Prescriptive Religious Language

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Religious language is language which aims to justify and explain the existence of God. Within religious language it uses many different forms of language such as specialist vocabulary "messiah" which is religion specific , truth claims "there is no God except from Allah." which say what God is, language expressing feelings and emotions "We are truly sorry we will repent." , prescriptive language "Honour your mother and father." which tells someone how to act, and performative language "I baptise you in the name of the lord." which states that something is about to happen in context of religion. All these forms of language can be argued to be meaningless according to the verification principle. The verification principle arose to show which statements are meaningful and which ones are meaningless, it originated from the Vienna Circle and was created to add a more scientific mindset to philosophy and therefore wanted to avoid the theological aspect that philosophy had. The main argument of the principle is "Statements are only…show more content…
The language is what they base their perceptions on and things such as moral compasses, due to prescriptive language such as 'do not murder.' therefore the religious-language is meaningful as it builds certain peoples character and is able to spark emotions amongst those who have faith. Wittgenstein alltogether suggests that Religious-language is meaningful to those who are religious, and meaningless to those who are not. Hare also talks about perceptions, he calls them bliks and suggests that there are insane/sane bliks and there is no way to objectively measure such things, so no way to objectively measure religious language, which suggests it is meaningless as it can't be falsified or verified without objective

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