Monday.....Miscellaneous.....There Is No Truth...And That's The Truth!

The United States Episcopal Church recently elected a lesbian as a bishop in their church. If she receives consent from a majority of the church's bishops, she will be installed in May. This blog is not about homosexuality nor Christian doctrine, it is about logic and postmodernism. The teaching on homosexuality in the historic Christian church is documented. The Scriptures, which are the foundation of all doctrine, is crystal clear on the issue. R. C. Sproul often uses the word perspicuity to describe biblical truths that are so clear that they can be seen by anyone. There is not an iota of evidence that can be used to reverse what Scripture says on this. Attempts made to do this are the absolute height of absurdity. One has the right to declare an offshoot of Christianity and hold to a belief that is not biblical. They would have the right to relegate the Bible to the status of a mere volume of good advice. In fact, this has been done. They would be wrong, but they do have the right to be wrong. What they cannot do, or I should say, what they cannot do without abandoning even the most basic rules of language, reason and logic, is look at an obvious statement and say that it does not say what it says but it says the opposite. The Christian Scriptures say one thing. One can disagree but not change what is said.....unless one is a postmodern. Whether it was the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason itself, or the more recent Modernism, we mostly dealt in facts, reason and logic to the best of our abilities. Modernism then collapsed. The high hopes of a scientific world evaporated in the slums of America and the battlefields all over Europe and Asia. The vacuum was filled by Postmodernism. A cursory search on the web for this topic would explain how thinking itself has changed, evidenced in everything from art to architecture, from film to literature, from linguistics to social theory. I'll recommend two books from a Christian perspective. The first is Postmodern Times (isbn 0-89107-768-5) by Gene Edward Veith, the second A Primer On Postmodernism (isbn 0-8028-0864-6) by Stanley Grenz. One quote from the Veith book is Knowledge is no longer seen as absolute truth; rather, knowledge is seen in terms of rearranging information into new paradigms.....These new models tend to be adopted without the demands for rigorous evidence required by traditional scholarship. We can see evidence of this, I believe, in the conclusions of some in the global warming debate. Grenz adds In the postmodern world, people are no longer convinced that knowledge us inherently good....The postmodern mind refuses to limit truth to its rational dimension....Finally, the postmodern mind no longer accepts the Enlightenment belief that knowledge is objective. My purpose here is to tie Postmodernism into the newspaper headlines of the day. Today, Senator Harry Reid said essentially that Republican opponents of health care legislation are like those who favored slavery. Only the convoluted mind of the Postmodern would brave the shoals of intellectual shipwreck to make a statement like that. On our side, commentators are arguing, correctly, that it was the Democratic Party that supported slavery but they should be addressing the absurdity of making a statement that reeks of chaos in the mind. Only the postmodern mind of an Al Gore could look right into the camera lens and confidently make the statements he does on global warming, and then say that the opinion is unanimous in the scientific community. Only a postmodern consensus could ignore the evidence of Barack Obama's socialist and radical training and consider it irrelevant. For decades now, we have heard stories in the news that literally numb us temporarily, and we then commence to argue against them as if they were rational to begin with, oblivious to the fact that we all do not process information in the brain the same way anymore. It has been my hope for a long time that the Republican Party and the Rush Limbaughs of the world would address this issue to make it more clear to the average American citizen, what we are facing, but alas, I don't think that they are familiar enough with it to take it to task. Postmodernism cannot be tied down to one theory, one leader or one method of interpretation and there are various theories as to what it is evolving into but the result is the same, truth is distorted, without qualms, according to one's preferences.