We start out with acknowledging a shift in how "truth" is thought about.
Which, I mean, yeah just read some Stanley Grenz and you can see it coming. It is called *taps mic*
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POSTMODERNISM
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1/
Mini Thread:
Every time I think there is no more postmodernism in Christianity, I find more postmodernism in Christianity.
This time @KaitlynSchiess
We start out with acknowledging a shift in how "truth" is thought about.
Which, I mean, yeah just read some Stanley Grenz and you can see it coming. It is called *taps mic*
🥐🦭🥐🦭🥐🦭🥐🦭
POSTMODERNISM
🥐🦭🥐🦭🥐🦭🥐🦭
Pic 1: We are sinful and as such we are epistemicly flawed
Pic 2: Because we are flawed and imperfect we must adopt the philosophy of Richard Rorty: "The truth is out there but we can't get it."
Although she hedges slightly with "every time."
Next "There is no universal basis for evaluating our environment."
This is her argument for that:
1. our perspectives are limited,
2. our communities suffer from generational and structural biases,
Therefore:
3. there is no universal basis for evaluating our
environments.
This whole argument (much like the whole essay) is totally confused.
For one, the conclusion does not follow from the premises. She goes from different perspectives and people have bias directly to there is no foundation for the discovery of truth.
now....
The cheap dunk is to ask "if there is no universal basis for evaluating the environment, on what basis do you know your communities suffer from generational and structural biases?"
She had to evaluate her environment to figure out her community suffers from structural bias...
If she can't evaluate her environment, she can't know her community suffers from structural bias.
She makes all kinds of claims about the world while claiming that a universal Basis for evaluating the environment does not exist.
Her argument is self-refuting.
Next, she trots out the idea that "absolutism" is just as bad for faith as relativism.
Damn it.
The problem is not the property of truth that is it absolute, the problem is the psychological fact about humans that sometimes we have *CERTAINTY* that is unjustified. But...
Although it is true that Christians sometimes claim to have complete certainty when they ought to content themselves with blessed assurance, this does not mean that truth is no longer absolute, or that we should abandon a "belief in objective means of assessing reality."
The fact that truth is absolute does not imply that our certainty is always justified. This is an argument for humility. It is not an argument for abandoning absolute truth in favor of local narratives which is what @KaitlynSchiess appears to be suggesting here.
She then says "hard facts can lead us astray"
*deep breath*
Lord, give me strength
*exhale*
She then says Christians need "storytelling communities that use particular narratives, practices, and norms to instill in us a truth that could not be reached by reason alone"...
She says we can't get to absolute truth and hard facts lead us astray, so she wants us to abandon both absolute truth and hard facts in favor of narratives and story telling.
How, exactly, does this woman think Trump got elected? Let me tell you:
HE TOLD THE BEST NARRATIVE.
Trump won the first time by winning the Narrative warfare. And Trump Lost this time because he lost the narrative warfare. Trump is our first postmodern president precisely because his presidency was based on, built around, and powered by narratives, not truth.
If we accept the idea that absolute truth is impossible to grasp, all we are going to get is ever deeper and more insidious forms of narrative warfare on all sides.
That is, and I cannot stress this enough, very bad.
So, @KaitlynSchiess please, lets *NOT* abandon truth...
The deeper we get into postmodernism the worse this is going to get and the winners are not going to people like you, the winners are going to be people who can tell a story, who can use persuasion, who can create a mirage with words....
You know, like Trump...
unless you want more of Trump, lets get back to the facts, because if you think people can be led astray with hard facts, just wait till you see what people can do with a narrative....
/fin
Be nice to @KaitlynSchiess please. Don't be mean. She actually seems honest so let's give her the benefit of the doubt that she means well.
More from Wokal Distance
1/
There is an entire industry of guys like this whose only goal is to front as "speaking truth to power" while they build a brand. "Social Justice"
*IS* the cool thing.
2/
I did an entire thread on how these sort of people monetize Social Justice on the one hand, and the turn around and accuse anyone who disagree with their ideas and methods of being in it for power and
3/
Books like "White Fragility" and "how to be antiracist" sell millions of copies...because that's where the money is and this guy thinks anyone who would say "this recent cultural view that progressive Christians are adopting is bad theology" is in it for money and power...
4/
Ibram Kendi wrote "how to be anti-Racist and had an ad deal with McDonalds.
Does Ameen think he's in it for the money?
5/
Nikole Hannah-Jones said "Capitalism is the motor thay drove slavery" and then, this is not a joke, did a lecture series on emancipation *SPONSORED BY SHELL OIL*
Will @Ameen_HGA be accusing her of chasing power?
There is an entire industry of guys like this whose only goal is to front as "speaking truth to power" while they build a brand. "Social Justice"
*IS* the cool thing.
How many are \u201crich young rulers\u201d when it comes to social and cultural power and capital but want to hold on to those riches instead of seeking to give it up to help the vulnerable? Many are going away, yet, I don\u2019t think they are going away with much sorrow
— Ameen (@Ameen_HGA) December 27, 2020
2/
I did an entire thread on how these sort of people monetize Social Justice on the one hand, and the turn around and accuse anyone who disagree with their ideas and methods of being in it for power and
1/
— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) September 3, 2020
While activists disrupt, dismantle and deconstruct everything from art to tech, Corporations are going woke.
Why? Because despite the woke rhetoric about "income inequality," there is ZERO ideological conflict between wokeness and capitalism. None.
I'll explain
A thread\U0001f9f5 pic.twitter.com/1ofvzUrwwV
3/
Books like "White Fragility" and "how to be antiracist" sell millions of copies...because that's where the money is and this guy thinks anyone who would say "this recent cultural view that progressive Christians are adopting is bad theology" is in it for money and power...
4/
Ibram Kendi wrote "how to be anti-Racist and had an ad deal with McDonalds.
Does Ameen think he's in it for the money?
5/
Nikole Hannah-Jones said "Capitalism is the motor thay drove slavery" and then, this is not a joke, did a lecture series on emancipation *SPONSORED BY SHELL OIL*
Will @Ameen_HGA be accusing her of chasing power?
1/
Time to talk Trumpers.
This is Cori Bush's bill to expel from congress anyone who supported election challenges yesterday.
Yesterday was Jan 6.
The bill is dated Jan 5.
*SHE KNEW YOU WOULD PROTEST, LOSE CONTROL, AND GET VIOLENT. AND SHE HAD A BILL READY FOR WHEN YOU DID*
2/
You guys are going to take the "L" here and quite frankly you deserve it. Cori Bush is going to eat your lunch every day until Biden is inaugurated and there isn't a thing you can do about it.
So....
Let's talk about how to make sure this never, ever, happens again.
3/
How did Cori Bush know you guys were going to have problems and violence?
Because she was trained in the lefty protest movement. Lefty organizing are what she did for years, that's her area of expertise. So she knows just how quickly and easily protests go off the rails...
4/
She knew that this was likely planned by people who did not understand how easily protests go bad, and she knew there was a high likelihood of something going wrong.
Someone is going to say "They had people planted to make it go violent, it is not our fault..."
5/
So what?
Your job is to make sure your people behave, and that you have enough trained people to handle agitators looking to make trouble.
The left knows how to do this. The hold peaceful protests *WHEN THEY WANT TO*
Look at the Women's march, 2 million people, no violence
Time to talk Trumpers.
This is Cori Bush's bill to expel from congress anyone who supported election challenges yesterday.
Yesterday was Jan 6.
The bill is dated Jan 5.
*SHE KNEW YOU WOULD PROTEST, LOSE CONTROL, AND GET VIOLENT. AND SHE HAD A BILL READY FOR WHEN YOU DID*
I believe the Republican members of Congress who have incited this domestic terror attack through their attempts to overturn the election must face consequences. They have broken their sacred Oath of Office.
— Congresswoman Cori Bush (@RepCori) January 6, 2021
I will be introducing a resolution calling for their expulsion. pic.twitter.com/JMTlQ4IfnR
2/
You guys are going to take the "L" here and quite frankly you deserve it. Cori Bush is going to eat your lunch every day until Biden is inaugurated and there isn't a thing you can do about it.
So....
Let's talk about how to make sure this never, ever, happens again.
3/
How did Cori Bush know you guys were going to have problems and violence?
Because she was trained in the lefty protest movement. Lefty organizing are what she did for years, that's her area of expertise. So she knows just how quickly and easily protests go off the rails...
4/
She knew that this was likely planned by people who did not understand how easily protests go bad, and she knew there was a high likelihood of something going wrong.
Someone is going to say "They had people planted to make it go violent, it is not our fault..."
5/
So what?
Your job is to make sure your people behave, and that you have enough trained people to handle agitators looking to make trouble.
The left knows how to do this. The hold peaceful protests *WHEN THEY WANT TO*
Look at the Women's march, 2 million people, no violence
More from Culture
One of the authors of the Policy Exchange report on academic free speech thinks it is "ridiculous" to expect him to accurately portray an incident at Cardiff University in his study, both in the reporting and in a question put to a student sample.
Here is the incident Kaufmann incorporated into his study, as told by a Cardiff professor who was there. As you can see, the incident involved the university intervening to *uphold* free speech principles:
Here is the first mention of the Greer at Cardiff incident in Kaufmann's report. It refers to the "concrete case" of the "no-platforming of Germaine Greer". Any reasonable reader would assume that refers to an incident of no-platforming instead of its opposite.
Here is the next mention of Greer in the report. The text asks whether the University "should have overruled protestors" and "stepped in...and guaranteed Greer the right to speak". Again the strong implication is that this did not happen and Greer was "no platformed".
The authors could easily have added a footnote at this point explaining what actually happened in Cardiff. They did not.
This is ridiculous. Students were asked for their views on this example and several others. The study findings and conclusions were about student responses not the substance of each case. Could\u2019ve used hypotheticals. The responses not the cases were the basis of the conclusions.
— Eric Kaufmann (@epkaufm) February 17, 2021
Here is the incident Kaufmann incorporated into his study, as told by a Cardiff professor who was there. As you can see, the incident involved the university intervening to *uphold* free speech principles:
The UK govt\u2019s paper on free speech in Unis (with implications for Wales) is getting a lot of attention.
— Richard Wyn Jones (@RWynJones) February 16, 2021
Worth noting then that an important part of the evidence-base on which it rests relates to (demonstrably false) claims about my own institution
1/https://t.co/buoGE7ocG7
Here is the first mention of the Greer at Cardiff incident in Kaufmann's report. It refers to the "concrete case" of the "no-platforming of Germaine Greer". Any reasonable reader would assume that refers to an incident of no-platforming instead of its opposite.
Here is the next mention of Greer in the report. The text asks whether the University "should have overruled protestors" and "stepped in...and guaranteed Greer the right to speak". Again the strong implication is that this did not happen and Greer was "no platformed".
The authors could easily have added a footnote at this point explaining what actually happened in Cardiff. They did not.
