Reply #47: You seem to be putting a whole lot of emphasis... [View All]

[Silent3]

...on the "in the air", after the "dart" has "left your hand" aspect of communication.

Being able to make on-the-fly course corrections is indeed a superior form of control compared to having to do your best to control a trajectory, or a received meaning, by controlling what might be termed "launch parameters". That's still just a difference in degree of control and quality of control, however, not a difference between control and utter lack of control.

I can see how this idea relates to a very serious lack of control over interpretation of the writings in the Bible, the various authors of which, not to mention a fair portion of the transcribers and translators along the way, not being able to anticipate the characteristics of a target audience hundreds or even thousands of years later. To the extent that you want to comment on the futility of claims to the "literal" meaning of the Bible, I concur.

What I don't get is why you seem insistent upon the concept of NO control, which still seems to me an excessive overstatement of the problem. I could agree that there's no additional control once something has been written down, no capability for "course correction" once words are set in place and sent out into the world in a one-way, non-conversational manner, but I don't get the importance of focusing on "post launch" control, or lack thereof, to the exclusion of pre-launch control.