Millions of leaders now (and in the human past) commit the irrational mistake that thinkers including C.S. Lewis warned against--
using famous terms such as "God" and "Love" not for their denotative meaning,
but for their emotional impact.
Big-name words are so widely defined their meanings have become almost "empty-buckets." They are used to promote even contradictory meanings to their original definitions.
For example, the famous Christian theologian Paul Tillich defined "God" as the "depth" in human lives. Thus, even avowed atheists are really theists!
John Haught a Roman Catholic theologian did this, too (in his books such as What is God?)
And in the case of "love," it is often used to mean "like," "lust," "infatuation," etc. In millions of novels, "making love" is only instinctive sexual intercourse with casual acquaintances.
These examples of humans who redefined terms is what the Christian thinker Oz Guiness called "Mystification"--using a famous word in such a way that readers get contrary meanings of it.
That is one reason I quit using "God," "love," and "Christian" because they are constantly used by multimillions of humans in such divergent ways one only gets an emotive effect, nothing substantial.
Plumb your words and check whether or not you are using them to explain real truths or are using traditional words for their strong emotional effect.
In the LIGHT,
Daniel Wilcox
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