Do You Believe In God?

Human language can be used to model the territory honestly, efficiently, accurately, but that is its Sunday-best, not the costume it grew or weaned in. Creatures in rut declare their identities: Yearning frog here; or Capable bull. So do rutting predators: I'm a male lion. But hunting, the predator conceals its identity. The female lions stalking the gazelle try to declare nothing of their imminence to their targets: Silence, they say: never mind us, we're just waving grass, tricks of the light ...

Humans rut: boy, do we ever. Humans can also sit and munch veggies: chew the fat, chew the cud. But humans also hunt, humans also prey on each other: oh, not for calories, there wouldn't be too many of us around if we did that; but for resources, for turf, for bragging rights: a rutting stage.

Do You Believe In God?

What do we mean?

Well, different things at different times. Of course. Different things at the same time as well. And the attribution is necessarily interpretational in all cases: unless there's an infallible God to dictate objective truth to us: at Judgment: infinitely far away from us in time, orthogonally far removed from us in space, and logic.

Who goes there? Friend or foe?
Friend.

Should we shoot in the direction of the voice? Or provisionally believe the voice: until s/he gets close enough to put a knife in our ribs?

Do You Believe In God? can mean a zillion things, but an open sincere naive inquiry into the details of your faith is the least likely. I propose that there's nearly always one meaning: alternate-obverse if not primary-obverse: Are you on my team? Not Do You Believe In God? But Are you within my semantic and political control?

Actually, if you think about it, very few questions we ask each other are independent of power, politics, of jockeying for control. Who did you vote for? That nigger? We're always testing our alliances, testing our level in the pecking order: trying to rise, looking for a chance to cheat.

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Note: for a consideration of ambiguity in our concept of "obverse" ("alternate-obverse if not primary-obverse" above), see the next post. (2009 02 03 Note further, what I've written thus far on the obverse both here and there, is inadequate. I'll try to do a more complete job at my blog InsTic.)

Also: Though I have read Huck multiple times and studied about Huck many times more, none are within recent decades. I avoided retelling the plot in detail so I would be risking fewer errors, but I still could have made one. Realize: it doesn't matter, the point about America, politics, literature, censorship and racism are the same regardless of whether it was Tom or Huck-as-Tom improvising his lie.