Talk:Godman

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I created the article Godman, spelled as such in a reference work. I was unaware of this "God-man" article and the unsuccessful AFd. There can be little doubt that the concept of godman is at least somewhat common in India and I have seen the word quite often. Andries 23:06, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

The concept of godman seems to be problematic for Wikipedia because there are several defintions that are somewhat similar and somewhat different from each other, which may be confusing for the reader. I propose

1.making redirects of the entries god-men, godman, god-man, godmen to this disambiguation page.

2 Make a new entry Godman (Hindu ascetic) that contains the Hindu ascetic definition by Lochtefeld

May be the Hindu ascetic definition by Lochtefeld should be merged with the mystical godman definition by Meher Baba, clearly attributed of course. Another option is to merge the mystical definition by Meher Baba with the book God Speaks Andries 12:36, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

These are good suggestions.chris 14:13, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Maybe it would be helpful for me to explain the genesis of Meher Baba's so-called western usage of "God-man" -- to better know how to organize the disambiguation. When Meher Baba was a teenager (very early 20th century) he avidly read the poetry of the 18th and 19th century western Romantic poets. Later, in 1955, he dictated "God Speaks" and made a strong attempt to syncretise eastern and western terminology by finding western terms that had legimate legacy in western vernacular to approximate the intention behind eastern concepts which previously had no clear western counterpart. This was possibly because "God Speaks" was intended for english publication (Dodd Meade, Ltd. 1955) and english speaking readers who might be disoriented by purely sufi or vedantic terms as is the more common Indian style. Most of the terms he coopted were from romantic era poets he was familiar with. For example his word "Over-soul" is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, "God-intoxicated" is from Novalis, and "God-man" is from Goethe. Since these have been in at least some usage since his publication in 1955 (and he has about 100,000 followers in India) it seems that some reference to his peculiar usage and intent is at least of historical value. It may be that no one today, except those that take Meher Baba seriously, use this term in this way. However, it is used and it does have roots in western literature (mostly romantic) as some sort of diffuse reference to the "Christ" without being overtly theological. chris 14:31, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

This brings up the whole issue of philosophy of language. Definitions are always in flux and derive from usage of words. Words and their usage are obviously not handed down to humanity on stone tablets, but language is a living and evolving dynamic. Definitions change (or splinter-off) with attitudes and usage over time. Proper definitions are grounded in legacy, in serious usage, in degree of authority, in the degree to which they are proliferated, in their ability to "stick," and to some degree to the age of a usage. But none of it is entirely static. For example the word "paradigm" took on a slightly different meaning after Kuhn's "Scientific Revolutions" and stuck. "Scientific Revolutions" was itself merely a theoretical book, a particular interpretation of the history of science. So one could say that "paradigm" is a theoretical word, or denotes a certain belief-set chris 15:08, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Capitalization on Incarnation

While ordinarily the word "incarnation" is spelled lower case, in the Christian context in the sentence after God-man (Christianity) the spelling is always capitalized. See Incarnation (Christianity). I will wait before changing it back to the correct capitalization in case there is any discussion here. Dazedbythebell (talk) 11:29, 7 April 2015 (UTC)