Brad Rogers posted on Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:32:31 +0100 as excerpted: > Punctuation; It really can save lives. Consider:- > > "Let's eat, grandma" > > "Let's eat grandma" > > :-)
Another famous doctrinal example... Warning: religious doctrinal reference follows. Skip if you might find it offensive. Jesus is recorded in the gospels as saying the following on the cross, to one of the thieves crucified with him who expressed faith even while the other thief mocked and as all three were of course crucified and ultimately to die: I say unto you, today you shall be with me in paradise. I say unto you today, you shall be with me in paradise. Apparently the original Greek the gospels were written in lacked the comma inserted there as punctuation (and of course even they would have been translated from the Hebrew Jesus and the thieves would have likely been using), so it's purely translator's call as to where to place it, but it makes a big doctrinal difference. The first reading appears to support "going to heaven" immediately after death and is the way most translators (who believe that) choose to parse it, while the second simply emphasizes the "now" of the statement, thus being the preferred parsing for those who believe "death is a sleep" and that "the dead know not anything" until the (believed) resurrection at Christ's second coming. As I was raised in a church that taught the latter... FWIW, I'm still a Christian, but my "after death" belief is rather more nuanced now, and not something I'll choose to go into here as (besides being even further OT) were I to do so it'd /surely/ be another 400-line post, complete with all sorts of scripture refs, etc. As Ecclesiastes famously says, "There is a time..." and this isn't it. (But if anybody's interested, you have my email address...) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
