In the beginning...

"In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God."
- John 1:1

Greek is an interesting, complex langauge where words can take on many different meanings. Just to show you the complexity within Greek, I have decided to entertain a nice little excercise. The above Biblical passage is often recited by certain evangelists as a proof positive of the legitmacy of the Bible. Notice, though, I have replaced "Word" with logos.

Logos can easily mean word. However, logos has a number of different meanings. Now, I know why translators choose 'word' as an all encompassing term. However, I'll leave it as an excercise for the reader to discover why translators do as such (Hint: It has to do with an apocryphal work).

he following are different definitions of the word logos:

1. reason
2. account
3. story
4. report
5. praise
6. utterance
7. statment
8. precept
9. prophecy
10. converse
11. speaking
12. sentence
13. question
14. tale
15. inward thought
16. oracle
17. assertion
18. promise
19. resolution
20. condition
21. command
22. speech
23. discourse
24. myth
25. fable
26. prose
27. oration
28. proposition
29. position
30. principle
31. thought
32. opinion
33. expectation
34. plea
35. consideration
36. due proportion
37. analogy

Those are just to name a few. It's interesting, that without proper knowledge of Greek and the context of what's written, one could easily translate logos into any of the above. Just think, what if John 1:1 read as follows: "In the beginning was the myth, and the myth was with God, and the myth was God."

That doesn't seem to bode very well with Christianity. What about plea or fable or opinion? It escapes me how counter-intuitive the extremely religious can be. Considering their outright dislike of science for fear of it ruining their religion, they attempt to suppress knowledge from their young. To me, it seems very much like they are waging a war with knowledge. However, they fail to realize that God does not speak Enlgish and nor did the prophets. Why on Earth would they wage war on knowledge when they themselves rely upon it to understand their religion?

Perhaps, then, they only desire selective knowledge, as if their intellect were at some buffet sampling entres and desserts. This idea of picking and choosing seems short-sighted, and it is simply gross to consider them willfully abandoning true knowledge (such as the theory of evolution) over patently false concepts (such as Biblical Creationism).

I promise to post some more enlightening stuff soon. I've been a bit busy writing my book, unfortunately. Perhaps soon I will be confident enough to post a chapter, or at least a provocative section or two.