God's an Octopus

My sister Carla is a renowned linguist and widely published researcher. She works for a car dealership megastore based in Portland. She believes that God lives in a tide pool on the Oregon coast, outside a town called Lincoln City.

“Surly atheists always badger Christians about the translations and versions of the Bible. How challenging it is to translate Aramaic and filter these complex concepts through all of history’s languages and cultures,“ she said. “Yet the real issue is that God would never rely on words to convey meaning.“

I asked if God speaks American.

“It’s that mundane!“ she said. “Every author thinks they’re God, but only because they create and destroy at will. Gods or not, authors struggle when they discover that their text has been misinterpreted. Except for the lazy ones- that conflate ambiguity with artistic integrity- authors want to be understood. God wants to be understood.

“Why would a benevolent, all-knowing, all-powerful Creator rely on syntax, grammar, and evolving languages to share its message?

“What holy being would exclude the very young, the illiterate? Or force them to rely on the learned to connect them with the divine?”

I guess that she does not subscribe to the notion of the revealed word of God.

“God is revealed in the armored intricacies of a chiton shell or the malleable beauty of an octopus,” she said. "Not in symbols pounded into the tissue of trees.

”Plus, I can tell God is not an author, because God stopped publishing! Writers can’t help themselves,” she explains. “Once they have an idea, they just write it over and over again. We'd be up to 2000 Bibles by now.”