I am perfectly fine with flowery, over-the-top, clunky and repetitious language when it comes to fiction and entertainment. I mean, you want to entertain yourselves so sky's the limit. You want to be obtuse or bombastic, that's up to you. Its entertainment and its for fun.
However, I am not fine with flowery, over-the-top, clunky and repetitious language when it comes to philosophy and reality comprehension. If you want to teach or educate or enlighten people with how you think the world works, how reality functions and how one should live their lives, it is best to use concise and clear language. Furthermore, you must list your sources of information. This allows people to understand what you are talking about and allows them to replicate or verify your findings and viewpoints on their own.
The problem comes from the fact that religion and religious like philosophy like the Qun try to portray themselves as the source of all the answers for the questions we seek, as the source of morality, as a source for laws and as a way of life...While using obfuscative, over-the-top, flowery, clunky, and repetitious language.
If religion and religious philosophy are viewed as fictional entertainment (which is what they actually are), then I would have no problems with them but they are not viewed that way. Specific groups of people are persecuted and oppressed, facts are whitewashed away, wars are started and resources are wasted under the banner of religion and religious philosophy.
With all due respect, you're holding modern standards to ancient times. What's more, our modern technological aids like pen and paper to write things down, and computers and internet to print and store large amounts of information, allows us to keep things short and concise so it's easy to flip to the page or click on the website/document we want to use to recall that little blurb of information we were thinking of.
The thing is, before the newfangled invention of "writing" from ancient Egypt, Greece, Persia, China, etc. most societies had a really strong oral tradition. The way they conveyed information was purely through word of mouth, and the way they stored it was through memory. And what's the best way to make something easy to remember? Make it flowery and dramatic so it's interesting, and make it repetitive so the more times you repeat something, the more likely the listener is to remember.
Think of when you give your phone number or address to someone and they don't have a phone to type it into or pen and paper to write with. Do you just say it once to keep it short and concise? No. You'll repeat your phone number or address several times, maybe with little details or memory aids to throw in, and possibly have them repeat it back to you, because the more you say it the more likely they are to remember it.
"But they wrote it down," you might say, "There's no reason to make it long, flowery, and repetitive since they had the written documents." Problem is, even after writing and recording was invented, throughout most of recorded history most people were illiterate. Until about modern times, only the elite could read and write and/or had access to written documents since they were very hard to make.
For things like philosophy and especially religion, the elite who could write and read these documents wanted to impart what they thought were the answers to life to the masses. But they couldn't exactly pass out little pamphlets with snappy little slogans the way we do today, because, a) people couldn't read it, b ) most people's lives were too mean and hard to take time out to learn to read since those crops weren't going to grow themselves, c ) even if they could take time to teach people how to read, writing was a long and laborious process. Papyrus (or, more commonly, parchment, which was made from animal skins), ink, and books had to be made by hand. In fact, before the printing press in the 1400's, books were so scarce because they had to be written by hand, which was a long and difficult process.
So, yeah. If you're a religious or philosophical leader in ancient or medieval times, and you have what you think are very important religious or philosophical answers to life that you want to share with the unwashed masses, then when you bring your information forth to the public, you're going to make it sound exciting and dramatic so people will listen to you, and you're going to keep repeating your main points so the people you're preaching to will be more likely to remember it. If you're a scholar recording religious or philosophical ideas, knowing that most people aren't going to read it but rather a few educated individuals will read it out loud to illiterate masses for generations to come (think preachers and sermons at church; today it seems redundant for religious leaders to read the Bible out loud since we can read it ourselves on our own time, but throughout most of history people relied on their preachers to tell them what the religious texts even said), you're going to write it to be "flowery, dramatic, and repetitive" so the more times the religious leaders recite it out loud, the more likely the masses are to remember.
Does that make sense? We can afford to be short and concise today (and have been for only a few centuries) because we have a mostly literate population, along with access to lots of paper, ink, and computers to store our information. We can just pull up any book or document or website giving us the information we need. But during the time that most of these religious and philosophical documents were written (the Bible, Confucius, etc), most people relied on word-of-mouth and memory to remember, so these ancient religious and philosophical documents had to be dramatic and repetitious so the people hearing The Word would be able to remember it.





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