Day: December 30, 2015

Sure, I did. But I’m a linguist, so I don’t count. 🙂

Not that agglutinative/flexional is the same thing as analytic/synthetic, but Esperanto did spoil me for language learning in my teens, and I have read a Turkish grammar just for aesthetic enjoyment. And the most joy in the historical grammar of Greek is tracing the inflections to their agglutinative origins. For that matter, on the synthetic side, I’ve gotten my jollies from reading Tok Pisin and Mandarin grammars too. 

Of course, “inconvenient” isn’t the right answer, as other respondents have said. They are just different ways of expressing the same meaning, and they certainly aren’t intractable for native speakers to learn.

And synthetic language speakers shouldn’t get too envious. If you read the fine print of those Mandarin and even Tok Pisin grammars, you find that the semantics of aspect and mood particles gets very messy very quickly.

My site on Greek and Unicode is currently offline, but this is what I had to say about it: http://photius.tlg.uci.edu/~opou… . (I refer to the “calligraphic” phi as the mathematical variant:

Until Unicode 3.0, the normal character for phi was the closed form, and the mathematical variant was the open. The reference glyphs were swapped in Unicode 3.0, as it was realised that the normal mathematical phi is the closed form, and Greek text uses the open form exclusively, at least in Greece. (The Loeb Classical Library amongst others uses the closed phi, so it is fair to say that Classicists have a greater tolerance for the closed form.) Fonts created before the release of Unicode 3.0 (September 1999) are likely to have the old default form for phi.

Are they all not just history books concluding to have some moral message to help us live our lives? Because if this is true, then life should be put first before religions. And nobody should take a life of a preacher or one dedicated in a path to understand religion. It’s secondary is it not?

Other respondents are responding to the OP’s use of “history” vs “story” (mythology). But OP’s question is, if the Bible is not divine, then one’s morality cannot derive from religion, but affirmation of life.

It’ll interest OP to know that there was a prominent theologian who came to pretty much that conclusion. This theologian pioneered Historical Jesus research, and came to the conclusion that the actual Jesus was all about the end of the world—and since the world has not ended, that Christianity was founded on a lie. (Subsequent Historical Jesus researchers have concluded that the end-of-the-world guy was John the Baptist, not Jesus, but that’s not the point here.)

So. You are a big time theologian, and you have just proven to yourself in your forties that everything you believed in is a lie. What do you do?

You switch jobs, study medicine, and go to Africa to heal the sick. “Life should be put first.” In fact, your personal philosophy Reverence for Life.

Ok, that’s one take on it, and I see that it’s not Wikipedia’s take on Albert Schweitzer: he articulated quite Christian motives for dropping theology and taking up medicine (and he didn’t really drop theology for that matter). But clearly he did not stay an orthodox Christian, and he had a crisis of faith after confronting the issue of literal truth in the New Testament.