Postmodern Delusion Without Cognitive Dissonance

Serendipity never fails to excite. No sooner had I wrapped up yesterday's "Sunday School Theology for a Time of Crisis" on the unhealthy state of Christianity, or my attention was drawn to a post written by Professor Comparative Religion Justin Halter on the subject of the schism within the Episcopalian Church: he's got it ... Narcissism's the word! Christians in name only, these people are entirely following their own council, having internalized what in Postmodernism passes for 'morality'.

Thankfully Halter - a white elephant in higher education - has not been infected in any way by Relativist thought and can still see the wood for the trees, thank you very much! His suggestion? If you don't like the 'homophobic' morality of the Christian God, then by all means, apostate!

He's entirely right, but misses the underlying political point. The sole aim of these exercises is to destroy the Christian Churches from within. If simply abandoned by these fiends, they might stand a chance of survival, and that would never do. So what we have instead is people within the faith offering a new perspective - say the Emergent Church, or the Homophilic Episcopalians. This allows adherents to be still nominally Christians, when in fact offering to the Marxist God of the Socialist dialectic.

It defies belief, but somehow they have managed to marry the delusion that there is no truth to the word of Christ without the slightest hint of cognitive dissonance. The other central role, the one of the four Apostles within the new system on the other hand, is still any one's guess. Not all details of the new crede have been hammered out yet. But hey, it took Christianity two millennia to work out a comprehensive, organized belief system, so there's hope yet for the heresies of Narcissus. I'm sure some solution will be found once the dogma takes shape, to define it as anything other than that, considering the taboo that rests on the axiom.

It will take some doing though to defy the laws of reason altogether. Even professionals working in the field of psychology are having trouble. Take Dr Sanity in her post yesterday "The Democratic Party 2008 Platform: "Truth Doesn't Exist and We Possess It"":

"What they possess is a moral and intellectual confusion that is so pronounced, I hesitate to even call it psychosis. It is more like a deliberate dementia."

If that wasn't enough brilliance for one day, she's quoting Gagdad Bob of One Cosmos who in "Life Amidst the Postmodern Ruins" provides a series of insights that warrant extensive quoting and - above all - dissemination amongst the fallen Christians that haven't passed beyond salvation. I highly recommend reading it all, but here's a sample:

(...) Chesterton could prophecize in this manner because he could see directly into the 'principal' world of timeless truth embodied in revelation. Again, revelation instantiates metaphysical truths with which it is possible to 'think beyond the surface,' both in space and in time, interior and exterior. Thus, unlike postmodernists who believe that "perception is reality," he writes that "man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert -- himself." This leads to the erosion of universality and the elevation of particularity to the ultimate -- which quickly devolves into nihilism.

Conversely, the part that a man doubts "is exactly the part he ought not doubt -- the Divine Reason." But this inversion obviously persists -- indeed, it is practically the fault line that runs between left and right -- and is responsible for a range of pathological ideas, from multiculturalism, to moral relativism, to the belief in "self esteem," to reducing standards in general to achieve some preconceived end.

The left also practices a "false humility." After all, it can sound like a plea for humility when the postmodern multiculturalist asks, "who am I to say that I can possess the truth, or that one culture is better than another?" But this attitude is a "more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic." That is -- and this is apparently a subtle point, so listen closely -- "The old humility was a spur that prevented man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."

This is one of the reasons that the left habitually attacks motives instead of substance, for they first undermine the idea that you can know anything objectively, and then insist that the purpose of knowledge is domination and oppression anyway. For the last several years, "job one" of the left has been to make us doubtful of our aims in Iraq, in the hope that we will simply become demoralized and surrender.

But they do this so selectively that it is mind-boggling. (...) just as the left engages in the moral inversion of detaching virtue from tradition, they engage in a weird "cognitive inversion" that combines "intellectual helplessness" with a kind of monstrously arrogant omniscience. This is how you can spend some $100,000 plus on an elite university education, only to learn that truth doesn't exist and we possess it.