Scoop of the day: One may desecrate a symbol, but it does not change its value

  Everything of this realm is symbolic of nature. Nothing manifest is more solid than its meaning. Most meaning is obscured in mystery and remains to be revealed only after this life has passed.

  A great example of this is words. A word is nothing more than a symbol of something greater; a referral to something more meaningful and solid. A clear presentation of this is the fact that the meaning of a word changes continuously. Vocabulary is dependent on the societal needs and its particular level of conscience.

  A less conscientious society would change words more during a shorter time span than a settled society. Words of yesterday are taboo today and will be completely lost tomorrow. A mere fifteen years ago, a child born with intellectual challenges would have been called ‘retarded’; this was even a medically appropriate term. Today, it’s taboo and these children are rather referred to as ‘people living with intellectual disability’.

  But, in fact, calling it something new had no effect on the actual value referred to… In South Africa, the government has been changing the names of Apartheid-era cities to more traditional African terms, costing the taxpayer millions. This does, in contrast with popular propaganda, not change the value of the infrastructure or the people living there.

  The simple fact that there’s a multitude of languages proves this: all refer to the potato by a different word, and yet its nutritional value remains unchanged.

  This simple rule is especially valuable in the religious sense, where we tend to attribute more and more content to the ancients, be that Judaic, Christian, Islam or Buddhism, and yet its essence stays the same:

Leading humanity forever upwards and onwards