Peter Westh

Muslimer insisterer ofte på, at koranen ikke kan oversættes, men at dens fulde dybde og skønhed kun kan mødes i den originale tekst. Det er jo i virkeligheden sandt om alle oversættelser – en oversættelse er altid en fortolkning, og det er umuligt at få alle nuancer med. Problemet har dog en særlig betydning, når det handler om religiøse tekster, der opfattes som normative eller ligefrem åbenbarede. Filologiske studier og oversættelsesspørgsmål er en vigtig del af det, religiøse specialister beskæftiger sig med, både inden for jødedom, kristendom og islam – men de spiller alligevel en særlig rolle inden for islam, fordi bevidstheden om dem er så udbredt, også blandt lægmandsmuslimer. Man skal ikke diskutere et koranvers ret længe i en klasse med muslimske elever, før der henvises til, at oversættelsen er upålidelig, og at den rette forståelse kræver års studier af den arabiske tekst. Dette hænger sammen med dogmet om, at Koranen blev åbenbaret ved direkte verbalinspiration, men det kan også ses som et forsøg på at hævde et vidensmonopol: Hvis man skal forstå teksten, må man opsøge de religiøse autoriteter (hvad end det så er elevernes imam, eller den altid beredvillige Sheikh Google). I undervisningen er vi som oftest henvist til blot at påberåbe os oversætterens autoritet. Men efter at der i de senere år er udkommet indtil flere nye oversættelser, har der åbnet sig en ny mulighed: Aktivt at tage oversættelsesproblematikken op i undervisningen. Det er det, denne artikel lægger op til.

A characteristic feature of Assyro-Babylonian religion was the repeated use of conventionalized phrases to address and describe the gods. Often, religious texts such as prayers and ritual incantations consisted of little more than the heaping up of such epithets. If the gods were indeed culturally postulated superhuman agents, divine epithets were the actual cultural postulates being made regarding them.

This paper presents the results from a survey of divine epithets applied to the deity Shamash in a large corpus of Assyro-Babylonian religious texts. The epithets are categorized according to their conceptual content and underlying ontology, and a quantitative analysis of their use and distribution within the corpus is performed. On this background, some of the predictions made by Pascal Boyer regarding the role of evolved, intuitive ontologies in the formation and transmission of religious concepts, are discussed.

It is concluded that while Assyro-Babylonian concepts of the divine do seem to fall rather neatly into the basic ontological domains proposed by Boyer, violations of intutive ontological assumptions do not seem to play the prominent role that his theory predicts.

En rød tråd i Jørgen Podemann Sørensens tilgang til religionshistorien er det skarpe fokus på praksis og kontekst. I denne henseende er han en trofast forvalter af dansk, religionshistorisk tradition. Så frugtbart dette fokus end er og har været, har det også i hvert fald én lidt sær bivirkning for et fag, der beskæftiger sig med religion. Nemlig en udpræget skepsis over for guder og gudsforestillinger.

For Grønbech var guder vel nærmest golde forsteninger af det levede liv. For Podemann er de måske nok en del af det religiøse inventar, men at interessere sig for dem i og for sig selv må bero på et manglende blik for det religiøse sprogs diskursive og performative funktion – og er formentlig et tegn på, at man er en smule protestantisk i hovedet.

Som Podemannianer - og jeg betragter mig selv som en sådan - med en udpræget interesse for både gudsbegreber og mentale religionsgeneratorer, er jeg optaget af at demonstrere, at det ikke ligefrem behøver være sådan. Følgende er et forsøg på at gøre netop det.

De to bøger, Thorbjörg Hafsteinsdottirs "10 år yngre på 10 uger", Ninka Mauritsons "Kernesund familie- sådan!" er blevet en for helselitteratur hidtil uset succes. Eksperter har advaret og kritiseret, og debatten har raset for, og i særdeleshed imod. Et tilbagevendende tema i kritikken har været, at der er tale om en ny religion; En vækkelsesbevægelse, moderne djævleuddrivelse, et udtryk for, at der er for kedeligt i kirkerne. Men er det rigtigt? Artiklen kaster et religionshistorisk blik på fortællingerne i de to bøger, og på de "mirakuløse" virkninger de stiller i udsigt.

There is an emerging consensus among current, cognitive theories of religion that the detection and representation of intentional agents and their actions are fundamental to religion. By no means a monolithic theory, this is an argument with several separate lines of reasoning, and several different kinds of empirical evidence to support it. This essay focuses specifically on the notion that people tend to spontaneously make inferences about gods based on intuitive, ontological assumptions, and on one of the main pieces of evidence that is cited to support it, the narrative comprehension experiments conducted by psychologists Justin L. Barrett and Frank C. Keil. It is argued that the experimental data in fact do not support the conclusions that have been drawn from them.

This thesis explores the association between natural phenomena and deities in Mesopotamian religion. Within Assyriology, expressions such as »Anu is the sky god«, »Enlil is the storm god« and »Girra is the fire god« are being used as if their meaning was transparent and self-evident. In the first part of my thesis, I trace the origin and discuss the validity of this practice. In the second, I explore and re-evaluate how the relationship between gods and natural phenomena is expressed in the sources, in the context of a case study of the »fire god«, Girra.
The way religion has been perceived and studied by Assyriologists has so far not been analysed systematically. The first part of my thesis, I will at-tempt to do such an analysis. The concept of nature gods is traced from its animistic and nature-mythological origins in the 19th century, through astral mythology and the predominantly hermeneutical tradition of the first dec-ades of the 20th century, to the phenomenological and intellectualist trends of the post-war years. In this way, far more continuity than previous histo-riographical studies have acknowledged, is demonstrated.
Particularly persistent within Assyriology is the notion that there has been a development in Mesopotamian religion from an early stage, where gods were identical with or immanent in the natural phenomenon they were associated with, to a later stage, where gods assumed anthropomorphic form. The various sources and theories that have given credence to this idea are discussed, as well as its impact on the way in which texts have been dated and interpreted. This leads to my claims that: 1) the differences in content between various texts that have been interpreted as the result of historical development, are in fact differences determined by the genre of these texts, and 2) the practice of distinguishing between historical layers in individual texts is not only circular, but violates the way natural and anthropomorphic metaphors are used in the texts.
These two claims are the points of departure for my analysis of the fire god, Girra. A new, theoretical perspective that combines genre theory and cognitive linguistics is proposed. Following a suvery of current knowledge of the god Girra, the various texts in which he appears are then analyzed in turn, by genre. The most important textual genre is incantations, in which fire is utilized ritually. I also discuss the way in which Girra appears in a number of mythical texts as well as in royal inscriptions and astrological and speculative texts. In each case, I show that the way in which Girra is repre-sented in these sources is determined by the formal and pragmatic character-istics of the source in question. Lastly, I analyse the complete and often very artful integration of natural and anthropomorphic metaphors in detail. My conclusion is that the god Girra has in fact only a very limited amount of common characteristics across various textual genres and that this point has far-reaching implications for the study of Mesopotamian religion as a whole

Dette nummers side 9-ikon stammer fra The Emin Foundation, en diminutiv, religiøs bevægelse der, ifølge bevægelsens egne tal, har små 3000 medlemmer verden over, fordelt i USA, Israel og en række nordeuropæiske lande, deriblandt Danmark. Emin er kun sporadisk beskrevet i litteraturen. De fleste steder (f.eks. hos Eileen Barker) betegnes bevægelsen som en "human potential movement"; en klassifikation, der nok er korrekt, men ikke fuldt dækkende, som det skal blive klart når vi betrager illustrationen nøjere.

Dette er en meget negativ anmeldelse. Så negativ, faktisk, at jeg mener det er en skandale at et forlag som Systime overhovedet udgiver en bog som denne. Bogen har afgjort sine kvaliteter og er på nogle punkter nyskabende, men den er også præget af så fundamentale problemer, at den efter min bedste vurdering ikke lever op til fagbekendtgørelsens krav.