Listen / Read
This was yet another good attempt at saying absolutely fuck all for the best part of three minutes. Really though, what was she going on about? She says “language is getting in the way, and yet it’s the only way we render our experience intelligible”. How about you try to render your Thought for the Day intelligible? You edit a newspaper for Christ’s sake! Literally, she edits it for Christ’s sake. It’s a Catholic newspaper, I wasn’t being emphatic.
I’m trying to put my finger on the point she was actually trying to make, and I just can’t. She concluded by saying that “there is no word more difficult to use well, and with integrity, than the word ‘god’”. But I can think of loads more words that are harder to use well and with integrity. Muff. Diarrhoea. Scabies. Rimming. Ulrika. Now they’re difficult words to say with integrity (so it’s a good job I have none whatsoever). But ‘god’? It’s piss easy to use the word ‘god’. In fact, in most every Religious Studies essay I ever wrote, I pissed all over ‘god’. I nailed ‘god’ time and time again, both well and with integrity. ‘God’ is my bitch.
“Questioning the existence of God,” she says, “always leads to difficulties, and most of them are caused by our use of language”. But instead of going on to talk about language, she went on to talk more about epistemology, about what constitutes proof and how we know what we say we know. Without claiming to know what I’m taking about either, it seems to me that the limitations of Descartes’ “cogito, ergo sum” were summed up nicely by Hume when he said “what peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe?”
Indeed, what peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the Beeb we call Thought for the Day, that we must make it an arena for unintelligible musings on the nature of language the whole universe?