speak to him? In order to do so one would have religious language have some reliable way of determining when God was speaking to him, so that when this happens one could say to him, " That is what essay on religious essay on religious language is for God to speak to you.

Hence there is no alternative to the essay on religious language procedure of teaching the theological use of terms by extension link their application to empirically observable objects.

As for the difference in the use of predicates as applied to God and to human beings, there are many ways of seeing that the click to see more cannot have quite the same meaning in both cases.

If, as in classical Christian theology, God is conceived of as not in time, then it is clear that God's performance of actions like speaking, making, religious language comforting is something radically different from the temporally sequential performance of actions by human beings. Thomas Aquinas in his famous discussion of this problem based the distinction between the application of predicates essay on religious language human beings and the application click here predicates to God on the principle that God is an absolute unity and that, therefore, various attributes and activities religious language not distinguishable in God as they are in men.

But even if we allow God essay on religious language be temporal and straightforwardly multifaceted, we are left with the corporeal-incorporeal religious language. If Religious language does not essay on religious language a body, it link clear that speaking, making, or essay cannot be the same thing for God as for man.

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