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.

Sunday School Theology for a Time of Crisis

In a posting on Chiesa yesterday Sandro Magister writes as follows:

The letter from the 138 Muslims addressed last month to Benedict XVI and to the heads of the other Christian churches received a spectacular collective reply in a message signed by 300 scholars and published in "The New York Times" on November 18.

The message originated in the Divinity School of Yale University, specifically through the initiative of its dean, Harold W. Attridge, a professor of New Testament exegesis.

The signatories belong mainly to the Protestant confessions, of both "evangelical" and "liberal" strains, and include such a celebrity as the theologian Harvey Cox. But the list of the 300 also includes a Catholic bishop, Camillo Ballin, the apostolic vicar in Kuwait. Other Catholics include the Islamologist John Esposito of Georgetown University and the theologians Donald Senior, a Passionist, and Thomas P. Rausch, a Jesuit from Loyola Marymount University. Also Catholic – although at the margins of orthodoxy – are Paul Knitter, a specialist on interreligious dialogue, and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, a teacher at Harvard and a feminist theologian.

The message lavishes praise upon the letter of the 138. It endorses the letter's contents, or the indication of the love of God and neighbor as the "common word" between Muslims and Christians, at the center of both the Qur'an and the Bible. And it prefaces everything with a request for forgiveness to "the All-Merciful One and the Muslim community around the world."

This is the reason given for the request for forgiveness: "Since Jesus Christ says: 'First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye' (Matthew 7:5), we want to begin by acknowledging that in the past (e.g. in the Crusades) and in the present (e.g. in excesses of the 'war on terror') many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbor."

In releasing the message, its promoters announced that it will be followed by meetings with some of the signers of the letter of the 138, in the United States, Great Britain, and the Middle East, meetings that will also be open to Jews.

Magister starts his article on the subject with a question contained in the title "Why Benedict XVI Is So Cautious with the Letter of the 138 Muslims", which he rhetorically answers with the assertion that what Benedict wants is a dialogue that is completely different. "The pope is asking Islam to make the same journey that the Catholic Church made under pressure from the Enlightenment. Love of God and neighbor must be realized in the full acceptance of religious freedom.

God bless Pope Benedict! The former Professor Ratzinger of Theology and Philosophy at the Regensburg University is a unique, shining light of reason and intelligence in a world which is self-destructing under the debilitating madness that is called Postmodernism. What can a person say when dumb struck by a protracted exercise in jaw-dropping?

The School of Non-thought that equates all uniformed men with Nazi brutes and cannot for the hell of it perceive any difference between BushHitler, Nazism and Zionism, has made devastating inroads into organized Christian religion over the past decades. It has been gnawing away and sclerocizing its vital organs like a malignant form of cancer.

Although God knows that Roman Catholicism has been plagued by its own brands of virulent, post Vatican II, politically motivated heresies, it is Protestantism that is really seriously in trouble. I think the obituaries on the Episcopalian Church have all but been pronounced. The sclerotics collected in the Emergent Church are simply too much deluded to understand that they are being used and that what they are proclaiming, is directly opposed to the Christian message. False prophets and scions of Satan indeed!

At the present time of deep social, cultural and religious crisis this putrefied collection of hypocrites that calls itself the followers of Christ have seen fit to reply the Muslim letter in the most debilitating terms imaginable - oozing false humility: the infantilized platitudes are not even fit for a sub-quality Sunday school!

Forgiveness indeed! For efforts to roll back the Muslim conquests of the Holy Land, the Levant, and Outremer? For defending Christian lands in Egypt and Asia Minor against Islamic onslaughts? For throwing them out of Al Andaluz? For driving them back at Tours and Vienna? For excesses on the War on Terror: moral trauma in the defence against a brutal, barbaric, blood-thirsty, indiscriminate war declared on Muslim, and Infidel civilians alike? These people are red hopping, criminally insane!

I think we shall find that the invitation to the Jewry, when push comes to shove, will "not be opportune at this stage", and that Pope Benedict in the end - in the most woolly, theological terms possible - will have to distance himself from the whole affair ... but that last may be wishful thinking on my part.

I pray to God that he may keep us from the Postmodern All-Merciful One and that bees may pee upon them all!

~ For an historic overview on this subject, see: "Historical Letter from Islam to Christendom". ~

Related:
- Postmodern Delusion Without Cognitive Dissonance
- Flanders Fields: "From the Belly of the Beast"