What’s in a name?
By: Navin (April 26th, 2008)People across the world give great importance to their names and the name of their offspring’s and loved ones. So much that, the name of an individual gives a first impression these days about them and their background. A survey pointed out that British parents spend 30 million hours a year picking the names of their newborn child. The survey also pointed out that most parents felt, choosing the right name can be crucial for their children to get on in life. Parents agonize for up to 45 hours over the name of their child – a combined 30 million hours annually in Britain. One in three parents believed the right name can give a child confidence while up to 2 million thought it could help their child’s career.
Closer home Namkaran is the traditional Hindu practice of naming the baby child. ‘Nama’ literally means ‘name’ and ‘karana’ means ‘to make, to effect’. The Namkaran is held at home or in a temple where the father of the child whispers the name in the child’s right ear. The ceremony usually takes place on the twelfth day after birth. Choosing a Hindu name is a difficult process. Friends and relatives are invited to celebrate the namkaran ceremony. According to the Grihyasutras, there are 5 requisites to selecting a name for the baby. This is the name by which the child will be called. It depends on the culture, religion & education of the family, and should be auspicious.
1. The name of the baby should be easy to pronounce and sound pleasant.
2. The baby name should contain a specified number of syllables and vowels.
3. The new born baby name should indicate the sex of the baby.
4. The baby’ name should signify wealth, fame or power.
5. The child’s name should be suggestive of the caste of the family.
Name represents a person or a set of people with a certain set of values, beliefs, abilities and characteristics. As soon as you hear a name, you are able to relate to the person/s behind it and it generates in you certain emotions and accordingly invokes a physical or mental response from you. We live in a society where people go to great extents to protect and maintain the value attached to their traditions, heritage, cultures, family lines, clans and caste because there is a name attached to each of these which over the years has been built up. Any blot or blemish on this name is like loosing face or having his nose cut which is equivalent to loosing all honor.
I still remember when working with a bank, many customers used to come to the branch and start shouting at the branch staff at the top of their voices, livid with the banks mistake of having spelled their names wrongly on their cards and cheque books. Even an assurance that the card and cheque can still be used as the bank will check the PIN number/specimen signature to identify the customer, did not address the problem in his ‘heart’, a heart which is not ready to accept a wrong or different name. They would not calm down till they were given an assurance of a new card or cheque book carrying their correct names.
“A Name” is more than just “a name”. It attaches personal responsibility to the person and that is how we were probably made. God gave names to the first human beings and he called them Adam and Eve, then he handed over the right of naming to them who in turn named the plants and the animals. God said there was a need for distinct personal identification with responsibility.
The South Korean student who was the assailant in the Virginia Tech killings in the U.S last year where many students, dreams and families were gruesomely killed, when asked to sign his name on a plain piece of paper, instead of putting his name, drew a question mark. He was either probably mentally ill or had a deep sense of loss of personal identity. That probably answers his actions and also shows how man is made to have a distinct personal identity with responsibility. His actions showed he lacked both.
Let me draw your attention now to a world full of people who have this great need for being identified and attach value and responsibility to it, but are greatly mistaken when they think that they can call God by different names and get away with it, because the one who put this need in our ‘hearts’ and created us in HIS image, was also showing his heart and how he would like to be identified.
We live in a society filled with people having different faiths in a sea of gods with different names. They are majorly divided in to the following belief types:
Monotheist: People who believe in the existence of One God. Monotheism is the term used for every religion which has a One-God belief system. Christianity, Islam and Judaism belong ot this classification. Zoroastrianism, which ascribes all worship to one god although it does not deny the existence of other lords (ahuras) and those worthy of worship (yazata), the Bahai faith and even Hinduism which worships many gods and goddesses, but strongly emphasize the pre-eminence of the Supreme Deity are monotheistic in their root. All the Hindu scriptures (The Vedas, Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita) ultimately stress there is only one God. Many scholars interpret the verses as either Monotheistic and Pantheistic or a combination of both.
Polytheist: People who believe in multiple gods. Polytheism is however reconcilable with inclusive monotheism which claims that all deities are just different names or forms for the single god. This approach is common in Hinduism unlike the Greek gods, where the Greeks believe that all their gods were independent deities who aren’t aspect of a greater deity and did stand on their own. In its essence polytheism is the belief in different gods who are normally in conflict with each other. In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates criticizes a definition of piety because of the possibility that the gods might disagree among themselves on whether to approve of a particular action. This is exactly opposite the monotheistic belief. Each God addresses a specific need of man and does not address all his needs like, Aphrodite was the goddess of love and beauty, Ares was the god of war, Hades the god of the dead, and Athena the goddess of wisdom and courage. Some deities, such as Apollo and Dionysus, revealed complex personalities and mixtures of functions, while others, such as Hestia(literally “earth”) and Helios(literally “sun”), were little more than personifications.
Pantheistic: Pantheism is the view that everything is of an all-encompassing God; or that the Universe, or nature, and God are equivalent. This is the most prevalent belief system in the east. They believe that ‘God is all and all is God’.
Well you can now make out how God would be feeling when people give new names and worship different deities to reach the one sovereign God. If we attach so much value to our names, how about God?
When Moses was asked by God in the Bible to go to Egypt (people with many gods with many different names) to lead Israel out of captivity, he asked God what he will answer, when Israel will ask him about the name of God. God had to give a name which as I said earlier would represent his nature, values and his character. Unfortunately there was no name under heaven or on earth that could have matched the requirement, that is why God told Moses ‘I AM WHO I AM’. And from there was derived the Hebrew word for ‘I AM’ which is ‘YAHWEH’, a name which the Israelites never took on their lips out of reverence for HIS holiness, eternal nature and unchangeable character.
Finally there are many kinds of people, practicing different kinds of faith and calling out to different gods, but there is one God of the bible who is very serious about HIS name and HE says that we cannot address anybody else as God but HE alone.
HE said in Isaiah 44:6
“I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God”.
Tags: Bhagavad-Gita, God, Greek Gods, I AM, Monotheist, Name, Namkaran, Pantheistic, Polytheist, The Vedas, Upanishads, Yahweh
April 30th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Fascinating insight into names…your post is absolutely right in saying that a name is much more than a label for an individual. No wonder people in your bank were so touchy about their names being written wrongly. Makes a good read