Posted on 05/17/2006 12:14:40 PM PDT by guinness4strength
BOSTON - As postmodern thinking assumes its role as our national identity, we at the Boston Daily Truth are announcing this will be our last issue.
After 127 years of bringing you our version of the news, we've decided to call it quits. What's the point in going on? Everything's already been said.
There is nothing new under the sun. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Those words, by the way, are from an old book called Ecclesiastes, which like our newspaper, has lost all significance under the weight of postmodern thought.
Postmodernism informs us that there is no universal truth, no right and wrong, just meaningless accidents that stumbled into life as we know it.
We will stop pretending we know the important news of the day. The most important news is about you. If you still want to read important news, write your own paper, damnit, because we aren't going to do it for you. After all, "important news" is a subjective term.
Subscribers: please note we will still publish blank pages bundled and delivered for people who still find a practical use for the newspaper. After all, they provide excellent lining for pet cages and cheap stuffing for postal packages.
We editors realize, like the rest of America, that we are but a composition of cosmic dust born to eventually return to dust.
No more features on Millie's garden parties.
No more investigative pieces about political corruption.
No more reporting on all the world's evils. After all, evil is relative. One person's "bad" is another person's "good."
OK, we admit that crime, corruption and lawlessness are spiralling out of control as people have decided that "nothing matters," and the least we can do is go along with that sentiment and not report any of it.
However, we have decided to conduct one final interview. We randomly selected Western High Cafeteria cook Marla McNarlow, someone we'd never interview in the past unless she was accused of some major mishap.
She was mopping the floor of the high school's cafeteria during this, our final interview.
"People are saying all beliefs are in ruins, I say hogwash, " McNarlow stated. "Or better yet, Twinkie."
When asked to elaborate, she opened a shrink-wrapped Twinkie and took a bite.
"Basically, postmodernism is like a Twinkie," she said. "And Judiasm is like an apple, Christianity is like an orange, you get the drift."
We asked McNarlow if she was implying that postmodernism is just another belief, rather that the end of all beliefs.
"Absolutely," she said. "To believe there is no absolute truth is still a belief. We must believe in something, it's our natural inclination. Just like we all need to eat. We can choose to live off Twinkies, or apples and oranges."
At that point we started to wonder about the long-term effects of living off nothing but Twinkies.
We considered doing an investigative piece to see if people who ate only Twinkies suffered any ill effects compared to those who lived off apples and oranges. However, such a study already assumes one may be better than the other, so we dropped the idea.
McNarlow finished the Twinkie. "Just because we may enjoy a Twinkie, that doesn't mean we can't enjoy our apples and oranges, now does it."
"And what kind of belief would that be?" we asked.
"That would be post-post-modernism, or common sense," she answered.
Standard What-If disclaimer: The preceding is pure fiction, which is often more illuminating than fact.
He musta been here during the days of AYBABTU.
The trick to post-modern thinking is to always be a moving target. Yes, you must believe in something. So their answer to that is to put all beliefs in motion. A moving target, so they ridiculously think, can never be debated and proved wrong. In reality, they are simply making themselves foolish, lying hypocrites 100% of the time, living by choice in the realm of insanity. But to them there is nothing wrong with that because they make their own reality. Hypocrisy becomes an illusion that a simple rhetorical move can deny. Thus those who try to debate them feel like they are trying to nail jello to the wall. Why debate dishonest people? You might as well take on the mentally insane. In this case I charge that they are cousins (postmoderns and the mentally insane).
I don't know - who's to say Postmoderism is the best way.
(It's a joke people.)
This postmodernism crap is becoming very prevalent, especially in the evangelical community. When people can't discuss issues on the facts, they start to change the meanings of those facts, so they can shift the debate.
How is this for appalling. A youth "minister" I know said, "the Bible is gray." I sent him one of these:
2 Timothy 3:16-17 16 All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work."
Hebrews 4:12 12 For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
His reply? Well the Bible may not be gray but life is. Notice the move of positions? He taught the kids, the Bible is gray. When called on it, he simply moved his position. Should I refute him, he would move again. Truth means nothing to the man. He elevates doubt because it supposedly shows humility. Faith is arrogance. Everything is upside-down and backwards. But if you call him on it, he will agree with you and move his heresy so that you are constantly forced to answer but he is never obligated to defend a position. It's willful insanity if you ask me.
We at Free Republic are, philosophically speaking, mostly "postmodern recidivists." You can drop that into your next conversation with a liberal and watch the look you get.
Fair warning...it was an Evangelical Free youth pastor. Steer clear of that denomination. It used to be quite orthodox but it has been bitten by the Emerging Church bug and all bets are off on where it will end up. I happened unfortunately onto one of the worst, but they made some changes back in 1996 (I think it was) that are acting like a cancer on the entire denomination. They are redoing their doctrinal statement again and I think the perverters of truth are probably looking to weasel their own subjective terminology in there somehow. It's difficult to pin it down too, because they will pull the liberal art of redefining long held terms and then agreeing to a statement when in reality, they don't agree at all. It's like a liar who rests on literal truths even when he is knowingly deceiving people (Clinton, for example). Call it serpent-deception.
Also, under the new relativistic postmodernism, crime and corruption is only bad if you get caught. Even then I'm not so sure.
Relativism allows you have an blase don't-care attitude about life. No anger with people who disagree with you (it's just an opinion), no guilt over things done in the past (you define your own morality), etc; avoid all those negative feelings. What many don't realize is that it's not much different than just being drugged up all the time.
Precisely!
Please don't judge an entire denomination by the actions of one youth pastor. Good grief! I attend a large EV Free church and the theology is right on. Can I say that it is representatiive of the entire denomination? No, because I don't know most of the pastors in the denomination. And neither do you. But in general they seem to be pretty good. I have been with the church for over 20 years, and also know several good graduates from their seminary.
Post modernist philosophy has been ruling the DIMRATS, THE UN, ALL GLOBALIST'S ACTIVITIES, UNIVERSITIES, MSM, the Senate etc. etc. etc. for decades.
And, it's brought much ruin far and wide.
I went to a good one in the early 90's. Be forewarned, the denomination has changed. It may not effect you right now, but just watch out, particularly in your youth group. If they start doing things that seem very Catholic, worry!
We get signal.
Yeah, I found some good lectures by DA Carson on the web today. I am listening to the first one as he recaps the whole postmodern/emergent movement. Someone at church brought a book into a bible class. It iscalled Colossians Remixed. I was greatly offended by many of the ideas in the book. I was put off by the disavowal of notions like truth. The authors also referenced all of the French deconstructionists like Leotarde and Focault (there was a footnote referencing Chomsky as well).
DA Carson teaches (or taught) New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (seminary) in a northern suburb of Chicago. That is the EV Free seminary.
Richard E. Averbeck, Ph.D. - Director, Spiritual Formation Forum; Associate Professor of Old Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (Deerfield, IL)
Prayer is not what you were taught in Sunday School. It's now a New Age style meditation -- emptying your thoughts so God can speak directly to you.
If you go to the efca.org website and read some of their statements, you will find they are too vague. The problem, I think, is that you have a mix of persons with solid doctrinal belief and other persons who want to go gray. The solid people are being naive. Some of them want to hold onto sound doctrine but add an almost charismatic type prayer practice (only instead of praying in a foreign tongue, you pray will no thoughts of your own at all -- in the spirit realm). So you have this mix of ideas that thrive on vague denominational statements.
Notice the statement about doctrine plus experience. The problem is that they leave the door open by not defining doctrine well enough and by inserting the importance of experience. It leaves them vulnerable. It could mean any number of things. They are lacking clarity and being too trusting in a noble effort to be harmonious and inclusive. They do not know their enemy.
At the website, check out the student ministries prayer site and click on the info about the boiler room.
A few months back I found a tribute to Pope John Paul II on the efca.org site. What was that about?
Here's one Spiritual Formation workshop offered by the group Averbeck belongs to:
Workshop 3 - Stepping into His Presence
How does God want us to pray? Most of us learn to pray with our minds and our mouths. How do we learn to pray together with our ears and our hearts? This workshop will explore the prayer practices of those that serve in St. John's Downtown that enables them to hear God's vision for the lives of the poor. Without the transforming power of the Holy Spirit we can change circumstances but not lives. With it we can see lives transformed as we serve in humility and obedience.
In practice, some of these prayer techniques are, mantra style repetition, icons, stations of the cross, labrynths.. The prayer is often called contemplative prayer and it is basically christianized transendental meditation.
innerexplorations.com
explorefaith.org
I have yet to recover from the trauma of finding that I was allowing my son to attend such a youth group. There were other problems, such as using movies instead of Scripture to teach lessons. Seriously! And e-mails that revealed a pastor who hadn't a clue about authentic Christianity. But I unwisely overlooked those things, thinking the poor guy was just not too smart or something. I tried to be kind and charitable. WRONG MOVE!!!! I have since learned that he is steeped in Emerging Church doctrine. The guy is lost. And I am a sucker no longer.
Oh..and the entire church is into the contemplative scene. It's sad. You could say it's just one bad Evangelical Free Church, but I believe from my research that it is more of a denominational trend. The pastors received E-Free magazine attention and were talking about their lectio divina stuff.
Info on Lectio Divina.
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