Joralex and Yaro, open to comment.

Actually PaulK is right about this. Language isn't determined by authority, but by the community of people who speak it. This is fundamental to language. If God uses words in a different way than the community of people who speak the language, the community outweighs God, because there's more of them.Unless God is to be taken as a community of speakers larger than the society he's talking to. But that would mean he's talking to himself, a billion times over. That doesn't seem Biblical.Anyway, if God exists, and he created, then he created language. Therefore it's safe to assume he knows the rules of language, and when he says something, he's saying it using definitions consistent with the community of the users of the language he's using.

What I can't understand is why you don't seem to see that if God isn't using our language the same way we are - if his definitions aren't ours - then he's made it impossible for us to seek his meaning.Since God (if he exists, etc.) wants us to know what he's talking about, we can safely assume that when he uses a word, it means what we percieve it to mean. Ergo God's definitions are ours. His meaning doesn't have to conform to any of our expectations - but the words he uses to communicate it must conform to the expectations of the community he's addressing. This is fundamental to language and again, something God should already know.It's really pretty simple. Your rule of "God's definitions are not ours" is pretty clearly just an escape hatch for whatever non-literal interpretation you plan to make to support statements that aren't literally Biblical. In the context of a God who's actually speaking to humans, the rule doesn't make any sense.[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 09-16-2003]

Off-topic question:What I never understood (and part of why I think Star Trek is bad science-fiction) is how that society is supposed to work.I mean, if the language is purely metaphor, and "Juliet on her balcony" is the only way to refer to a romantic situation, then how do children assimilate the language? If you have no way to tell a child who Juliet was, or explain the plot of "Romeo and Juliet", then how are they supposed to know what "Juliet on her balcony" is supposed to mean? Within a generation your language becomes a set of metaphors that nobody understands. If there's no concrete basis to the language - no way to say "this is called an 'apple'" - then there's no way for a neophyte to assimilate the language.And if they do have a way to explain their vast scope of metaphor to children, why didn't the alien talk that way to Picard?I know, I know. It's just a TV show. But it's a stupid one. (Your point is, of course, valid.)

On another topic:In the Yaro vs. Joralex thread, a sub-topic about what the bible says is rape or not is developing. I thought I'd interject something (without cluttering what was intended to be one on one, I think.)Rei and Yaro, I guess I'm really asking this of you: is it possible that the Bible is trying to draw a distinction between coerced sex and voluntary sex later characterized as "rape"? As in, the Bible isn't trying to say "if you don't scream, it's not rape" but rather say that "if you have voluntary sex, you can't call it rape afterwards to escape punishment." (Not that I believe that voluntary sex needs to be punished, but potentially the writers of the bible may have believed so.)Now, don't get me wrong - the text of the Bible doesn't make this clear. But could you interpret it that way? Would such an interpretation make more sense?Or, is it always rape when the woman says it is, and the Bible is simply way off?

Well, I was trying to imply that it was saying: "absent evidence of coercion, rape claims are suspect."I'm not sure that's totally unreasonable, is it? I mean it's not like nobody's ever made a false claim of rape, right?

It's cool. Don't sweat it.It sounds like you're right, though - the verse in question is worded too poorly to support my interpretation. Although I see it as possible that my interpretation was their intent - after all the Bible, even if it was not the word of God, was written to tell some people how to behave - it's just that they failed at finding an appropriate wording.I guess they didn't have lawyers in the ancient days...