Re: Public Nudity: Innocent or Sin?

On Mar 17, 12:47 am, Stuffed Tiger <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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.

garbage.....jz