Re: Public Nudity: Innocent or Sin?

On Sat, 14 Mar 2009 09:27:07 -0000, "David Looser"
<[email protected]> wrote:

...
>>>I think you're also conceding that
>>>the intended audience wasn't humanity for the ages, but only the
>>>illiterate bronze age herdsmen of the time.
>>
>> That IS the literal meaning of the text, just like Hamlet was intended
>> to make Shakespeare money in the theatres of his day. Nevertheless, it
>> is still entertaining audiences today, partly due to the underlying
>> universal human issues it addresses, however rightly or wrongly.
>
>You really do seem to have a huge problem with the concept of "literal
>meaning" don't you? . Neither Shakespere's motives for writing Hamlet, nor
>his (or anyone else's) idea of the moral of the story are relevant to it's
>"literal meaning".
...

You really do have a huge problem understand that *meaning* is in the
mind not the fact. What Shakespeare would have meant by those words at
that time is the only thing relevant to their meaning. Hamlet himself
and everything he is supposed to have said and did and every object he
saw or felt never existed as in the play but only as in their minds. 

Let's first look at an example that is NOT the literal meaning.

An example of usage that is not the literal meaning is the use of the
word "dagger" in the famous quote from Act 3 Scene 2: 

		"I will speak daggers to her - but use none"

Here, the literal meaning of the word "dagger" is not the *intended*
meaning, but the literal meaning is still that of a dagger. The author
may intend a word mean something other than the literal meaning. There
are many instances of this in the Bible. Genesis is full of them.

In other places the literal meaning is intended, but not as today.

When MacBeth uses a dagger on Duncan, it is the literal meaning of the
word dagger, and that is pretty much as we know it today, but other
words are not so obvious. For example, what does the word "King" mean?
Even if you know MacBeth was to be the High King of Scotland, what is
that? Was Scotland then the same as today? How big of a prize was
that? Enough to kill for, or was MacBeth merely a homicidal kook?

King of Scotland would have meant a lot more to a man in Shakespeare's
audience than today, and been an even bigger prize to a Scot in 1040
than when Shakespeare lived, a fact his audience would know.

The literal meaning of the word "King" here depends on roughly knowing
what the author intended for the mind of his audience. A young person
today in the USA seeing the play might wonder why a general like
MacBeth didn't simply run in the next elections for prime minister or
president, and get real power. Who would even want to be King?

We can get the denotation of King from the dictionary, even the
connotation with help from the syntax, but meaning involves semantics.
Every attempt for a machine to understand what someone wrote or said
has stumbled badly on the issue of semantics. Doing a dictionary based
translation, with phrase translation, gives you the kind of
translations you get from Google. Semantics are absolutely critical to
the literal meaning and impossible to resolve without a reference
model of knowledge that approximates that of the author or speaker.

MacBeth is not historically accurate, even though there was a real
King MacBeth of Scotland in 1040. It does not need to be historical
because it is intended to convey something very different than
accurate history, but that does not mean we can just fudge the
intended literal meaning of the words if we want the full impact.
MacBeth might be more truthful even if less factual. Like the Bible.

MacBeth was given to us less than 400 years ago and in our native
language, it is easy to see how the literal meaning of the words in
the Bible are different than the obvious literal meaning today,
however well translated, because the semantics of every word are so
different today in our minds than in the author's over 2K years ago.

Even more important, we can see with hindsight not available to people
of that time, that their actions in the light of History were not at
all pleasing to God, and certainly not to be duplicated, no matter how
much they were celebrated and perhaps necessary. As with MacBeth.

If a person's reading of the lessons of the Bible (or the Koran or
Hamlet) does not stand up to reason or common sense in today's world,
then it is not an accurate reading of the literal meaning of the time
as it would apply to today's world. In the final analysis, then, it
does not matter what it says in the Bible (or the Koran or Hamlet)
because we have to take those lessons learned and run them up against
reason and common sense to see how we would apply them today. 

We could just skip that step and go with reason and common sense, but
who cares as long as we act together to promote reasonable, sensible
solutions to the problems that beset us.

So public nudity is not a sin if it is reasonable and sensible, and
that conclusion does not require Biblical support or change in the
face of Biblical condemnation. OTOH, it is not surprising to find both
Biblical support and a lack of condemnation. It's a Biblical human
value, and people who care about such things should know that.