More Sunday morning thoughts

Have I mentioned that my brain never stops?

I’ve been putting off writing this for … well, 6 days. I have 1000 words worth of notes. So, let’s see if I can create something more or less coherent out of those. There might have to be “yet more Sunday morning thoughts”. I’m sitting on my balcony. It’s 9 AM on a Sunday morning. I’ve already walked around Aarau for about 45 minutes, taking 100 pictures for a city profile I’m working on. I just had breakfast – Butterzopf and honey, you guessed it.

Bus terminal in Aarau at 7.20 this morning. Award-winning “roof” especially helpful when it rains. That’s my bus on the right #1 of course.

So, here’s what happened since last week: I went on three long walks (see Rhena on the move, my YouTube channel, Twitter) – a total of 12 hours of walking. That’s a lot of time to think.

Church bells

Some other uses of church bells came to mind. Things I remember from childhood. Of course, they ring every 15 minutes and at the top of the hour. They would also ring when somebody died. It was this tiny bell. An eerie sound. Then my grandma would know just who to call to find out who died. The town I grew up in was kind of special as in we didn’t have an actual church. The clock and the bells were on top of the school building. Same functions though.

One of my favorite times of the week is Saturday between 4.45 and 5 PM. That’s when all the church bells ring for a full 15 minutes to remind people it’s time for the weekend. It’s an old tradition. Way back when people didn’t have watches the church bells were used to communicate the time and to let people know to get off the fields on a Saturday afternoon. I kind of like that we’re still doing that. As I mentioned I live really close to two churches. The bells are LOUD. I don’t mind it though. I mean - not really.

This can stay and this can go

Let’s keep the traditions. Especially the food-related ones. I had the pleasure of trying traditional Jewish food with friends at a deli in New York last December. That was yummy. I think traditional foods are here to stay. I mean I come from the country that produces insane amounts of chocolate Easter bunnies. We didn’t invent them – that was the Germans, apparently – but we do love them. I mean I don’t, personally, but people do. Food makes people happy. Holidays that have special foods attached to them (religious or not) give people something to look forward to. Also, a sense of community. That can stay.

Basically, I think we should keep anything that makes people happy, supports them and actually helps them. What I think should disappear is church dogma in our private lives. It would also be about freaking time for the abuse in the Catholic church and elsewhere to stop. There will be a separate newsletter on religious cults – the rant kind. Anything that is harmful needs to go. Sin and guilt are clearly not helpful either. Religious guilt is such an extremely harmful concept. Anyway, stopping here. Rant to follow.

It is now 9.25 and all the bells are going. Church time. I just googled it there is a service at the Catholic church held in Croatian. Interesting. Bells just ringing out as the service begins at 9.30.

Keep religion out of education!

There is a reason church and state are meant to be separate. A person’s belief is their private business. Traditionally, many schools in Switzerland were church-affiliated. Churches were where you could find people that could read and write. They also had the funds to run schools. That gave them a lot of power. Nowadays most schools are state run.

My High School (Alte Kantonsschule Aarau) was the FIRST non-church affiliated school of its kind in Switzerland when it was founded in 1802. This was needed for progress. This was needed for fact or science-based education. In my entirely unbiased opinion, this really shows even today. It also made the school the best in the country in the 1890s and it was therefore recommended to Albert Einstein when he was looking for a school to get his Swiss Matura (High School Diploma). He needed that to be able to study at what is now the ETH in Zurich. We don’t just let anybody study there. Side note: great views overlooking the city from their terrace.

Seriously, keep religious beliefs out of schools!

No! Climate change does not care if you believe in it. It’s happening either way. Neither does gravity, really. If you drop something it won’t float around right in front of you because you don’t believe it exists - unless you’re in zero gravity. Science is fact based. Your beliefs don’t matter to it. Theories can be proved or disproved. That’s the beauty of it. Disproving a colleague’s work is just as important for progress as proving it. No hard feelings.

Ask for proof in a church or ask too many questions and … well, you might get sent home from Bible camp or asked not to come back. Not that this ever happened to me or anything.

Language matters

Mistranslations or misinterpretations happen. Just think of the last time you received a message from a friend that was very clear to you until much later when you realized that you had completely misunderstood what they were saying. It’s usually a written message where there are no facial expressions or a tone of voice to help you understand the meaning.

How arrogant is it to think that we know EXACTLY what the people who wrote down the stories in the Bible meant all that time ago? We don’t even know who wrote the damn thing in the first place. Then there were people copying it and mistakes were made. I’ll tell you about why we have “adder” in English and “Natter” in German despite them having the same root. Another example is “orange” and “naraja” (Spanish).

Now the bells at the protestant (or should I say Swiss Reformed Church) bells are ringing. It’s 9.50. Service starts at 10. They are barely audible even though that church is not that much further away than the Catholic one - but anyway …

How about translations? How about words that had more than one meaning? Have you used Google translate lately? Has it ever spit out something completely wrong because it couldn’t figure out the correct meaning from the context? How about false friends (the linguistic kind)? A trap that I fall into on a regular basis. Let’s take the basic word “salad”. In German that’s “Salat”. We also use “Salat” when we mean “lettuce”. Asking somebody at the store where the iceberg salad is might confuse them (if they don’t sell any) or you (if you’re pointed to ready-made salad section). Anyway, my point is that any of this could have happened.

How about words or concepts that don’t exist in other languages? How do we deal with those? How about translators who missed the memo on how a certain word was to be translated? Why are there different versions / different translations of the Bible? What language was the text translated from? So many questions!

I read a book in Swedish (Omgiven av idioter – “surrounded by idiots”) and before I was going to recommend it to friends I wanted to read the German translation. It was well translated, but sometimes it sounded a bit odd. You know why? The translation was based on an English translation. Fair play, I guess. It’s easier to get translations done if the text you’re translating from is English rather than Swedish. No problem there. When it comes to vocabulary, sentence structure or grammar German is much closer to Swedish than to English. This made some parts sound a little clumsy where they didn’t need to be. Also, some very obvious German word were not used. Obvious in the sense that they were the same as the Swedish word. This happens too.

Let’s not base the way we live our lives on a text that was written, copied, translated by people we don’t know. People who put their own interpretations in their works. That just doesn’t make sense, does it?

I was going to write more on the role of the church today and how it should re-invent itself. Take on more of a role of comfort and support and skip the dogma. Maybe some other time. Also, only one god - what happened to all the other fun ones. This is a bad deal you guys!

If you have any thoughts, examples or your own experiences to share please leave a comment or send me a message.