Episode 28 - The Asymptotic Fidelity of Words

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hey everybody advent is almost upon us so we thought we'd start today's episode with one of the pieces of our advent liturgy by none other than amina brown who is actually the guest on today's episode this was recorded last year but has just come available for your listening pleasure on itunes spotify or any of the places that you listen to your music if you enjoy this piece i really recommend that you go listen to the rest of this liturgy it's actually one of the better ones we've ever done i think it's got some amazing meditations some beautiful music from some of our friends like sleeping at last jason moran the brilliance gunger has some stuff on there i highly recommend it so check it out without further ado amina brown is going to perform advent for weary souls while yours truly plays some banjo behind her because why not this year has brought us tears and sorrow watching our world like the very ground beneath us tremble with fear and racism and death and hate so many questions without answers so many mothers who have had to bury their children we cannot unplug from the noise of news our world is being torn at it seems by the tug of war finding it difficult to make or keep peace the fight for human rights the fear of disease the violence of militants lives are being snuffed and stolen typhoons airstrikes opened fire this year nearly 300 girls were kidnapped in nigeria while getting an education and most of them have still not returned home the protests in venezuela china mexico ukraine are the same as the protests happening in new york chicago la atlanta ferguson our cities and towns are at an unrest as we wrestle with the violence of lone gunmen immigration race relations as we watch our neighborhoods turn into war zones we don't hear the wounds we just take sides and divide to find our us so we can accuse them we have stopped listening we find ourselves with angry fists in what is supposed to be the season of giving there have been breaches in our confidence and trust we have lost our ability to mourn with those who mourn to see injustice with disgust and our facebook statuses turn into the worst kind of soapbox and pulpit bring back our girls ebola ice bucket challenge i can't breathe why i stayed renisha mcbride occupy hong kong black lives matter gaza under attack yes all women hashtag break the internet take down that post mh370 hashtag pray for south korea mh17 hands up don't shoot until our souls need a ceasefire sometimes it's hard to light the candle and drape the tinsel when christmas seems to not unwrap gifts but wounds reminding us of the people we've lost of the things that have been stolen of despair of grieving the kind of sadness a christmas carol can't seem to shake and what do we do with this baby this savior whose arrival had no celebrity no red carpet no paparazzi just mary and joseph and manger animals and sorrow to lead wise men what does this jesus have to do with our brokenness and wounds what does he have to say when the plot lines of our life don't wrap up cleanly like a christmas tune this jesus is not just a baby he is the radical revolutionary who came to do the saving who spoke uncomfortable truth to the narrow-minded religious who turned over tables for justice who used his voice to speak for children orphans widows who became freedom for the oppressed yes he wanted us to know peace so badly that he sacrificed himself so we could realize we are not us versus them we are us with him us who want to walk and love and serve like him fight against injustice and poverty with him let's listen to those who are hurting mourn with those who are weeping let's do what we hear the angels singing for love for peace for good will for all humanity this advent may jesus teach a weary world and our weary souls to fight for justice and someday live in peace [Music] okay so we have this sort of parenting snafu that uh probably was a foolish move but since amelie was a baby you know how you desire for a cute baby to squeeze or bite whatever that is that also translated to language for lisa and i so we're like squeezers are you a little budget so we've been calling amelie a butt head since she was tiny and it's the same impulse as uh you know i must squeeze the cheeks but it's intended in nothing but love and cuteness and laughter but it's continued and she's five now and she was recently with some i think it was her cousins and one of the kids said something to the other kid like butthead and the parents were like hey we don't talk like that you know that's not that's not a nice thing to say and they kind of told them why or whatever and the kids were all silent for a bit and then like 30 seconds later goes hey my parents call me a butt head welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody [Music] that's a good opener and here's why because all words are just made up there is no objective basis for any word they're just made up and they have the meaning we assign to them and we walk around having conversations like our words are somehow anchored and timeless and they're literally just nonsense sounds that someone ascribed meaning to for example let's say you were sitting in a recording studio in los angeles and you saw something with which you weren't familiar so in this room let's say i'd never seen a caster before and i didn't know the word for caster well at some point someone else was in that same situation and called it a caster and now you do as well so why does that have any grounding any essential quality and i've noticed that when people have discussions even on very substantive things there's a reticence to acknowledge the degree to which language is fluid and utterly fabricated hence getting in trouble for calling someone butt head or feeling loved affirmed and accepted by being called a butt head and okay so let's take casters because nouns i feel like they're more understandably concrete in people's heads because you know there's at least similar properties between all the reality that people usually refer to as casters but it's not rock solid it's not concrete because somebody called something a caster and what you're calling a caster in this room is not that actually same object there's probably quite different than that object was but there was some set of properties that people continued to put these rollers at the bottom of things that were heavy and calling them casters or whatever but it's not blurry you can imagine what like a line between a caster and a tire is there some in between i mean like how does it get fuzzy what's a caster all right here's what i got well in case you were wondering according to siri castor oil is a vegetable oil obtained by pressing the seeds of the castor oil plant so a few billion dollars of communication infrastructure still can't figure out what a caster is i've got to type in safari like some kind of savage here we go a caster is an undriven single double or compound wheel that is designed to be mounted to the bottom of a larger object so as to enable that object to be easily moved okay so a larger object what about a caster on top of a caster boom is that a caster anymore the top one then would not be a caster in that meaning or neither would the bottom so two casters stacked up size they cease to be a caster both of them are no longer but yet if you did that you held up a caster mounted to a caster and we took it on the streets of los angeles and said what is this most people say that's two caster wheels why'd you do that in fact when you buy a caster wheel in the hardware store it is not yet a caster it is a potential caster yeah what's a wheel what's a wheel here's some information a wheel is a circular component that is intended to rotate on an axle bearing so a square or let's see mythbusters made square wheels and they worked so a square wheel is not a wheel by that definition no it is not circular so a caster that had some shape other than entirely circular is not i mean you know i mean like you can just keep deconstructing yes so the point there is words have limited fidelity when compared to reality like when you use a word you're making an approximation of objective reality you're not actually capturing objective reality you're just approximating it and it's useful right i mean like this is how we function but it is to to think of it as concrete in objective reality uh leads to some dangerous things which we can get into in a bit but let's talk about for a second um color there's no such thing as color doesn't exist all right talk about it color is a descriptor of a subjective neurological experience that's it color doesn't exist in reality your eyes are just interpreting different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation and then ascribing this qualia to it so you say blue and you say blue because you've been trained that when you have this certain experience you call it blue blue is a new color it didn't exist in earlier times in society and so you can't find things we describe as blue described as blue in older literature so the c for example could be called the color of wine we don't think the c is the color of wine we call it blue even though a lot of times it's much more green i've seen a study done where they found contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures that don't use the color blue in their language and if you get a wheel with squares of color and 11 are green and one is blue and you show members of this tribe that wheel they can't pick the color that's different but they have over 60 words for green and so if you show the same wheel with a slightly different color green they can tell the square that's different but westerners can't because our green construct is more simple and so literally the way that we're processing subjective sensory information is affected by our neurocognitive labels in the form of language but either way you take eyes out of the equation and there's no color there's only electromagnetic radiation and there's nothing intrinsically different between an x-ray and violet's visible light wave except that one is interpreted by the eye and the other is not but technically you could imagine a species that had eyes that could see x-ray and visible light and they would see some color assigned to it now the reason color is so interesting when when talking about the nature of words and language is because color perfectly describes something called qualia which are mind states that can be experienced but not described and here's what i mean you cannot describe green to someone who's never seen it it's impossible you can use any language that exists today or that we're aware of in antiquity and none of them can describe green to someone who has never seen it you cannot cause their brain to experience the greenness of something which is quite remarkable because what words do these fuzzy approximations that are arbitrary and made up is they allow us to transmit thoughts between brains it's phenomenal when you picture a word and you turn into a story or a sentence if we do a deep brain scan on someone what you'll find is you transfer a structural relationship in neurons that is identifiable and similar you take thoughts from one brain and teleport them to another with limited fidelity and with the limitation that you can't actually transmit qualia or basic experiences you have to use shared experiences as a reference frame to build a meta language on top of [Music] but that's not how it feels right it's not it's not how it feels when you see a dress that's blue or gold it feels it feels like that is reality you know what i mean like it feels like blue is a thing gold is a thing a dress is a thing that is concrete and all this philosophical mumbo jumbo about fuzziness and subjectivity it's all it doesn't feel like i think that's why everybody went so crazy with that dress like you get there's a lot of people that would say all this stuff like yeah i mean language gets you can it's fuzzy and not objective it all comes but when you see like i'm sitting there with my wife and she's saying the dress is this color and i'm saying it's this color it freaks out your view of reality can i be completely honest my wife thought the world was ending like she was so freaked out and i was like no it's just science it's pretty predictable well that's not surprising [Laughter] i literally started trying to explain to her how it worked and then there were so many people online who started asking me that i made a video just to like save time from answering the question over and over and over like no your your visual system just lies all the time and that that's important because we use our sensory data to create language but we're not getting an objective view of reality from our senses we're getting a heavily biased filtered narrative that is designed to achieve certain goals but an objective view of reality is not useful to humans in fact the most important thing to do for a brain is to filter out the parts of reality that aren't related to survival so there's nothing special about some molecules that are breaking apart from say some cheese and falling into the wind they're just molecules like any other but you're olfactory system filters out all those extraneous molecules it ignores the smell of the concrete it ignores the pollen on the breeze but you go oh jeez and that's that's by design that's your brain's job is to that's so weird map the things about reality that will keep you alive and disregard everything else [Music] okay so let's let's go one level deeper maybe what about words that mean more casters is one thing color is one thing but let's talk about god for a second what word is there that's more subjective than god how can you translate when one person what they're calling god what they're experiencing is god what they've been taught about god you're talking about something invisible right you're talking about or even saying that you can't even say that something invisible like there's no universal that's a lot of definitions there's no universal definition of god i remember in an earlier episode of the show we asked people who are what is god i don't remember what episode that was i don't remember what we said i just remember what the readers said you are the listeners and i was just like blown away almost everyone who sent in an idea about who or what they thought god was a christian yeah but the difference in the ideas we got back were unbelievable now part of that's neuroscience so some words we use are used for things that aren't principally linguistic in our brains so love is one love is something that is not modeled in your brain as a noun at all or even as a verb it's this feeling experience and it's very complex and when you ask someone to talk about love you can watch their brain first kind of recall the experience of love and then you see their left temporal lobe activate as they try to verbalize this unverbalizable thing and brain scans have shown us that people relate to god and in fact the idea that god is love has a lot of merit in neuroscience right because very similar neural pathways and connections between relationships in the brain are activated in a non-verbal capacity and so you see people kind of struggle genuine deep believers if you say well who is god they'll go uh and then atheists go ha ha you don't know you're an unthinking believer but it's it's more sophisticated than that they actually have a feeling and experience that transcends language that they now have to convert into language and because everyone's like describing green sort of like describing green absolutely so god is almost a qualia neurologically and so they have to try to come up with terms that label and identify their own personal and unique neurological model of god and so when we use like one word god to sort of umbrella and cover everybody's relationship to ultimate well no wonder those discussions get a little controversial because people are starting from different perspectives and different assumptions without discussing that first which is why a question like do you believe in god to me at this point seems so inane like what do you what do you mean there's a fantastic movement very small among some philosophers and some secularists to drop the term atheist and drop the term agnostic and instead use the term agnostic meaning you can't even have this conversation without defining a lot of terms and assumptions first and that that comes from i think rather sophisticated secularists coming across some ideas in pantheism or more broad ways of defining god going okay i wouldn't call that god but no i agree there's a mysterious foundation to reality that science can't brush up against either i just call that the cosmos but the fact that you call it god but we're referencing literally the same thing means it's not especially interesting for me to call myself an atheist in contrast to your god which is not even theistic in nature so i tend to when people push me if they say are you a theist you're an atheist i usually say i'm an agnostic because we don't have enough defined to even have this discussion yet because i'll yeah i believe in god but then you're going to go to one you're you're going to go to a model of god that i don't actually ascribe to as soon as i say that and then we're going to debate about something and waste time yeah like the even we've said this on the show before but the god that most of the new atheists deconstruct and show how there shouldn't be believed in there's so many christians that say yeah i don't believe in that god either right so many yeah i mean they keep this show running that's why i think it's important to step back sometimes and contemplate this idea that language is just this weird thing we made up because otherwise you'll get too far down the rabbit hole without that perspective of going whoa we're literally all just comparing incredibly limited models of reality we use to survive which is why so we had a couple weeks ago had david bazan on the episode and talking to him and hearing him say like and we mentioned that you know i talked to him about this when he said it but him saying i'm not a believer and we went into this is language what a believer in what like because you you're writing songs that are seeking truth you're writing songs that are longing for justice in the world that speak prophetically to use the christian language against powers that be that are oppressing groups of people that are economically and like he he speaks incredibly christian in practical ways you know what i mean so but then the metaphysics you don't believe in god or that jesus is the son of god that jesus is lord so what do these things mean and this is one of the things that i think one of my favorite things that i've ever heard from betsy your pastor and that amazes me about her and how she pastors your church is she said these words have different meanings for every person that says the creeds and when you think of that like what does jesus is lord mean let me take the verse like you will be saved if you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart that jesus is lord what does that mean to paul versus to a syrian refugee right now versus to a peasant in ancient england versus to me in a western society in a postmodern world like what do those words mean lord like what does lord mean what does lord mean to a slave owner versus a slave herself what does what does lord mean to a roman citizen versus a jewish person in the ancient world jesus's lord is almost like a horrible idea if you have an actual lord yeah or a mean a bad lord versus a generous but that's reading that verse in a modernist english context and ignoring the original language the original author's intent the original cultural context and that's what's just bad in my opinion but can you even even when you take into account because good preachers that teach the bible will try to get into as close to what they think those people intended but how can you ever get entirely there you're talking about terms that are subjective from person to person right yet alone from time to time so jesus is lord and you shall be saved and believe in your heart what language has asymptotic fidelity that's it every sentence depending on the amount of work the person who composes the sentence puts into it combined with the amount of work with the person receiving the sentence puts into receiving it can get closer and closer to the sender's intent but never fully and completely match it it's impossible it's impossible as soon as you communicate you have to assume some meaning is lost i've learned that as an author it's made me a better writer to stop trying to phrase things in such a way that there's no room for misinterpretation because that's impossible and when you try you get legal fine prep that's what i like about being a songwriter i like the poetry of knowing this is going to be misunderstood from my intent but that's okay uh and actually that's all i'm gonna start writing songs that's so much better authors are like god dang it what do you do with my perfect words [Laughter] well they become you strive for the perfect words but it's a different quality to the words it's not so much about the meaning of the words as the the music of the words unless you're doing christian music then you have to be obsessed with the meaning that's so true like songwriting in some ways is a more true use of verbal language than more completely verbal capacities because it starts with the assumption of this asymptotic fidelity [Laughter] ah that was a great praise for songwriting the nerdiest praise for songwriters i've ever heard that was amazing i guess what people might be concerned about which is a lot of the the modernists critique of the post-modernist deconstruction of language seems to be well then nothing means anything which leads to nihilism which leads to well then why even have the creeds if that's what you're saying and i don't think that's what we're saying i think i understand where that idea comes from yes and i would agree that on some level it doesn't no it's all meaningless you know what i mean like it's all but it's that doesn't mean it's not useful and here we return to pragmatism right we find meaning in it that's it so there's meaning we find meaning therefore there's meaning you know where people get frustrated with me as i i get a lot of people friends and and good folks who listen but are from much more conservative theological positions i often get the term relativist thrown at me like a spear but i'm like yeah no totally yeah i am a relativist i don't see how you can be anything else even if i like agreed with you on all these theological assumptions completely i would still say yeah but so my point is so let's say let's start with some assumptions one that there is objective reality which i think there is but two let's assume that objective reality was created by a conscious god okay let's make that assumption and let's make another assumption that this god literally authored scripture with god's own hand through men so three assumptions so let's just go with biblical inerrancy for this discussion even if there's biblical inerrancy i don't trust humans to interpret that perfect text perfectly ever because even what you just said those were so full of metaphors and fuzzy words like with god's own hand like what does i'm talking about literally his hand came down and like a dad held the hand of the author and went i wasn't actually using a metaphor okay so there's a guy in space just like a cosmic hand appears in the room and just like reaches over and touches the quill as the author writes like just a so obvious not metaphorical like but then that a hand is a human that's the way people knew canonization was was the hand present was there a witness to see the hand if so this is scripture i'm taking out all the things we usually fight about to make it a safe assumption that scripture is inherent and i'm saying even if that happened we'd still screw it up we'd still fight about what that verse meant because it would still be words and words have asymptotic fidelity yeah by the way i don't know if you can tell i'm really impressed with my new phrase asymptotic fidelity yeah it's pretty good [Music] it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourself or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the 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amina she's been on two or three of them i think longtime liturgist friend just finally on the podcast here man thanks for having me could you share with us one of your poems that might be uh appropriate for this topic yeah um i'll share with you this poem i wrote called first lines a first line never cares what time it is nudges its cold nose against my ear wants to go for walks and the briskest part of the am doesn't care that i just went to sleep that i'm lazy that i no longer take to the habit of keeping journalists by the bed for this very moment that i want to shoo it away because i'm too afraid of losing one so i drag my right hand out from under the covers grab the pin that has left the trail of inkblots on my bedspread and let the poem do its business so we can both head back to sleep some days i want to quit afraid that the words i write or maybe even my own life just will never be good enough but thankfully words don't give up they are ants crawling in a line scenting out one at a time to scout out the territory i mean they bring reinforcements long lines of stanzas tracing the trail from the floorboards down the door jam surrounding the perimeter of my walls will not be stomped out or stopped until they find the sweet thing they've been searching for so despite the decline of printing presses or the fact that magazines books and newspapers are becoming an endangered species or that words have historically been misused and taken advantage of they will never grow extinct they will not be rationed or relegated to government assistance see words no no economic crisis and their stimulus plan can be found in my grandmother's scrabble tiles searching for triple word score or in the hands of a little colored girl clutching the spine for color girls hoping to find the backbone to be herself in a world that would encourage her to be anything but so as long as god is still speaking as long as the story must be told as long as the word tin in your heart will always show up on your tongue as long as a whisper still has the power to send the hairs on the back of your neck to rise and standing ovation words will survive they are really just like the rest of us searching for a place called home with strong arms and a warm heart to hold them hoping for someone to take them in and accept them in their present tense for someone to believe in them that they can become something which is why at the end of a long day of living and an even longer list of things left to do i leave my worries outside this room i lay next to these words and wrap my arms around them until i can feel them breathing and sometimes we wake up in the middle of the night just to share each other's secrets and after we both fall asleep the pen slips from our fingers and leaves its mark on the page that's beautiful thank you for sharing that it's mike's grandfather's funeral today so it's just amina and i having this little convo together so amino why have you picked a career in words what do words mean to you oh man i almost i almost don't even know if i picked it even though it sounds probably super cliche i almost feel like a career with words picked me you know i grew up in a house with a lot of books my mom had you know i remember growing up my mom had this big wall unit that was like made of bamboo which now looking back on it i'm like where do you get that is that like an 80s thing i don't know but it's pretty cool looking but it's where you buy that now yeah like where do you get a bamboo wall unit that's so crazy but anyway she had one and it was just stacked stacked stacked full of books i remember being just a little girl i i opened uh tony morrison's beloved which is a very tough read as are a couple of toni morrison's books because you're having a difficult time understanding who's alive and who's dead it's very strange it's very strange as a grown person but i remember opening the book and trying to read it and just realizing that my my brain knows this is beautiful but i don't understand what i'm reading i know that this is great i just can't i don't have enough language or whatever to decipher what this is and so i've always been since a little girl just a lover of words and books i'm still the kind of person that could be at a party introvert problems could be at a party and like the conversation's boring and i contemplate do i have any books on my phone [Laughter] why does it matter to you that those words that you read or write are beautiful why does it keep drawing you too is it just an aesthetic thing does it seem important to you on a human level beyond just aesthetic beauty or plainness you know what what is it that keeps you coming back to words oh my mom would always tell me she would say this about girls or women although i think it's true regardless of gender but she would always tell me that a girl or a woman should have at least one place where she feels unedited and that place is your journal it's your poetry it's where you write that's the place where you honor your feelings your emotions your thoughts by you writing those things down you are saying to yourself what i feel and think matters whether or not i ever publish these things or share them with anybody you know i'm i matter to myself i think i come from a family of storytellers so in general like growing up and listening to my great grandmother tell us stories about when she was growing up and sharecropping in north carolina and working in the tobacco fields and all these different you know legends that they had when they were growing up i think hearing older people tell stories also made me value words books are a place and poetry is a place and songs are a place where story and words can live even beyond the person that initially told that story no i'd be interested to hear your thoughts about this because my husband and i talk about this all the time i am the tormented writer of the two of us so it is like torment for me to finally sit down and write something new because i'm all like oh this is gonna suck it's not gonna be as good as it was the last time wow you know like i take myself through that whole thing then i finally sit down and write and i'm like i should have done this weeks ago i feel so much better right where it was like when my husband i mean he's not a poet but you know he makes music his musician produces music so when he goes in to create he comes out like this is the best thing ever i have never made anything good as this thing i just made you know so it is kind of interesting that it's sort of this torment inside a little bit before i write something new for something i love i love writing but there's like some torment to it but when i do it i'm like that's right i love this i'll be okay so the next time i have to write something else and i remember that it might suck again that's amazing have you read the war of art we've talked about it yes yes yes love war of art yeah yeah i kind of think that there's probably some of that going on of the resistance of what you know you should be doing and that art that wants to come up but there's that resistance to it um but there's also something i think about when people have actually begun to appreciate your work and praise you for it and you've started to build some something of your life on it some sort of career some sort of and there's more at stake now with it for me anyway i hardly felt any pressure or fear of my work until i started like sensing that there was an expectation that other people had on what it should be and that i needed it to continue to do be well received for me to continue having a career or continue to receive praise or whatever whatever the part of my life that i perceived as being better as a result of the work uh now there's something to lose um you know i think when we begin there's nothing to lose and and it's just pure joy and i think that's some of the war for me at this point as an artist is to get to that place again where where it's back to why i played music in the first place why i loved words in the first place why i do what i do for the love of it for the joy of it and not for the applause not for money and when i can get into that place where i'm actually like doing this because this is what i love uh i'm not as freaked out about the output [Music] as an artist since in any artist that works with words it's not just deciding whether we should use words at all but it's should i use this word or this word in a lyric or a poem or whatever one word difference can like make the thing shine an entirely different way right yeah yeah i do so how do you identify that how do you know which word to pick and and how do you judge words against one another i think a lot of my writing is so rhythm-based i think a lot of my word choice comes down to how the words sound when they are said together not what the words look like when they are on a page together so i think a lot of my word choice you know comes down to i mean obviously when the poetry some of it comes down to rhyme but i would say even more than that it comes down to the rhythm of how those words come together which means you take that form into an essay into a blog post into a book and some of you know even when i was writing my first book some of that is hard because there's a way you want the words to sound that on the page may not matter as much for people reading it you know so i definitely experience that tension like between the ear copy and the eye copy which one do you think you are or do you do both i think for music it sort of has to be more ear copy i think that's just the nature of a lyric i think a lot of times when you read lyrics that you really love and even sound poetic sometimes on the page they look a little clunky to me but i wrote a book too so when i did that it absolutely was the other way around although i don't know how much i wasn't thinking in those terms when i wrote the book and i'm curious if my writing style is is impacted by my musical ear you know i don't know i i mean that's it's part of how i judge the poetry or the the beauty of a sentence is i think it's cadence a little bit as well as just what i normally do with songs so i don't know that's an interesting question i don't know how i approach my prose writing in it what about meaning though what about the actual con not just the sound or the aesthetic of how it looks or sounds but what the words are actually meaning because i i think this has been something i've been thinking about a lot about lately is how people say things versus what they are saying and how that matters and how it doesn't matter and i kind of think that most people put a lot of stock into how you say things i think that's what we generally do i think we saw that really strongly in our careers when i think of like what happened to us over a year ago with the some of the people that got mad at us online about my views of genesis i think a lot of that now looking back was more how i said a few things than actually the content of what i was saying that really made some people mad and turned some people off and then we i look at the lgbtq episode that we did with the liturgists and honestly i thought that was the end of my whole career i thought putting that episode out was gonna be the end i was like if people got that mad at genesis like the lgbtq issue is way more divisive polarized dangerous issue to talk about within christianity within christendom in america right now than creationism so i was like well talking about this goodbye career but somehow like nobody got mad [Music] like hardly anybody everybody was like oh wow thank you for it and i think it was how we said it ah how we said the things that we said we really were careful to show honor to all sides of the issue and to to try to speak graciously and generously we were really careful with that and probably extra careful with it because of what had happened with genesis when i was just sort of cavalry saying what i thought about stuff without thinking about how that would make a conservative christian that really puts a lot of stock in that idea feel so they felt disrespected by me i think in retrospect i see that of how i said some of those things and i regret how i did say some of those things i wasn't even thinking of conservative christians when i said the things that uh that they got upset at i was talking to people that i assumed were assuming the same assumptions that i had right and so how we say things and and that leads me into thinking about political correctness and how words i mean when you think of even we did an episode on pro-choice or pro-life and how that language like whether you say a baby in the womb or a fetus in the womb or a piece of matter in the womb you're we're all talking about the same actual thing right that thing in the mother's womb that is developing that is you know begin with a sperm and egg whatever but what do you call that and what you call that says a lot i also mentioned this on a different podcast of uh but i had seen this movie about the germans and the nazis that had where they kind of came up with the final solution and it was based on a transcript of the actual conversation that these guys had about the final solution of exterminating the jews and it was so terrifying and interesting to see how language in that conversation even through the actual conversation began to evolve and they tried to use language to kind of soften the blow of what they were actually doing to themselves you know they were they they didn't they weren't speaking in terms of like let's murder all the jews you know they'd use language to dress it up and just to evacuate they tried to find like gentler ways of saying what they were actually doing the ways that we use language what we're saying versus how we're saying it it matters somehow to all of us i don't know what thoughts do you have about all that oh man that just sent a whole bunch of thoughts through my mind but um it actually kind of made me think a little bit about a conversation i was having with a friend of mine not too long ago we were talking about uh name changes um and we both know people who you know for various reasons you know in their life have decided to change their names not their last names but their first names and what happens when you you know knew that person as ashley all this time that you've known them and now ashley would like you to call her darlene instead but what emotions that brings up in you if that's been your friend since you were three years old and you've known her as ashley all this time what it means to you that ashley comes to you and says well i don't want you to call me ashley anymore i'm darlene now well in a certain way you feel like well you are not darlene to me you are ashley to me and i should be able to reserve the right to call you what i want how that signifies our relationship to me but then am i letting my pride get in the way if i cannot refer to ashley as darlene in the way that ashley has told me she would like me to refer to her so i think also in some parts like it made me think naming plays a part in that because there's certain ways that we feel you know like these weird emotions are coming up like okay if ashley comes to me and says ashley wants to be called darlene that's ashley's prerogative why is it making me upset you know like why am i feeling emotions about this person wanting to have a different name like that seems so selfish and weird to be that way you know but i must have some emotional attachment to that naming or it must mean something to me about our relationship that that naming is causing me to feel that way and then i thought also very randomly you know even like on a dating level when you're sitting across the table from some from someone and they are done with you they're done with you they're done with this relationship but the way that they are done with you does a thing to you separate from the fact that they are done with you if they tell you it's not you it's me if they tell you they just want to be friends whatever the niceties are that they say you know you don't hear oh really that really frees me but you also have if they just said you're not good enough for me we're done and that was the end of the conversation they'd be like what do you also you're sort of like awful person are you yes you know why didn't you at least give me some niceties yes i think there's no way to win so expect the nicety there's no winning but it still hurts either way but they would prefer probably to have some niceties with your words to soften the blow of like i don't like you anymore right yes and it's funny because we fool ourselves because we all know like that's what's actually happening right but we want you to use words that elicit different emotional responses for us even if they're not entirely truthful which that that brings to that does bring to my mind a thing that i've been thinking because i do feel like is that a lie is it a loving lie that we give people when we're in those situations like when what i really want to say is i don't want to have this conversation with you i'm done talking about this you know i really want to say that but you know i i don't know how to say that without crushing you so i nod and i stay here and stay somewhat present in this weird conversation like are we what is the most loving thing to do with our words there okay like i'll give you just very minut very small example awkward conversations that happen to artists at merch tables i could write a whole blog on various asundry things that people say at our merch table so we'll be at the merch table and it's like us and like you know probably two other artists there who maybe most people at the event are more familiar with the other two artists than they are familiar with us people walk by the merch table and go wow i've never heard of you guys yeah and should i be saying wow well i'm happy to be here so that you can at least hear of me once today like i i don't know what i'm supposed to say to that you know but you're at your merch table so you feel like you must customer service the people who are there oh yeah people i think i think the thing is most of the time people are meaning well it is it is funny to see how people bungle their words like we lisa posted an instagram photo a couple weeks ago of lucy doing something i don't know our youngest daughter who has down syndrome and and somebody somebody commented on the photo aw she has a special condition for the lord and for all of us that makes me so tired oh like what what was she trying to say i don't know what she was trying to say but i enjoyed what she said but this is the weird thing about words like because they're just sort of made up things but they hold so much emotional power we use them trying to navigate translating what's happening in my brain into your brain but we fail it gets murky and this is where poetry and music and good literature and anything that people are very intentional about words can be so profound and powerful when somebody finds the right string of words that elicits something in the other person's brain that actually you know if it's a similar thing to actually happen in your brain and you can get the feeling across because that's a lot of times the failure with words you know i think of church music i think so much church music that i've heard that i'm sure it came from a really well intentioned place and even an emotional place that they were experiencing something when they said every time i see your face i sense your grace in your embrace they were feeling something and then when i hear that i'm like gag me i don't want to hear those rhymes ever again so i i don't i'm not experiencing in my brain what you experienced in your brain when you wrote that and there's this disconnect the language didn't make it it didn't it didn't make it across the divide um so when you can find the words that actually do help what happened in my brain make it across the divide to your brain uh either by a little spin that oh i didn't realize i had this emotion connected to you know when you said the little colored girl in your poem yeah how how you turn that phrase and and now we all feel it a little differently that's language done well i think in the arts i i think that's also interesting even when you start thinking about like how you say things i find this a lot in theology people that are good with words are able to turn really bad things that they're actually saying into something that sounds good i guess this would be a good sales person or you know you can you can use the words it sort of becomes destructive because you can find the ways of turning the words that actually elicit positive responses in the brain from your listener but what you're actually saying is pretty horrible and if you just spoke that in plain english and i think this is you know we talked about calvinism a couple episodes ago mike kind of went into some like hardcore uh calvinism stuff and some people got mad at him for it uh but he just what he did was kind of plainly speak what some theologians really dress up in flowery amazing theological language and he just kind of spoke it plainly and people like well that's not exactly what it is what's different about what i said well i don't know just that's harsh you know right um so when you when you learn how to dress up words that so i think for a discerner a discerning person not only learning um to use language in healthy ways and productive ways but also to kind of really see past the language as much as possible as well to say okay i get you're using flowery language that makes me feel good what are you actually saying language is weird like that right i mean it just it helps you ignore the path that you're actually on sometimes by letting you just look at the words and what they're listening in you emotionally [Music] what would you imagine this is totally obviously just fun imaginings who knows but what would you imagine that it would have been like to hang out with jesus how do you think he used words in a normal setting i imagine two things when i really think about what would it have been like to be hanging around jesus and listening to the words that he was saying i i he does strike me and maybe because i have an image in my head of what the guru or the wise spiritual person would be like my mind says he would not have been a super chatty person he wouldn't have been the kind of person that is so chatty you're like i need a break from you you know like you have too many words going on you know i feel like excessive talking and this is me total this is totally judgy but i feel like excessive talking comes from a place of insecurity says one introvert to the other and i'm like yes that's true right [Laughter] sorry sorry guys you know like i feel like if you talk excessively to the point that it just grates against most people who know you there's probably like some sense of insecurity there and jesus strikes me as he'd be the kind of person that you know was comfortable in his skin which meant he is comfortable talking is also comfortable with it being silent too but also i look at jesus and feel like when he did say things like when i read it now i'm like man that's really profound but i feel like if i had been there when he was saying it i would have been like why is he talking about that what made him bring up these virgins like we were all just here hanging out now he's talking about the virgins and like the bridegroom and if there's gonna be enough oil for everybody i would have missed out on some of it because i just would have been like i just don't get it i thought we were hanging out at this person's house eating food and now you're talking about the kingdom and you're gonna die in the bread i want to think of myself that i would have been in tune enough to be like i feel you jesus yes i understand you but i honestly feel that some of his way of communicating i would have just been like what i would have been whispering to somebody next to me like but what does that mean girl isn't it strange that like what that's what we have of jesus is this like handful of things that people reported that he said like if you just took a handful of things that you've said in your life trying to see the amina the real amina from that i was working on a poem years ago and i was trying to find like these stats on jesus and one of the stats was that i think if i have the count right that he told 51 parables that we have in our gospels which you know in in the poem it ended up becoming this line to think that you know that seems like not a large amount of stories for as many people as have come to call themselves christians like that seems like a small amount of stories for millions of people yeah to become his followers it's so wild to me that words are the primary sort of essence of ourselves that it's the only way that we can give ourselves the story of ourselves the essence of ourselves to other people outside of just presence being with them in person sitting there without words we have no history of anybody we know nothing of dr king we know nothing of anybody gandhi or anybody that has come in history that has done something interesting or good it's just words that have translated something of what that was to us and it's just words that allows us to give something of ourselves to others beyond us and in that sense words are tremendously sacred and tremendously powerful and how we use them and and i think that gives a little credence to you know something like politically correct speech some people get it gets people get annoyed by it because it's difficult to keep up with sometimes you feel ignorant by oh i didn't use the correct term but i'm not really trying to be whatever a racist or a bigot but i don't i haven't caught up with how many letters are in lgbt you know what it is right um but when you think of language as how we share our essence with one another and the words that we use doing that more effectively or less effectively the words that we use are important and when we can use words that dignify human beings and rather than disrespect when we can use words that communicate honor and uh even though that's all gets cloudy and it's subjective and whatever when we try when we make the effort to let our language match the essence of what who we are and who the other person is and we do we do our best to let the language represent that as truly as possible i think it's a worthwhile endeavor and i think it's pr it's worth having grace for people too whether we're at the merch table and the person is saying you know i've never heard of you it's i think for all of us to deal with human beings that are we're all clumsily trying to use words all the time to communicate something we need to learn to be gracious with another generous one or hear what he hear what one another actually trying to say but also strive to be better with our words to use them more wisely more graciously full of more love and dignity and honor and respect and because i do think it does matter that's that's how we hand our brains to other people it's how we show our heart to other people that's how we show our deepest thoughts and passions and desires it all gets filtered through words so while they might be imaginary and made up on some level they're also important i agree with that man my husband and i were talking too about you know growing up in the 80s and 90s and sometimes we go back and watch some of the movies or some of the sitcoms from that era and there are things people are saying on there that now we're like you know like perfect example i loved the cartoon fat album growing up the music was awesome i loved that show and now you're like all right when we have kids are we going to be able to let them watch fat albert [Laughter] you know like you can't just say fat albert like you did back then you can't just do that now you know and so in some regards it's like you know i'll hear various people talking about that and they're kind of like ah you know which even this word i'm about to say is also offensive but i've heard people say this like ah people are just becoming sissies now getting so sensitive about everything you know why should we have to you know watch every little thing we say you know and i'm like okay first of all your use of the word sissies is already leading you down the wrong direction you're already going down the wrong path there you need to you need to just start right there start by working on another word but i'm more of i'm more of the opinion of what you said which is i think as much work as it can take to think about what i say and and really what it turns out to be is to think about how what i say may affect or impact other people who do not have my story who are not coming from the same background that i may be coming from who may not have the struggles i have because it's easier for me to for example be sensitive about the things people say about women or the things people say about black people it's easy for me to be sensitive about that because i'm a woman because i'm black but it takes another place of humility for me to also want to know how are other people that might not fall into my you know whatever demographic that is how my the these words i say be offensive to other people who i may not have grown up having had that experience or that may not be my story or my life or my identity i think it takes more humility from us you know kind of back to the ashley darlene example you know it takes more humility from me to go i don't want to call you darlene but that's what you've asked me and if i am going to be caring about you in this world then i should be able to prefer you over my own whatever my weird emotions are about this word you know obviously i've been having lots of conversation about racial injustice and and reconciliation reconciliation racial reconciliation is more a conversation that's happening among christians than i think people who want to see the end of racial injustice who are not christians are sometimes not concerned with the reconciliation parts as much as they are concerned with the justice but that brings up things like why is it not all lives matter why is it black lives matter why do people feel so emotional about it being black lives matter you know like why why are we emotional about that why can't we just say it and say it period and just leave it but these things and what why does it make us feel weird or when we bring up words like privilege why does that make us feel defensive you know so i do find that to be an interesting sort of tension that we experience but i think it's good i think it's good to walk on the other side of pc sometimes because otherwise what's the alternative we're just going to use our words to berate each other all the time and not care about how it makes people feel i think some of that's good some of that sensitivity that we're seeing come up now i think it's good well thanks so much for being part of the podcast love your work thanks for doing all that you do look forward to collaborating more with you thanks michael appreciate you tell everybody where they can find your stuff or find out where you're going to be what you're doing oh yeah uh you could find me on aminabrown.com my first name is spelled amen with an a on the end a m e and a brown.com and i am on all of the other uh interwebs all right thanks amina thanks michael hey michael uh this is graham hiding in my closet to try to avoid barking dogs and flyovers and traffic void the void unmade by simple speaking the mouth of infinity filled with words thoughts encased in the fragile flesh of sound rounded and clipped by lips to travel the illimitable distance of meaning each stuttering utterance a constellation of fear and desire shimmers across the emptiness between the atoms we are such desperate tongues of flame flickering in darkness to warn or warm wound or weep to whisper into the void all right man that's what i got let me know if you need something else and thanks for asking see ya there is this tradition within the christian faith that puts this like divinity spin on language that i think is interesting even how the very beginning of the story begins with and god said let there be light and it starts with speech and how the creative and generative aspect of language and what it does so yes it's fuzzy but it also creates our world when you don't have a word for blue you can't see blue in the same way it it changes how you actually see the world when you find a word for it and somehow sometimes that diminishes reality but sometimes it lets you experience reality i think in a in a different and sometimes even deeper way like i don't know is that true yeah no i think it's demonstrably true i think it's unique to the human perspective you know what i mean like i got two dogs and they don't have a language construct but they experience reality but they also because of that what language lets us do is change the emphasis on how we're processing reality and sometimes that happens kind of against our will because language is installing code in our brain we didn't write but if you kind of become a person who is awake and begin to consider how you're using language and begin to intentionally alter the meta-narrative and the meta-linguistic narrative in your consciousness you can choose how you're processing sensory experiences i guess what i do when our friend rob bell told me to put uncertainty in the neuro-linguistic construct god he gave me a tool to volitionally experience reality in a different context that's an incredibly powerful yeah usage for language yeah that was kind of at the heart of what i really missed when i stopped believing it was not it was knowing that there's parts of reality that i experienced that i now kind of had a vacuum for when i could say i sense the presence of god in this symphony that i'm listening to now all i can say is this symphony is really beautiful and that's not i mean like you know it it moves me emotionally there's something to me and maybe just because i'm a romantic or sentimental or whatever it is but there's something about me recognizing that within that symphony is not just as though i'm separate from the symphony and i'm judging it as some beautiful thing but within that music there is something about the heart of all things there is something about what it means to exist and what it means to be alive that stirs me it makes me feel transcendent of the physical space and time that i'm inhabiting in that moment and god you can't use god's infinite mystery ground of being all like the beauty of the language that has been handed to us when i didn't have that language to believe in because i didn't have a metaphysic for it anymore there was part of reality that i felt kind of out of touch with yeah and coming back to the language um what your axioms help me to do and and reading about greek orthodox and you know epitheticism and all sorts of stuff uh allow me to come back to language with a looser hand but still somehow some of that vacuum was able to be filled with those worries which let me experience the reality behind the fuzziness [Music] well thanks for listening everybody uh we hope that you're okay deconstructing language can be disorienting and uh we'd love to hear your thoughts on the show you can go to the liturgist.com podcast and leave a comment of course we'd love to hear from you on facebook.com the liturgist at the liturgist on twitter or instagram or even periscope thanks for listening everybody i'm science mike i'm michael gunger peace