Religion and language

[Jenny A]

@Jenny A

That was one of the most striking things when I came to the babble belt the first time. They really believe that certain words of the English language are magical.

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They will make Jesus cry. They will anger God. It doesn't matter in which context they are understood by the speaker or the audience. It doesn't matter that someone might use "fucking" simply as a means of emphasis without even promoting indecent relations with the inanimate objects in question - in the puritan mind, the word itself offends God. Never mind that the English language is a recent concoction even on mere bibliccal time scales, a weird product of a shitload of historical coincidences - no - the words themselves as they are now are magical.

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I have never before seen such an infantile lack of awareness of history and perspective from otherwise intelligent people.

It goes beyond religion. I worked in the Federal courts in Idaho for a number of years. Numerous people there not only believed weird things like that Federal judges only had admiralty jurisdiction, but that if they said the magic words in court or pleadings, the judge would suddenly become aware of that and lose jurisdiction over their case. As you might imagine, that didn't work out so well for them.

The religious magic I noticed most there was fear of using zip codes or SS numbers, because they are the "mark of the beast" and will damn you forever. But they also had a secular belief that by refusing to use those numbers, you eliminated the federal government's legal control over you. Once again, that didn't work so well for them. Similarly, they believed things like the U.S. Constitution was improperly passed and therefore, if you just pointed that out it would go away.