Re: Freedom, Liberty and Conscience

Richard,

I'm not questioning your habit of only speaking through quotations --
well, I don't agree with it but this is about something more basic.
It's about your attitude to individual words and to translation. Don't
you understand that even if you can't find the phrase "insight into
truth" or "source of truth" on Ocean, that doesn't mean the central
figures of the Faith haven't spoken about these things? Shoghi Effendi
knew English, but Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l Baha wrote in Persian and
Arabic. This means that when their statements are rendered into
English the translator -- sometimes Shoghi Effendi, sometimes someone
else -- chooses a particular English word as the equivalent. Because
English has such a vast vocabulary, a given word in the original can be
expressed in a whole number of ways without doing violence to the
original meaning. So, for example, the word 'truth' or 'verity' might
be used in the same situation with much the same essential effect. So
when you search Ocean for 'source of truth' and can't find it, that
doesn't mean the idea isn't out there. The translator may have used
slightly different words to convey essentially the same idea. So you
will be ignoring a quotation that touches on the subject you are
interested in simply because the *wording* is slightly different.

But even if this were not true, even we were debating, in Arabic say,
and you could search for Baha'u'llah's precise words, what would be the
consequence of this? Even in a language less rich in synonyms than
English, there would be cases when it was obvious that although the
Blessed Beauty had not used the same word, he was clearly talking about
the same *thing*. Is your freedom of action so restricted, is your
human agency so paralysed within you that you could not make the
imaginative leap? You say we have an obligation to speak for
ourselves, but I don't think you really believe it. Your whole
message, your whole attitude implies that since the quotations reveal
the answers for all questions, our own search for truth is at an end.

I speak this with hesitatation Richard, and I want to make it clear
that I speak only for myself, in my fallible human capacity, but in
that capacity I must say it. I cannot believe God wants this for you.
He made you a human being and not a parrot -- surely He must want you
to be more than a mouth that utters slogans, an endless recording
playing back the same speeches again and again. We can never
understand the Will of God, but we must all try to discover what He
wants to make of our lives, and I cannot help but feel He wants more
for us than this. We need to consider, to question, to discuss, to
*think* for ourselves. The vision of humanity's purpose your postings
imply, the reducing of a human intelligence to something less than
human, an MP3 player with a pulse -- I must admit this horrifies me.

sincerely,
Brendan

.

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