(Part 18 is here.)
Any religious argument based on expertise in a language is necessarily unconvincing to someone who doesn’t already consider that language to be special or holy. Numerous languages have been asserted by various religions to have special or divine properties: Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Tibetan, Persian, and even English. The question of linguistic competence is often brought up by religious apologists seeking to deflect issues raised by skeptics about problematic passages in their scriptures, but when good translations and linguistic resources are available, this is just a smokescreen. When there are errors in fact or reasoning in a translation, or instances of morally reprehensible behaviour, the problems are rarely made better by referring to the primary text in the original language… » [Expand post] [Permalink]