Conreligions Checklist: Magic, Politics, Science

     Magic

• Religion and magic often skate very close to each other, however ...
• ... so did science and magic back in really old times.
• ... the differentiation between religion and magic is not necessarily all that clear.
• both are (or at least 'can be') supernatural practices, in some sense.
• not all cultures necessarily differentiate them!
• however, a distinction between sanctioned and non-sanctioned magical activities is rather likely to exist. 
• ... the differentiation between magic and science/engineering is not necessarily all that clear.
• Depending on how science develops, it too will be about
• causing effects
  
• explaining cause and effect
• developing a terminology that permits discussing things
• Practitioners of engineering may not necessarily understand the underlying science, and in the modern world, we do see a fair share of people whose understanding of science is basically just a substitute for religion. (I am not saying science is a substitute for religion, but if you reason about science in certain ways, your understanding of it is probably not much better than religion. Consider, e.g. someone who thinks that evolution has an explicit purpose, or that e.g. quantum mechanics proves that your attitude to outcomes of random events can influence them, etc.) 
• Practitioners of engineering thus may end up using formulas for calculating whether a bridge will hold a certain mass as a sort of magic incantation that tells something essential about the bridge.
  
• ... both religious rituals and magic contain an idea of causation that differs from a naturalistic idea of causation; however, medieval magic did assume quite a different idea of causation in the first place.
• If you don't understand where language came from, language might be seen as an essential, objective part of nature (rather than as a human phenomenon); if language is understood as such a part of nature (or rather physics), ... then linguistic acts might well be "naturalistically" thought to affect nature. Reality 'hears' what you're saying, and reacts to it. However, maybe your language is considered degenerate for whatever reason, and therefore less efficient.
• We find some modern people too have strange notions of causation, see e.g. Masaru Emoto
  
• This actually leads to an interesting notion of what the term "magic" might mean in modern times: "magic" is a term used for any system that assumes an outdated or otherwise rejected notion of causality!
   
• European and Middle Eastern Magic had several different forms, not necessarily recognized as branches of a single 'magic':
  
• The conjuration of spirits
• More generally, things that have effects on spirits in various ways - mazes by that made their obsessive minds get stuck, etc.
  
• Altering the properties of a thing more directly by carrying out certain actions (amulets and talismans)
• Utilizing the properties of a thing by carrying out certain actions
• "As abo
• In most of human history, religion and the state have been two legs of the same creature - the narratives and rituals of religion have justified and regulated the state, and the state has sponsored and sanctioned religion. A few religions, however, have become 'superstate' religions, i.e. their reach crosses state borders and can impose political clout onto several of them - this is maybe especially clear in pre-colonial India, post-Roman Europe and the modern world.
• ve, so below" - by doing something here, the order in the heavens is affected; the order here, is further affected in accordance with how it's affected above.
• Some of these did have somewhat reasonable assumptions:
• We can see that tides are affected by the sun and the moon; thus, the sun and the moon clearly have some kind of invisibly transmitted effect. From this, a mistaken understanding of what that effect is may easily lead into a variety of notions of magic. However! This misunderstood notion probably is not all that far from the roots of our understanding of invisible forces either. NB: I wrote roots, not implying that our understanding and theirs is similar, but that there is a historical continuity from one to the other.
  
• Is prayer magic?
• Depends on what prayer is supposed to achieve.
• Consider the Jewish notion that prayer should be an activity where you consider your own conduct and judge yourself and commit yourself to improving.
• OTOH, Jewish prayer also contains appeals to G-d to improve situations in the real world.
• The atheist view on what religious people do prayer for is is often rather lopsided towards 'people asking for stuff'. Prayer tends to have many functions:
• praise
• restatement and affirmation of doctrine
• personal commitment to improvement
• something somewhat like 'meditation'
• communal bonding
• this may include teaching and reinforcing beliefs among the community's members (e.g. a leader of the congregation prays aloud, and everyone else hears this and possibly repeats it)
• of course, this may also contain an aspect of curtailing freedom of thought - "you've confirmed, vocally, that you believe this every day your entire life, so why won't you believe it now?")
  
• ineffable things (silent prayer, prayer as music without lyrics (hassidic niggun)) - this does probably work as some kind of emotional vent

Science

• Scientific terminology is by itself not necessarily "true": if a religion by tradition uses a word to denote a class of things, and science uses the same word to denote a slightly different class, this is not necessarily a disagreement. It is merely the use of separate definitions. This is a normal phenomenon, and even scientists use words differently - ask a cosmologist and a metallurgist whether sulphur is a metal. Words are arbitrary labels that we apply to things, and sometimes, two groups have different use cases for these words.
• However, both sides of this coin may disagree with the idea that words are arbitrary, and see any failure to adhere to specific definitions as 'wrong'.
• Thus, imho, whenever an atheist use arguments like 'bats aren't birds yet the Bible thinks they are', I'd really like to tell him in private that his argument is making us atheists look dumb, and that he should know better - a language may well have a word 'bird' that basically includes all warm-blooded winged animals. We don't actually know the exact meaning of 'bird' in KJV-era English!
• However, the same type of arguments coming from a religious person is just as dumb. If a muslim argues that science is wrong since it doesn't agree that the liver is a kind of blood, ... well, 
  
• Thus, the terms by themselves don't hold truth value, they're merely a label. Yes, scientific terms often try to catch some kind of relatedness between concepts, ... but this is again dictated by use-case.
• Thus, disagreements as to whether something is a fruit or a berry, a fish or a mammal, etc, ... might occur, but this would be the result of either a religious group or a counter-religious group trying to impose one use terminologal use case onto the entire language, sometimes even onto every language.
  
• Some religions have narratives, rules or other conceptions of reality that go against objective reality. Science attempts to figure out something that is close to reality. If scientific findings and religious dogma contradict, this may lead to the kind of conflict we see in some circles w.r.t creationism, but it may also
• Cause reinterpretation in all kinds of mystical / metaphorical ways.
• Cause rejection of a narrative.
• Cause the believers to think they don't "understand" the narrative deeply enough.
• Cause believers to hold out hope that scientific findings currently are a fluke, and soon enough the True Truth will emerge.
• If the religion isn't all that interested in maintaining belief, but rather maintaining praxis, this might not be an issue at all ... unless scientific findings show that the praxis leads to the opposite results of what's expected (e.g. a healing ritual that is strongly carcinogenic).
• Sometimes, people are able to keep conflicting ideas in their heads, and if they do not perceive the conflict between the ideas to be important, this might not even lead to particularly strong cognitive dissonance. I know I have some conflicting beliefs w.r.t. some obscure maths, but it's not anything that gives me any stress.
• Consider examples like 'reconstructionist Judaism', which holds that Judaism is an iron age civilization that has survived into the present by morphing from a territorial civilization to an ethnic minority group kind of civilization. For such an idea about 'religion', the truth value of the religious scripture is really not all that important: to them, the Jewish Bible is a family hierloom which tells them how some particularly influential members of the civilization viewed itself and its challenges 2200+ years ago, and this volume has had a considerable impact on the culture, which is another reason to keep it around and sometimes even read it. For such a religion, the science/religion conflict seems totally irrelevant. For conservative Christianity, Islam and some branches of Orthodox Judaism, however, the conflict can be all the more threatening, as cherished truths are questioned and possibly even shown to be entirely untenable (or only tenable by extremely far-fetched solutions).
  

Politics

• A common notion today is "keep religion out of politics". Over most of human history, this would be almost laughable.
  
• Clearly, if divine beings exist and interact with mankind, pleasing them may be of some political relevance.
• As previously mentioned, in earlier times, causation was less clearly understood, and if your best understanding of causation says 'we need to sacrifice sheep to ensure rain', your culture will sacrifice sheep.
• Organized religion almost certainly emerged not as a result of politics, but as politics.
  
• Democracy in some sense does imply imposing by some kind of regulated manner, the ethics of some voters onto other voters. If some voters' ethics are based on religion, it's not weird if this does impose some religious values on the non-religious as well.
  
• In most of human history, religion and the state have been two legs of the same creature - the narratives and rituals of religion have justified and regulated the state, and the state has sponsored and sanctioned religion. A few religions, however, have become 'superstate' religions, i.e. their reach crosses state borders and can impose political clout onto several of them - this is maybe especially clear in pre-colonial India, post-Roman Europe and the modern world.
• Pre-state or sub-state religions naturally also exist, but also require some amount of social cooperation. And in these, there also tends to be justification of the social order - chieftains, shamans, gender roles, etc. And this, of course, is politics.

Detail #441: Naming the nights

 In several cultures, there's a cycle of names for days, and of course English is a trivial example of this. Now, imagine if there were separate names for the nights!

It could make sense, for some reasons, to have a separate cycle length for the nights: if the night is named by the group that is responsible for the night guard, it might be desirable that different groups cycle out to be able to participate in daytime religious obligations.

Conreligion Checklist Sidequest: Religion as an analogy of language

Language is not merely a vocabulary and a set of rules for how to generate and parse well-formed sentences. A proficient speaker also knows how to express himself idiomatically and in a culturally appropriate way. It also provides metaphors which can help a speaker express ideas.

A language is not a question of belief - normally, a speaker doesn't have to "believe" that 'nutmeg' is a spice derived from a certain plant's grated nuts. It's a question of convention. A speaker doesn't "believe" that it's rude to say certain types of utterances in certain contexts, it's rude by his understanding of the conventions of the speaker community.

In some ways, religion provides a similar set of conventions. Sometimes, some of these conventions may seem odd and superstitious, but as a shared set of conventions, they may help provide some way in which to parse human interactions, as well as render them somewhat more constructively predictable for other participants in the interaction.

Let's consider one example - sitting shiva. In Jewish culture, upon someone's death, there are many rules that govern the behavior of the nearest family of the departed, as well as how the community is expected to behave with regards to them. After the funeral, shiva begins and lasts for a week. During this week,

• You are expected to visit those who grieve.
  
• You don't start a conversation with them; you let the grieving family start conversations if they like.
• You can bring food. (NB: Of course, this is expected to be kosher food.)

There are more rules than these - and the rules may seem onerous and nitpicky. But ...

• They provide a clear 'manuscript' which to follow; you don't need to worry about what to say to the bereaved.
• They provide a clear, understood way of how to express your sympathies. You know what to do, the bereaved know what you'll do. This is a bit like having a shared set of vocabulary, and using that shared set of vocabulary. You don't need to come up with your own attempts at showing sympathy, and risk it being misunderstood.
  

In Jewish mourning, there's several other minor rituals - some of which are somewhat physical (and maybe cathartic for that reason, e.g. tearing a cloth,

Sitting shiva has a very specific time frame - a week. Other parts of the mourning last for a month, and finally some parts a year. This might seem odd to regulate, but this too provides people a 'manuscript' to go by. No matter how important a person was to you, life must go on. Providing rituals and specific dates as a kind of roadmap to grief may in some sense help manage the emotional baggage.

Probably, other practices besides funerary one provide similar contexts to people - even less dramatic ones like, say, festive holidays. These provide a shared language for joyous interactions, without having to come up with a great deal of explanations why I'd like to get someone drunk.

Conreligion: Lirbexper Funerary Rites and Beliefs

In Lirbexper belief, the afterlife begins as a member of a war party in the battle against various supernatural entities. Some parts of the ritual praxis and religious literature  in part is meant to prepare the members for this battle. However, as mentioned, this is a party. Not just one person.

Upon death, a person undergoes a short primary temporary interment, waiting for a full party to be assembled. At this interment, ritual symbolic weapons and devices for resting are given. The actual ritualized part of it is very short. The afterlife is not considered to have begun yet - this is a gray zone between dead and alive, and for certain types of religious observances, one is considered alive. (So, for instance, the family should still mention their recently dead in certain rituals.)

After this, the body is left to wait until a sufficiently large group of dead is assembled - usually 8 or more, depending partially on ages and status of the dead - preferably, someone who has achieved certain religious ranks should be included, in order to be able to ensure the strength of the party. Once a sufficient group is assembled, the actual funeral is performed for the entire party, and the families of the dead will arrange a celebration where the whole community together wish the dead luck in their raids, and also reminisce about them.

The date for the funeral is decided based on several types of divination, including astrology. Certain communities may also decide the burial place depending on the results of divination. Usually, a shared monument is raised at the place of burial.

Rituals

There are fairly standardized liturgies used at the first and second funeral; the bodies are clothed and equipped after a standardized manner. Symbolic weapons - and sometimes real weapons - are given to the dead at the second funeral. At the first funeral, the gifts are meant to give the dead person rest until the challenges ahead.

Complications - found bodies, lost bodies

Certain kinds of accidents or injuries may cause the body to be lost, and may sometimes even leave mourners unsure as to whether a person even has died. This may especially be the case with travelers who die far away. After a certain time, an effigy of the lost person may be buried with a group, but is not counted towards the full number - in the case of a mistake, the effigy would otherwise reduce the actual number of participants, and this must be avoided.

An unknown, found body is likewise sometimes buried with a group, but not counted: the body may already have been included in effigy elsewhere. Also, in case he is not a member of the community, it is assumed he will not be participating in the party, as the afterlife is assumed to work differently for other communities. If the body seems to be very recently dead, it will be left to wait at least a month. This can be cause for postponing a burial of an established group.

During this month, inquiries may also be done to other communities, to identify the corpse, in which case the originating community may take care of the body instead.

In both of the cases where the corpse is buried with a group, the officiant will also read a petition for forgiveness - in case the ritual causes additional bother to one who already has undergone it or in case the ritual causes irrelevant bother to someone who is not meant to participate in it. In case an effigy is present, an invitation to any non-buried dead of the faith is also extended in case the intended addressee does not need it.

Controversies

In more modern times, the question of whether you really have to be buried together with someone who you fear appeared. Especially people who had been abused by certain other members of the community may fear having to endure a considerable chunk of their afterlife with their abusers. Originally, clergy opposed such considerations, as it was against tradition, as well as against the will of God: had he chosen that you should die near the time of another person's death, he clearly wanted the two of you in the same team.

However, the undeniable evidence that noblemen, clergy, and even just generally rich people always had been able to get their wishes respected, including wishes such as not to be buried with commoners, or to be buried with particular types of people - to the point where people sometimes were killed in order to accommodate such wishes, medium-conservative clergy would over time start accepting such requests from commoners as well.

Conservative clergy, however, would reject these concerns. Radical clergy held that the afterlife was a myth, and the burial ceremonies were just a way of illustrating very clearly that we are all the same in the face of death, regardless of behavior or achievements, and for this reason worked hard to remove the privilege of choice from the upper classes instead.

 

 

 

Detail #440: Generalizing V2

V2 is a peculiar syntactical structure present in western and northern Europe, which governs where the finite verb goes in a main clause. Historically, it has had some presence in some Romance and Celtic languages, is still present in almost all Germanic languages, Estonian, and is also present in a few other languages worldwide. There's differences in whether these languages apply V2 to subclauses or not, (or even to what types of subclauses they apply them), and how strictly the V2 rule operates.

When trying to come up with new ideas, I like to 'parametrize' a concept and alter the parameters.

The first parameter of V2 that occurs to people tend to be the number, and of course, increasing that to 3 is an obvious idea. And naturally, one could even go further, to 'V4' or whatever, but such seems to require increased numbers of mandatory arguments, dummy arguments, or permitting V3 and V2 in circumstances where too few arguments are present.

However, there's a few other things we can do. Besides, grammar in general seems to be bad at counting past two. However, it seems to be rather good at counting both backwards and forwards. Thus, we could have V-2, where '-' denotes minus, and I'll parse that as in python list comprehension - i.e. counting from the end. This could signify having the verb always being the penultimate word.

This could lead to VS but SVO, but also SVAdv, etc.

However, there's a different parameter we can change: S2 - subject second! VSO, but also permitting OSV, AdvSV, VSAdv, etc. O2 is of course also conceivable, (or erg2 or abs2 or whatever), but in the case of O2 or Erg2, we do run into the question of how to deal with intransitive clauses.

We could also have a more general NP2, where any noun phrase qualifies. One could imagine having a subset of possible arguments: (S or O)2, or even weirder pairings like (Adv or V)2.

In Swedish, there's a handful of adverbials that can go between the subject and the verb, or at the beginning of a clause yet be followed by SV. Such lexical exceptions can of course also be considered for a conlang.

A different parameter we could imagine changing 'where does the rule apply'. For now, V2 applies on sentence level. We could imagine a similar rule that applies in a verb phrase or in a noun phrase, e.g. 'article comes second' or 'TAM marker is the second constituent of the verb phrase'. I am aware of some such rules in some languages, esp. w.r.t. articles and e.g. Wackernagel-position clitics in Latin and Russian.

 

Detail #439: Quasi-parts of speech and quasi-constituents and the Locus of the Abessive

Different languages are analyzed with different sets of parts of speech and constituents/parts of sentences. To some extent these boil down to grammatical traditions, but to a great extent they also boil down to actual grammatical phenomena. However, if we were to compare, say, Swedish and English, the differences are largely superficial: both descriptive traditions work with barely any modifications to describe either language. A trivial example: Swedish grammar tradition has "subjunctions", which in the English tradition are subsumed under "conjunctions". Subjunctions are words that introduce subclauses, i.e. subordinating conjunctions. A description of English would be marginally different if this concept was introduced.

In some languages, however, distinguishing adjectives from nouns - or adjectives from verbs in some other languages - makes way less sense. Applying such a distinction would be looking at it through a decidedly foreign lens. Sometimes, which part of speech a word belongs to is hard to pinpoint: a word may be both a verb and an adverb, or a noun and an adverb, or a noun and an adjective, etc.

A thing that interests me, however, are a variety of ways in which constituents and parts of speech may behave in ways that justify considering them some kind of quasi-PoS or quasi-constituent, constituents that show some kind of uniformity, but cut across other constituents.

One such example I have been sketching over recent months is what I chose to call "the locus of the abessive". This locus is marked by a certain case (which however also is used for some other constituents), but can appear as subjects, objects, indirect objects, possessors, possessums and other constituents. The abessive itself could also be considered a type of quasi-constituent.

The syntax of this entity gets complicated. First of all, the locus can be any of the following:

• topic
  
• subject: I miss her
  
• object: he deprived them of shelter
  
• indirect object: they gave him no food
• location: there is no joy in Aylesbury
• possessor: the orphan's mom
• possessum: the man's widow
• infinitives of various functions: there's no reason to hate him

What if the locus of the abessive could be coordinated over gaps, even when it isn't the same role? 'They deprived him of shelter and gave no food' would then have 'him' as the indirect object of 'gave'. This could get really tricky once possessors and possessums and infinitives start getting involved.

 

About Bryatesle and its relatives

About Bryatesle and its relatives

Bryatesle is a dialect continuum encompassing about 30 million native speakers. It is the lingua franca of about 40 million additional speakers, has a rich literature - fictional, scientific, philosophic, religious and instructional, in both poetic and prose forms - liturgies in multiple religions, songs, humor, word games, and a variety of other linguistic devices. Dialectal differences are sufficient that several ends of the dialect continuum are not mutually intelligible, but the standard forms of the language provide common ground for scholars, businessmen, clergymen, government officials and regular people.

Short history

The pre-historic connections between Bryatesle and its kin languages indicate a rather sudden expansion from the Dairwueh-Bryatesle urheimat about 3800 years before the present year (bpy), after a previous split from Sargalk.

Bryatesle tribes started forming city states sometimes roughly 1800 bpy, at which time also writing systems were adopted from Tatediem cultures to the south. Maritime and fluvial trade networks led to about 40 city states forming around the sea of Sadgal and the sea of Gudnyt as well as the great lake Pajik over the next 800 years. Expansion both east- and northwards included assimilation of some Cwarminoid and Tatediem populations. Westwards, Dairwueh tribes partially resisted Bryatesle expansion, partially stood as equal partners in trade and industry, partially stood in political unity, partially expanded onto Bryatesle areas. Several westwards city states in fact were bilingual, and conflicts were not necessarily as much between Dairwueh and Bryatesle, but rather between distinct alliances of dairwobryatesle states.

About 1200 years ago, a stronger political unity over the dairwobryatesle world emerged, with  Ykred emerging as a capital of sorts. This unity lasted 300 years, but after 200 years of dissolution and strife, the last 700 years have seen a somewhat less centralized, but still united dairwobryatesle world, now under the domination of the city-state Sţesar. Although some consolidation of the various standard Bryatesle dialects has occurred due to improved communications, significant differences persist.

Geoculturopolitically, there are occasional confrontations with the Ćwarmin civilization to the east. In the far east, the Ŋʒädär have some trade relations with the Dairwuobryatesle. Southwards, we find the Tatediem engaging in trade, diplomacy, proselytization and sometimes war.

Related languages

The Sargalk-Bryatesle-Dairwueh family consists of the following languages and major dialects (italicized)

• The Hefnarač-Sargaĺk Branch
• The Sargaĺk branch
• Sargaĺk
• northern Sargaĺk
• Inraj Sargaĺk
• Geʔamik †
• Tudiluk †

• The Hefnarač branch
• Hefnarač
• Sindeʔʔet †
• Bidlahʔa †
• The Rilgouz branch
• Simiz †
• Rilgouz
• The Adrk languages
• Adrk
• Tarts †
• Vimil
• The Dairwueh-Bryatesle Branch
• The Dairwueh Branch
• Dairwueh
• Western
• Central
• Bundur
• Vist †
• Kappeuje †
• The Nerazg Branch †
• The Bryatesle Branch
• Northern
  
• Bryatesle
• Western Tarist
• Southern
• Tarist
• Kurelwai †
• Trinzlye †

The Hefnarač-Sargaĺk Branch

The Hefnarač-Sargaĺk branch consists of three extant languages, Hefnarač, Sargaĺk and Inraj Sargaĺk. , Inraj Sargaĺk is moribund, with about 500 speakers. Hefnarač and Sargaĺk each have about 20 000 speakers, but language change towards Dairwueh and Cwarmin are weakening them both. More extinct languages are hinted at from old sources. Geʔamik, Tudiluk, Sindeʔʔet and Bidlahʔa have all gone extinct during the last 100 years. Small word lists for about a dozen other languages that probably were also related have been compiled by scholars and missionaries. The time-depth of the relation between Hefnarač and Sargaĺk is probably on the order of 3500 years or more. The most recent common ancestor between Hefnarač-Sargaĺk and Dairwueh-Bryatesle is probably about 4500 years ago or more.

The Rilgouz Branch

The Rilgouz languages are spoken on islands west of the main Dairwueh lands. The total number of Rilgouz speakers probably is about two million, with Adrk and Vimil having about 3000 each. Whether these languages diverged earlier or later than the HS/BD split is unclear, and even then it is a bit unclear which branch they diverge from: there are isoglosses that pair any two of the three branches, exclude the third - both for sound changes, semantic changes and grammar changes. There even are lexemes that single-handedly occupy conflicting isoglosses.

The Dairwueh branch

An overwhelming amount of shared innovations indicate that the Dairwueh and Bryatesle branches are closely related, having diverged at most 3500 years ago. Dairwueh and Bundur separated about 1500 years ago, Vist and Kappeuje were arguably divergent dialects that have since merged into Dairwueh leaving substratal traces.

The Nerazg branch

A few moribund languages with clearly para-Dairwueh/para-Bryatesle features have been assigned into this family. Research is ongoing, but the evidence is unclear.

 

The Bryatesle branch

Bryatesle's nearest living relative is Western Tarist, which diverged under the last 1000 years or so. Trinzlye and the southern branch encompassing Tarist and Kurelwai diverged about 1500 years ago, only to see Kurelwai mostly assimilate back into Tarist (but also to some extent into Bryatesle).

Trinzlye was largely assimilated into Dairwueh, where it has left some traits as well.

Arguably, there is a dialect continuum between Bryatesle and Western Tarist.