I’ve tried writing about this a few times. It’s a really difficult one.
Words are not the things they represent. So when we talk about anything metaphysical or spiritual, we are trying to find the words that most closely allow the person we speaking to to feel what it is that we are talking about.
Really nothing that we talk about can be distilled down to the words. The words are always a crude representation, or signpost towards the real thing, not the thing itself.
There will always be data loss when we try to compress this vast infinite eternal subjective experience into a finite search space of words.
And that’s okay, until people start mistaking the representations for the truth.
This is where we run into trouble with religion. The spiritual components of religions are all true, for some definition of true. When a Jewish prayer says that G-d opens his hand, for example, is the intention that this should be taken literally, with G-d having physical hands like our hands? I think no. But that doesn’t diminish the metaphor. As we try to use our rational minds to understand what these words are telling us, so much gets lost. To the point that I don’t think people know whether it’s metaphor or literal, any longer. In a sense everything is metaphor. We all have separate subjective experiences. Things in the physical realm are usually interpreted before they are experienced.
It makes no sense to suggest that someone else’s word-representation of their felt experience of G-d is wrong. Their subjective experience may be different than yours. Their compression algorithm may be different than yours. But to try to rationalise why one is more right or wrong than the other is to forget that what you’re comparing are compressed entities in the first place. Maybe you have a problem with the compression artefacts—sure—but it’s important to remember that that’s all you have a problem with—not someone else’s subjective experience.
“Is there such a thing as objective truth?” — more interestingly, would it matter either way?
