09-28-2014, 03:54 AM
the main problem here is the unintelligibility in the original question which shows the speakers inability to form a coherent question from which to begin his investigation.
The speaker asks "if not God then who?" Now, I don't blame the speaker for the absurdity, but rather hundreds of years of subsequent incoherences leading to even more unintellible problems of skepticism etc, in refutations that subject themselves to the same vocabulary of the very thing they refute, and continually get worse as they go on may be to blame here.
It's important to note that the problem I'm faced with here is not a problem of content, "message", or "meaning"-- despite the semantics that I'm about to address -- or of any difference of opinion or views, but an anomaly that can only be regarded as technical error.
If not God then who is incoherent, not profound (and I think it is important to make the distinction here), for the following reasons:
The speaker seems to have no idea just what it is he is asking.
If it must be a "who" and this "who" is a conscious, god like entity, then wouldn't it be fair and safe to simply call this who "God"?
I don't find the paradox very interesting; if the speaker asks what we could still wonder if the what is a who, but he seems to be erroneously--and inadvertently--imposing a world view on the reader through his inability to construct a coherent question.
It could maybe be if not my good then your god? or whatever a reader might dream up in their futile attempts to make the question intelligible, but trying too hard or reading much further into the poem would be masochistic imo.
The speaker asks "if not God then who?" Now, I don't blame the speaker for the absurdity, but rather hundreds of years of subsequent incoherences leading to even more unintellible problems of skepticism etc, in refutations that subject themselves to the same vocabulary of the very thing they refute, and continually get worse as they go on may be to blame here.
It's important to note that the problem I'm faced with here is not a problem of content, "message", or "meaning"-- despite the semantics that I'm about to address -- or of any difference of opinion or views, but an anomaly that can only be regarded as technical error.
If not God then who is incoherent, not profound (and I think it is important to make the distinction here), for the following reasons:
The speaker seems to have no idea just what it is he is asking.
If it must be a "who" and this "who" is a conscious, god like entity, then wouldn't it be fair and safe to simply call this who "God"?
I don't find the paradox very interesting; if the speaker asks what we could still wonder if the what is a who, but he seems to be erroneously--and inadvertently--imposing a world view on the reader through his inability to construct a coherent question.
It could maybe be if not my good then your god? or whatever a reader might dream up in their futile attempts to make the question intelligible, but trying too hard or reading much further into the poem would be masochistic imo.