July 20, 2012

The Death of Truth I: Postmodernism Is A Killer

It has become clear to many people, especially Christians, that society and the moral core of society in general has become rather debased. Sexual immorality is rampant and has been so for decades. Violence like sexual immorality is also glorified in society. We need only see the senseless tragedy unfolding today in Colorado due to a mindless evil shooting rampage in a midnight showing of the latest Batman movie. A movie which, played trailers attached to other movies that were chock full of what? More violence. This tripe is propagated by faceless unethical conglomerates driven by the bottom-line. Bad decisions by people that hold the controls of media empires through which tens of millions are exposed to godlessness and immorality. But as the mind-numbing mantra from the free-thinkers of our generation repeats in a senseless refrain: "It's a free country and everyone is entitled to their opinions." We live now in a society where everyone's statements and opinions are equally valid in the court of public opinion. We cannot be "haters" and tell people they're wrong for allowing this violence to be paraded before us daily. We then wonder why we have a generation of youth growing up that solve everything by making choices with a bullet. Yet I am told that I am mean-spirited and hurtful to tell them they are wrong...never mind the families of those poor murdered people in Colorado. The truth is, what was done to those poor people was horribly wrong. The claims that this spineless coward was a Christian is nonsense and nothing more that political propaganda. It is spun by people with agendas and ideologies to spread even if it means piggybacking them into tragedy. As any true Christian will understand anyone indwelt with the Holy Spirit would not have gone on a killing spree. But a society desensitized to God and Scripture would never be able to recognize this fact anyway. This man was no more Christian than Jim Jones of David Koresh. They say he recently went to church. This possibility of him going to Church no more made him a Christian than going to a train station makes him a train. False assumption...


Meanwhile we are left to pray for these victim's families to be comforted by the God of all comfort.


This clearly deranged shooter's behavior is the end result of moral depravity and sin run amok not the fruits of a Christian life. Horrid violence and rampant immoral sexuality are a degenerate and reprobate mind left to its own devices and a life absent of God. Regardless of how much this person used to attend church...people can clearly fall away from the faith never having been part of it to begin with. When we begin to dig we will find flawed sinful thought patterns and actions in the closets of people like this (so as a man thinks, so is he). A mind that commits these atrocities has been unmoored from the ethical restraints instituted by a moral God. A person untied from moral absolutes and set adrift on a sea of moral ambivalence, will spiral endlessly into the blackest of the black in a void of evil. Wrong is wrong, sin is still sin and evil is still evil. Call it whatever you'd like...it still needs to be identified as wrong and corrected. If we do not determine wrongs we will then continue to spiral away from truth and moral rectitude because there is no measuring stick or benchmark of morality other than the capriciousness of sinful men. The world adheres to a broken moral compass. I am fairly certain we are seeing a nation and world under judgment (or soon to be under judgment) as we saw in Isaiah's time. The depravity of man cannot go on unchecked and unabated forever. People should not confuse God's forbearance and mercy for His final response.

Isaiah 5:20 ~ Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.

We were warned there would be days like these...they are now here. Below and over the course of the next few posts, I will suggest how we may have gotten here.

2 Timothy 3:1-5 ~ But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
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This type of debasement is now infiltrating the Christian Church. In this short series of posts I intended to show through reasoned and logical argumentation that a main if not primary contributor to this debasing is tightly wound and tied to the amorphous idea of Postmodernism. I will show that a failure to allow for an absolute or objective truth claim undermines and subverts Christianity, morality and therefore society. I will also show that it is the relativism that ensues from Postmodernism that breeds pluralism or vice versa (Groothuis 53, Webber 23). I will also attempt to show how this has been to the detriment of Christianity and therefore society at-large because postmodernism removes a basis for objective truth (therefore morality) because in a society where no single basis for absolute or objective truth can be valid, all truths will be. Because these truths will then be subjective as they will come from a multitude of individual sources, confusion, chaos and anarchy ensues in a society “regulated” by these principles.

Many within society including some in the church have fallen victim to postmodernist philosophy. Many of these very people will argue vehemently that this is not the case and tell me this is not true and nor should I state this because is it not tolerant, exclusivist and unloving statement. They will further posit that I am being intolerant and close-minded by saying such a thing. The sad fact is that they will never once look to themselves and realize that the very statement they have made about me is the hypocritical inverse of the very thing that they have accused me of doing. This is the curious essence of the postmodern mindset. It posits that all people should be tolerant of all other people’s claims on truth or statements about their perceived truth. That tolerance or acceptance should be practice except towards the very person that shows theirs opinion (truth claim) as being in error and contradictory. Enter Christianity…the Christian faith is a faith based in absolute and objective truth claims. It is often Christianity (or non-pluralistic religions like it) that are demonized by the postmodern thinkers/theologians. Therefore a Christian cannot make an absolute truth claim to a postmodernist because it goes direct up against the main tenant/doctrine of the postmodern “faith” which is that all subjective truth claims are equally valid. Therefore Postmodernism has enmity towards Christianity.

It is at the point where now a postmodernist will draw lines and make duplicitous distinctions against someone with a worldview akin to Christianity that believes in absolute truths and is willing to make an absolute truth statement. It is here where the postmodernist becomes intolerant and non-pluralistic of someone else’s truth claim. They are tolerant to a point but will draw the line with anyone attempting to make an absolute truth claim that they are wrong, thereby they themselves make an absolute truth claim about a person making a claim contrary to theirs. Therefore they become self-contradictory. We will see that the postmodernist worldview is therefore self-defeating and does not have a leg to stand on.

I will conclude my short series by offering a few observations and what Christianity can do to countermand or cancel out the ever growing religion of Postmodernism that seems to have a death grip on the minds of the modern culture. Part of the battle of defeating postmodernism is often just recognizing it for what it is and isolating, then showing it for the contradictory and often hypocritical worldview/religion that it is.

[Please see last in series of post for Bibliographical information]

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