Especially in listening to people who "believe" things (spirituality, faith, etc.) do I hear words being used which are nonsense.
I'm a person who cherishes words in a weird, almost fetishistic way :)
I discovered this quite young. I was drawn to complicated word patterns and liked to repeat them. There was a commercial for Ajax (the foaming cleanser). I memorized it and recited out loud for my folks who thought it was so cute. Of course, I was five years old at the time.
Here is what I remember:
"CREST has been shown to be an effective decay-preventive dentifrice that can be of significant value when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care."
I adored tongue-twisters too. "The silent sea ceaseth and thus sufficeth us."
I was constantly making word lists and looking up and memorizing definitions.
Why? I just can't explain it. I really couldn't help it.
All of which goes a way toward explaining my intense dislike of "empty words" used by charlatans to (fake) explain mystical principles.
Here is an example from an advertised best seller:
"The author claims that as we think and feel, a corresponding frequency is sent out into the universe which attracts back to us events and circumstances on that same frequency."
What the hell is meant by using the word "frequency" describes "how often" a wave rises and falls, for instance. (Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time.)
The author is asserting facts not in evidence, to wit: "thinking" and "feeling" transmits energy pulses so strong and powerful they influence reality. And not just that! These "frequencies" find, select, captivate and take hostage the very objects of thought the thinker and feeler created in their imagination!
Okaaaay. With billions of people thinking and feeling every second of each day--what kind of universal traffic jam would result?
Here is a statement which doubled me over with laughter.
"Physicist Dick Bierman said of the Global Consciousness Project that the effects were very real and the only thing in dispute is what the results actually mean."
Ahh, that was rich indeed!
Here is a more sophisticated statement:
"What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it. The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning." – Carl Jung
M-mmmm, isn't he saying "We don't know anything"? But, then throws in the puzzling ". . . brings no loss of meaning." Does that represent the thought that ignorance carries meaning? Oh, my head hurts!
My taste for intellects which encompass reality is reflected in one of my heroes here:
"A paradox is not a conflict with reality. It is a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality should be like." – Dr. Richard Feynman
Isn't Feynman describing our tendency to decide before we have proof? We call something 'impossible' until it happens. Our expectations and ignorance combined to evaluate without proof.
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
I've visited several "fringe" websites to read the jelly-like reasoning which amounts to "Science doesn't have all the answers." I shout back at them, "So does that PROVE something about your unproven belief system?"
Yeah, you're right in thinking I need to go lie down awhile.