RE: When and where did atheism first start ?
June 25, 2019 at 9:15 am
(This post was last modified: June 25, 2019 at 9:38 am by Angrboda.)
No offense, Bel, but you seem to be back to arguing the question of applying normative judgements to the acquisition of religion because it's unnatural, despite your explicit denial that you were making any such suggestion. The most charitable I can be is to interpret your comments as simply reducing to "religion, being a learned thing, isn't necessarily evil." Exactly what point you are making besides that something being unnatural isn't necessarily evil is still unclear to me. The fact that a child is born without language has no impact on this discussion at all. We aren't born with genitalia hair either, that doesn't make it unnatural. I don't have the time or any inclination to further explore this at the moment, because I, like you, and every other human in existence, have a natural, untaught tendency to a certain degree of laziness, if you want to call it that, in terms of making my decisions about how to engage others, how to spend my time, what to focus on, and how to do so. Another way of saying the same thing is that I prioritize things according to various factors and at any given time, some thing or another just may not make the cut. You, for whatever reason, seem to be quickly descending from the already low rank in my priorities that you already enjoyed from prior encounters with you. I will see if I can explore your response more fully at another time. For now you get a less than adequate treatment of your reply because you have a history of demonstrating that any investment in a discussion with you is likely to go unrewarded.
Language does not have to be taught. Exposure to the stimulus of actual language use does appear to be required for the natural ability to develop into actual skill and practice in using a specific language. Offhand the best example is probably neglected children in orphanages such as those which existed in eastern Europe at one time. Despite the poverty of stimulation and neglect of attention, these children still developed linguistic skills in specific languages. The answer here is two-fold. First, exposure to a specific language appears to be necessary for acquisition of that language, and because children aren't routinely exposed to all languages, they do not develop skill in all languages. The second has to do with language itself in that the instinct is natural, but that instinct requires particularization toward one or more specific instances of language to express itself. Particularization is necessarily exclusive to a particular language and therefore is not a general thing which would transfer from one ability in one language to a similar ability in another language, without specific intentional work, or without some shared inherent similarity in the particularization of the languages involved. (For example, a child who learns French will have some native ability which can be transferred to Italian, as the languages, being in the same language family, share many structural and particular aspects that they, say, do not share with Japanese or Chinese.)
(June 25, 2019 at 8:56 am)Losty Wrote: If language does not have to be taught, then why doesn’t everyone speak every language?
Language does not have to be taught. Exposure to the stimulus of actual language use does appear to be required for the natural ability to develop into actual skill and practice in using a specific language. Offhand the best example is probably neglected children in orphanages such as those which existed in eastern Europe at one time. Despite the poverty of stimulation and neglect of attention, these children still developed linguistic skills in specific languages. The answer here is two-fold. First, exposure to a specific language appears to be necessary for acquisition of that language, and because children aren't routinely exposed to all languages, they do not develop skill in all languages. The second has to do with language itself in that the instinct is natural, but that instinct requires particularization toward one or more specific instances of language to express itself. Particularization is necessarily exclusive to a particular language and therefore is not a general thing which would transfer from one ability in one language to a similar ability in another language, without specific intentional work, or without some shared inherent similarity in the particularization of the languages involved. (For example, a child who learns French will have some native ability which can be transferred to Italian, as the languages, being in the same language family, share many structural and particular aspects that they, say, do not share with Japanese or Chinese.)