"We've created an entire parallel vocabulary which will do -nothing- helpful to the conversation."
You haven't created one. It already exists. I'm not proscribing, I'm describing. This is well within normal definitions of worship, which is a fairly fuzzy word as it is. Go ask ten people on the street to define it and see what you get. You'll get at least one that fits this close enough. "Spending ones mind and body on that which you prioritize the highest" is not that far out a definition, which is at least close to the sense used in that quote; when one talks about "worshiping money" we do not generally mean that a Benjamin has been placed on a literal pedestal and one is literally bowing in front of it and expecting favors from Mammon, yet the phrase is clearly in common use and has some sort of meaning.
The quote does not equivocate and you've misdiagnosed the fallacy. Equivocation is when you change your definition halfway through. There's no change in that quote. It starts with a certain (though as I said implicit) definition and it carries it through. If you think it changed, again, I'd really suggest reading it more carefully and considering the possibility that it is in fact not out to trap you in linguistic wordplay but actually has something to say that is in fact not even particularly religious (or perhaps more accurately supernatural) in nature. It's an observation about human nature that can still be true in a purely mechanistic universe. I'm not even sure what better terminology there might be.
The conversation isn't being poisoned with equivocation, the conversation is poisoned by people being simply unclear by their word usage, and refusing to grant the author any benefit of the doubt because they have their own baggage surrounding certain words. (That's two distinct things.)
English sucks. If you agree that there are no platonic definitions of words, then you need to be willing to follow through with the implications of that and bend a little to follow people in good faith. You're getting caught up in particular definitions and also appear to consequently not actually understand what the quote was saying. Right or wrong (because I'm not sure I 100% agree with it as is), how can you fairly judge it if you choose to not understand it?
You haven't created one. It already exists. I'm not proscribing, I'm describing. This is well within normal definitions of worship, which is a fairly fuzzy word as it is. Go ask ten people on the street to define it and see what you get. You'll get at least one that fits this close enough. "Spending ones mind and body on that which you prioritize the highest" is not that far out a definition, which is at least close to the sense used in that quote; when one talks about "worshiping money" we do not generally mean that a Benjamin has been placed on a literal pedestal and one is literally bowing in front of it and expecting favors from Mammon, yet the phrase is clearly in common use and has some sort of meaning.
The quote does not equivocate and you've misdiagnosed the fallacy. Equivocation is when you change your definition halfway through. There's no change in that quote. It starts with a certain (though as I said implicit) definition and it carries it through. If you think it changed, again, I'd really suggest reading it more carefully and considering the possibility that it is in fact not out to trap you in linguistic wordplay but actually has something to say that is in fact not even particularly religious (or perhaps more accurately supernatural) in nature. It's an observation about human nature that can still be true in a purely mechanistic universe. I'm not even sure what better terminology there might be.
The conversation isn't being poisoned with equivocation, the conversation is poisoned by people being simply unclear by their word usage, and refusing to grant the author any benefit of the doubt because they have their own baggage surrounding certain words. (That's two distinct things.)
English sucks. If you agree that there are no platonic definitions of words, then you need to be willing to follow through with the implications of that and bend a little to follow people in good faith. You're getting caught up in particular definitions and also appear to consequently not actually understand what the quote was saying. Right or wrong (because I'm not sure I 100% agree with it as is), how can you fairly judge it if you choose to not understand it?