Pandora’s Box Part 2

by Michael Newberry

… pathetically, only Hope remained inside. In the other version the box held all of humanity’s glories. When she opened the box progress, knowledge, and exaltation vanished into oblivion, forever lost to humanity. Art, in all its forms, plays an exalted role as one of humanity’s glories. It also plays a profoundly personal role. Think, for instance, of the impact your favorite artwork has had on your life. Has it moved you to tears, to resolution, to moments of joy? Have you felt that an artwork was as close to you as a lover, a friend, or a child? Have you imagined what your life would be like without art? Picture your most beloved painting or recall your favorite song or regard your most treasured book and ask yourself what if it had never existed. Would that leave a gaping hole in your soul where once something precious had been? When Pandora opened the box, marvelous things rose up and vanished into space before her eyes. Without grasping the nature of this phenomenon, she unleashed Postmodernism on humanity.Artistic creation is fragile. For most artists creation calls on the limits of their intellectual, sensory, and psychological resources; each artwork is, in essence, the artist’s summation of what is important from all of existence. Additionally, it is usual that an artist’s career calls on the limits of their financial resources. Given the nature of such a daunting task it is no wonder that artists suffer profound doubts in one form or another. Imagine young students impatient to express their visions and passions on canvas and imagine their vulnerability in hoping they will have what it takes to realize their dreams. Without the certainty of accomplished works behind them, they are, indeed, vulnerable to peer pressure, authoritative experts, and the influence of the icons of their day. If their profoundly personal visions and attempts are not acknowledged and supported, then it merely takes an air of disapproval to blow away the sparks that would blaze their future. Several years ago I taught foundation classes at Otis College of Art and Design, one of the most reputable art colleges in the United States. While there, I offered seven students a private apprenticeship program outside of their schoolwork. These students had everything one could ask for: they had fire, talent, intelligence, and drive; they had that “light-bulb” look in their eyes. They studied with other foundation teachers who taught them rock-solid basics, but in the following year they entered into the fine art program, which was dominated by postmodern teachers. During a critique, one teacher and his students called my 18-year old apprentice a “fascist”, an “imperialist pig”, and “naïve” because he had exhibited a realistic oil self-portrait with studies that documented his creative process, which was dramatically lit. He was not criticized for lack of sincerity, passion, or talent. By contrast, another student received the highest mark and praise for a goldfish cast in resin which had its eyes plucked out and sewn to its tail. A day after the critique my student came to me crying and passionately asked “why?” What horrible things did my student do to deserve such nasty condemnation from the teacher and his cohorts? Could it possibly be that they were chastising him because he displayed skill and passion in painting? Another apprentice of mine took classes with an abstract expressionist teacher (in the style of Pollock) who deflected answering to students’ direct questions. In the third week of class this apprentice came to me with tears bursting from her eyes and blurted out, “what does this teacher want from me?”  I guessed that the teacher was looking for expression divorced from thought so I recommended that my apprentice use a stream of consciousness technique for this class. I told her to unscrew her head and leave it on the shelf before entering this class. She followed my advice to the letter. She did not “think”, did not ask questions, and did nothing to aim for a realization. Later in that class, the teacher waltzed around the room with my apprentice’s “creation” and claimed that it was a museum piece and that she was a genius. Overnight she became the teacher’s star pupil. My apprentice said in a mood of distaste “that work took only 5% of my capacity”. Was this teacher so out of touch with these students that she confined their potential by ignorance? Or did she do it on purpose? During our apprenticeship program every one of the seven broke down in frustration due to their postmodern education. “What do they want?” Was the unanswerable query. After witnessing two years of these episodes, it became apparent to me that it wasn’t knowledge, dedication, skill, or love of art that was wanted by these teachers. It was both obvious and inconceivable that the teachers acted to thwart these students’ minds and abilities. Did the teachers really want to turn students into confused wrecks? What sort of people embrace such a stance? Rarely have I seen genius and rarely have I seen the completely hopeless. One student was sent to my class with the aim that she would finally pass, having failed the course given by other teachers twice before. She had no interest, had no touch, and had no understanding for drawing; she had no “light bulb” in her eyes. Shockingly, just before our holidays she presented me with an invitation to her exhibition at a modern art gallery. I will never forget the look on her face after she watched me read her invitation; she was gloating. I thought of the struggles of my apprentices pouring their passion, their egos, and their overtime into developing their potential for art; I thought of the psychological abuse they were taking for it, and I thought it unjust. Was it the way of the art world that this pathetic student should displace them? I don’t mean to imply that all postmodernists are untalented, but talent in the sense of mastery of drawing and painting is not a consideration for a postmodern art education. Before their second year, my apprentices were advised by the Dean of Otis College, by the Director of Foundation, and by the Director of Fine Art that if they wanted to continue drawing the figure they would have to go into Graphic Design and forgo Fine Art. If the postmodern community does not want skill, could it be that they want students who embody a “getting away with it” mentality? A few years ago I went to an artist’s talk given by a postmodern teacher/artist at a prestigious university gallery.   Prior to the talk I was embarrassed to find, after several minutes of looking around the gallery, that, in fact, there was an exhibition in the room, but I hadn’t seen it. Her works were camouflaged within the architectural setting. One of them was a 3″ x 1″ wide plaster band that wound around on the floor of the room. It was there to be “sensed” and to subtlely affect movement within the room, changing the traffic flow of the space intended by the architect. In her talk she proudly stated that she couldn’t draw, couldn’t paint, and didn’t know anything about architectural design. Yet all her works were dependent on architectural settings designed by others. She condescendingly referred to one of the buildings as a “fascist”. When asked if she had ever created directly from nature she said she had never “thought of that.” Without any skill in art she had several museum exhibitions in which she presented her deliberate acts of subtle subversion. Could it be possible that subversion was the standard by which this postmodern exhibition was chosen?With every postmodern exhibition, with every class, with every critic’s praise, clues emerge as to the motives of the postmodernists and the general direction of the postmodern movement. I believe there is a key concept guiding postmodernists but they, in their obscure way, don’t want us or perhaps themselves to understand what it is. Let us dig deeper and see if we can find what that key is.Museum directors are the guardians of art. They strive to protect art by heightening cultural awareness: they give artists venues in which to exhibit; they cultivate public interest in their exhibitions; they arrange recognition of artists through critics and media; they raise funds to pay for their initiatives; and they produce educational programs for adults and children. They have media, millions of dollars, and educational institutions at their disposal to influence culture. Directors are the middlemen between important new artists and the public; their influence is profound in shaping “high” culture. The mission statements of many contemporary art museums include aims to express the “aesthetics of our time,” to seek out artists that are creating “new inroads,” and to exhibit the “best” artists alive today. “Best” here does not have the meaning that it has in sports, where the winner is the better athlete. Artistic value is interpreted, meaning that it is up to the curators to evaluate who are the best artists based on contemporary aesthetics, which is postmodernism, and to support them accordingly. The Encyclopedia Encarta describes the aims of Dadaists’ (the first postmodern artists) works as “… designed to shock or bewilder, in order to provoke a reconsideration of accepted aesthetic values”. But postmodern art goes deeper than merely raising challenges to specific values; it is meant to disrupt your psychological and epistemological processes or, in other words, to shatter your sanity and throttle your mind.   To accomplish this, postmodern artists mangle either or both the content and means:1) They can choose a subject matter that will stretch your capacity for the unimaginable, usually by projecting a thoroughly disgusting state. Cultural Gothic by P. McCarthy is a good example of this in sculpture. It is a mechanized sculpture group in which a father encourages his adolescent son to fuck a goat. A Postmodern version of a close family? Branded by J. Saville is an example in painting. It is a self-portrait in which the obese woman thrusts out a fistful of her flesh towards us in an angry and defensive gesture. Incised scalpel-like wounds that spell out words “delicate” and “decorative” cover her rotten-colored flesh. Both these works intentionally take us into psychotic states. Saville, Self-portrait Parenthetically, it could be implied that I take issue with the artists’ right to express themselves, which is not the case. My point here is that these works are esteemed by the postmodern establishment for their shocking content and not for their quality as painting or sculpture. Strictly speaking, Saville and McCarthy aren’t postmodern purists; they compromise their postmodern, grotesque subject matters with figurative painting and sculpture. For purists, matching the means to the ends is a hallmark of the highest reaches of art, postmodern or not. “…art cannot be art and anti-art at the same time.” 2) The other method of shock aesthetics is to redefine art as anything but painting or sculpture. The classic example is The Fountain by Duchamp, a urinal presented as an artwork. The simple device of substituting anything but art, such as a toilet, as an artwork creates an epistemological disturbance in our minds. Think of substituting “table” for “egg”, “ice-cream” for “go”, “car” for “food”, etc. It is something like a computer virus that plays havoc with your system and ultimately renders your computer’s programs useless. In this way postmodernists have substituted Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning for drawing, Christo’s Umbrellas for sculpture, and Creed’s Empty Room for substance. Shock aesthetics are also commonly known in art history as part of the anti-art movement. Oddly, modern art historians gloss over the fact that, logically, art cannot be art and anti-art at the same time. In Part I of this series I stated that the theme of Christo’s Umbrellas magnified the contrast between the huge cost, effort, and scale of the project and its end of non-existence. The thematic idea is that this nihilistic work is not about “nothing” but it is about the non-existence, the absence, of something that had existed before. Stay with me on this idea; it is important because nihilism is one of the key aesthetic concepts of postmodernism. Now let us tweak the context and think of the entire postmodern art movement as one gigantic Christo project, in which “absence” is the theme. The postmodern movement has taken on the universality of representational art, with its history of 30,000 years, and succeeded in, in the eyes of the contemporary art world establishment, of virtually wiping it off the face of the planet. It has ripped the lid off Pandora’s box and replaced “progress, knowledge, and exaltation” with bile. Notice what this does to the status of the art director as a guardian of art, it creates a grotesque paradox; the directors of contemporary art museums are the promoters and protectors of anti-art. One important way in which they protect postmodernism is by ignoring any alternative; they are silent when it comes to value-orientated, representational art. Far from being harmless, silence from the art establishment delivers a deathblow to viable representational artists. I discussed this issue of postmodern silence with Dr. Chris Sciabarra and he replied: “[A] dominant ideology “brackets out” of the equation real alternatives: it just doesn’t allow fundamentally revolutionary alternatives to even be considered. I think this is not simply a conscious conspiracy, but a method of silence, of omission. It becomes part of the overall worldview, this tacit exclusion.” Silence is a very clever weapon for postmodernists to use; it implies that representational art is dead and that even if something is out there it doesn’t merit notice. Tom Wolfe tells the sickening story of young Fredrick Hart scanning art magazines, hoping for a review of Ex Nihilo, the facade of the Washington National Cathedral, an eleven-year sculpture project. “Months went by…nothing.” The exceptional representational artist faces another kind of wall of incomprehensibility as a consequence of this “silence.” In my long career as an artist I have met many “regular” people, who don’t know art in depth. Though some of them have mentioned the “silliness” of contemporary museum exhibitions. Yet, they have reverence for the title of “museum” and they do not understand why representational artists should have problems in getting critical recognition. They feel this is something that they cannot judge and it should be left to the experts to decide. The undertone of their unstated words is, “if the experts do not acknowledge you then there must be a good reason for it”. It is also unfortunate that if artists try to retaliate against the silence of the postmodern establishment, then it sounds like “sour grapes.” In an Agatha Christie story there is a small aside about the theft of a brooch. In the novel everyone suspected the maid, as she was the only one in the house at the time of the theft. No one accused her of the theft because she was an elderly woman and had always been very conscientious. The assumption of the locals and her employers was that she desperately needed money. The maid was terribly upset because she could see suspicion in their eyes and she could do nothing about it. The maid died before the mystery was solved. The brooch had been attached to a blouse that had been sent to the cleaners; the laundress had stolen it. The horror of this case was that the maid, in the absence of the solution to the mystery, died without ever being granted recognition for her goodness and honesty. Just as the solution to this mystery is crucial to clear up where the crime lay and redeem the innocent, understanding the mysterious motives of the postmodern movement is crucial to bringing about recognition of the goodness and honesty of benevolent, representational artists. Earlier I asked questions and raised the issue about the key concept guiding the postmodern movement. Now it should be clear. Postmodernism is literally an anti-art movement. Its objective, ostensibly, is the elevation of postmodern artists but its motive is the eradication of art. The postmodern aesthetic is a virus composed of the unstable components of nihilism for its means and disgust for its ends. It will take innovative contemporary representational art and reason-based aesthetic criticism to remedy this plague. Stay tuned for Pandora’s Box Part 3, the last of the series, in which I contrast two contemporary views of the sublime; the postmodern and the integrated. Michael Newberry 2002, revised in New York, 2006

Liberals think that the title of Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism is an oxymoron.  They’re wrong.  Goldberg himself writes:

“For more than sixty years, liberals have insisted that the bacillus of fascism lies semi-dormant in the bloodstream of the political right.  And yet with the notable and complicated exceptions of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, no top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger.  All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment–John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke–and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism.  Meanwhile, the ranks of the leftwing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition.  And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word “Marxist” to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents.  The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values–even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments” [page 175].

“Foucault’s “enterprise of Unreason,” Derrida’s tyrannical logocentrism, Hitler’s “revolt against reason.”  All fed into a movement that believes action is more important than ideas.  Deconstructionism, existentialism, postmodernism, Pragmatism, relativism: all these ideas had the same purpose–to erode the iron chains of tradition, dissolve the concrete foundations of truth, and firebomb the bunkers where the defenders of the ancient regime still fought and persevered.  These were ideologies of the “movement.”  The late Richard Rorty admitted as much, conflating Nietzsche and Heidegger with James and Dewey as part of the same grand project” [Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, page 176].

It turns out that most of the moral and philosophical assumptions of liberalism have been shared by not only the Marxists, but the Nazis as well.  NAZI stood for “National Socialist German Workers Party,” and was merely a rival brand of the clearly leftist political ideology of socialism.  And given the fact that Marxism was in fact every bit as totalitarian and murderous as Nazism, in hindsight it seems rather bizarre that “Marxist” was ever an abracadabra word that the American left was willing to bear to begin with.

The purpose of this article is to explore how the foundational ideas that liberals uphold as being the opposite of fascism in fact actually fed the monster of fascist Nazism, and how the modern American left continue to fall prey to fascist premises and outcomes to this very day.

It is particularly interesting that the supposedly highly individualistic and influential school of thought known as “existentialism” became so ensnared by fascism and Nazism.  On the surface, existentialism would seem to be the very polar opposite of fascism and Nazism.  After all, a philosophy of radical freedom centered in the individual would surely be incompatible with a totalitarian social system that denies political liberty in the name of the community.  One would assume that existentialism would be a philosophy of rebellion against all such external authority.  And yet the Nazis quoted Frederich Nietzsche at great length in support of their ideology (see also here).  Martin Heidegger, one of the foremost existentialist thinkers in history, turned out to have been a proud member of the Nazi Party.  And even famed existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre – who fought to resist fascism in his Nazi-occupied France during WWII – ultimately merely chose another totalitarian ideology in its place (Sartre identified himself as a Marxist and a Maoist).

Georg Lukács observed (in The Destruction of Reason, 1954, page 5) that tracing a path to Hitler involved the name of nearly every major German philosopher since Hegel: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthy, Simmel, Scheler, Heidegger, Jaspers, Weber.  Rather than merely being amoral monsters, the Nazis emerged out of a distinguished liberal secular humanist intellectual tradition.

Max Weinreich documented in Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People, an exhaustive study of the complicity of German intellectuals with the Nazi regime.  Far from opposing the Nazi regime, we find that German academia actively provided the intellectual justification for Nazi fascism as well as the conceptual framework for the Holocaust.  Weinreich does not claim that German scholars intended the Holocaust, but he argues that the Holocaust would not have been possible without them.

He asks, “Did they administer the poison?  By no means; they only wrote the prescription.”

How could such a thing happen?

Very easily, it turns out.

The existentialists (along with the secular humanists and the liberals), deny the transcendent, deny objective truth, and deny the objective morality that derive from transcendence and objective truth.  Rather than any preordained system – whether moral or theological – existentialist anchored meaning not to any ideals or abstractions, but in the individual’s personal existence.  Life has no ultimate meaning; meaning is personal; and human beings must therefore create their own meaning for themselves.

One should already begin to see the problem: since existentialism, by its very nature, refuses to give objective answers to moral or ideological questions, a particular existentialist might choose to follow either a democrat or totalitarian ideology – and it frankly doesn’t matter which.  All that matters is that the choice be a genuine choice.

Existentialists didn’t merely acknowledge this abandonment of transcendent morality, they positively reveled in it.  In his book St. Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre celebrated the life of a criminal.  Genet was a robber, a drug dealer, and a sexual deviant.  By all conventional moral standards, Genet was an evil man.  But for Sartre, even ostensibly evil actions could be moral if they were performed in “good faith.”  And since Sartre’s Genet consciously chose to do what he did, and took responsibility for his choices and his actions, he was a saint in existentialist terms.

And the problem becomes even worse: by rejecting the concepts of transcendence, objective meaning, truth, and moral law, and by investing ultimate authority in the human will (i.e. Nietzsche’s “will to power”, Hitler’s “triumph of the will”), existentialism played directly into the hands of fascism — which preached the SAME doctrines.  If fascism can be defined as “violent and practical resistance against the process of transcendence,” as Ernst Nolte defined it, then it’s affinities with existentialism are crystal clear.  The two movements became part of the same stream of thought.

Modern Nietzsche followers argue that Nietzsche was not a racial anti-Semite.  For the sake of argument maybe he wasn’t; but he was without any question an intellectual anti-Semite, who attacked the Jews for their ideas and their ethics — particularly as they contributed to Western civilization and to Christianity (which he also actively despised).  And in addition to Nietzsche’s intellectual anti-Semitism was his utter contempt for any form of abstractions — particularly as they related to the transcendental categories of morality and reason.  Nietzsche maintained that abstraction of life resulted from abstraction of thought.  And he blamed Christianity – which he rightly blamed as a creation of the Jews – for the denial of life manifested in Christian morality.

And, unlike most pseudo-intellectuals of today, Nietzsche was consistent: in his attack against Christianity, he attacked Judeo-Christian morality.  He attacked the Christian value of other-centered love, and argued that notions of compassion and mercy favored the weak and the unfit, thereby breeding more weakness.  Don’t you dare think for a single nanosecond that Hitler didn’t take the arguments of this beloved-by-liberals philosopher and run down the field with them toward the death camps.

The Nazis aligned themselves not only against the Jews but against the the Judeo-Christian God and the Judeo-Christian morality the Jews represented.  A transcendent lawgiving God, who reveals His moral law on real tablets of stone for mankind to follow, was anathema to the fascists.  They argued that such transcendence alienates human beings from nature and from themselves (i.e., from their own genuine choices).  The fascist intellectuals sought to forge a new spirituality of immanence, focused upon nature, on human emotions, and on the community.  The fascists sought to restore the ancient pre-Christian consciousness, the ancient mythic sensibility in the form of the land and the blood, in which individuals experience unity with nature, with each other, and with their own deepest impulses.

Gene Edward Veith in his book Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian worldview writes:

The fascist rebellion against transcendence restored the ancient pagan consciousness.  With it came barbarism, a barbarism armed with modern technology and intellectual sophistication.  The liquidation of the transcendent moral law and “Jewish” conscience allowed the resurgence of the most primitive and destructive emotions, the unleashing of original sin (page 14).

Nietzsche argued that God is dead, and Hitler tried to finish Him off by eradicating the Jews.  What is less known is that he also planned to solve the “church problem” after the war.  Hitler himself  said:

“The war is going to be over.  The last great task of our age will be to solve the church problem.  It is only then that the nation will be wholly secure” [From Hitler's Tabletalk (December 1941), quoted in The Nazi Years: A Documentary History, ed. Joachim Remak, 1990, page 105].

Hitler boasted that “I have six divisions of SS composed of men absolutely indifferent in matters of religion.  It doesn’t prevent them from going to their deaths with serenity in their souls.”  And Himmler said, “Men who can’t divest themselves of manners of previous centuries, and scoff and sling mud at things which are ‘holy’ and matters of belief to others, once and for all do not belong in the SS.”

With the creed “God is dead” and the resulting “death of God,” Nietzsche predicted that energizing conflict and revolution would reemerge in a great wave of nihilism.  Human beings would continue to evolve, he said, nodding to Darwinism.  And man would ultimately give way to Superman.  And Nietzsche said that this Superman would not accept the anachronistic abstract, transcendental meanings imposed by disembodied Judeo-Christian rationalism or by a life-denying religion.  Rather, this Superman would CREATE meaning for himself and for the world as a whole.

The Superman, according to Nietzsche, would be an artist who could shape the human race – no longer bound by putrefying and stultifying and stupefying transcendence – to his will.  “Man is for him an un-form, a material, an ugly stone that needs a sculptor,” he wrote.  Such a statement did not merely anticipate the Darwinist-based Nazi eugenics movement.  It demonstrated how the exaltation of the human will could and would lead not to general liberty, as one might have expected, but to the control of the many by the elite — with those of the weaker in will being subjugated to the will of the Supermen.

Nietzsche’s new ethic became the rationale for all the Nazi atrocities that would follow.  As Nietzsche himself put it, “The weak and the failures shall perish: the first principle of OUR love of man.  And they shall even be given every possible assistance.  What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and the weak: Christianity” (in “The Anti-Christ” in Portable Nietzsche, p. 570).  We see here also the exemplification of yet another legacy left behind by Nietzsche that was picked up by the Nazi and afterward by secular humanist atheists today: the Nietzschean attitude of flippant, sarcastic contempt for all the ordinary human values that had resulted from Judeo-Christianity.

One of the ordinary human values that had resulted from Judeo-Christianity was the fundamental sanctity of human life.  But the Nazis had their own concept – Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”).  And nearly fifty million of the most innocent and helpless human beings have perished as a result of an existentialist philosophy that survived the fall of the Nazis in liberal thought, which celebrates pro-existentialist “pro-choice” above human life.

Nietzsche’s philosophy underlies the thought of all the later existentialists, and the darker implications of his thought proved impossible to ignore.

And Martin Heidegger, in his own personal choice to commit himself to National Socialism, did not ignore them.

There is more that needs to be understood.

Martin Heidegger invoked Nietzsche in his 1933 Rectoral Address, in his speech entitled, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in which he articulated his commitment to the integration of academia with National Socialism.  He began by asking, if Nietzsche is correct in saying that God is dead, what are the implications for knowledge?

As Heidegger explained, if God is dead, there is no longer a transcendent authority or reference point for objective truth.  Whereas classical thought, exemplified by the Greeks, could confidently search for objective truth, today, after the death of God, truth becomes intrinsically “hidden and uncertain.”  Today the process of questioning is “no longer a preliminary step that is surmounted on the way to the answer and thus to knowing; rather, questioning itself becomes the highest form of knowing.”

Heidegger’s conclusion became accepted to the point of becoming a commonplace of contemporary liberal thought: that knowledge is a matter of process, not content.  With the death of God, there is no longer any set of absolutes or abstract ideals by which existence must be ordered.  Such “essentialism” is an illusion; and knowledge in the sense of objective, absolute truth must be challenged.  The scholar is not one who knows or searches for some absolute truth, but the one who questions everything that pretends to be true.

Again, one would think that such a skeptical methodology would be highly incompatible with fascism, with its practice of subjecting people to an absolute human authority.  And yet this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of fascism.  In fact, Heidegger’s Rectoral Address was warmly endorsed by the National Socialists for a very good reason: the fascists saw themselves as iconoclasts, interrogating the old order and boldly challenging all transcendent absolutes.

We find that in this same address in which Heidegger asserts that “questioning itself becomes the highest form of knowing,” Heidegger went on to advocate expelling academic freedom from the university:

“To give oneself the law is the highest freedom.  The much-lauded ‘academic freedom’ will be expelled from the university.”

Heidegger argued that the traditional canons of academic freedom were not genuine but only negative, encouraging “lack of concern” and “arbitrariness.”  Scholars must become unified with each other and devote themselves to service.  In doing so, he stated, “the concept of the freedom of German students is now brought back to it’s truth.”

Now, the claim that freedom would somehow emerge when academic freedom is eliminated might be sophistry of the worst kind, but it is not mere rhetorical doublespeak.  Why?  Because Heidegger was speaking existentially, calling not for blind obedience, but for a genuine commitment of the will.  Freedom was preserved because “to give oneself the law” was a voluntary, freely chosen commitment.  Academic freedom as the disinterested pursuit of truth shows “arbitrariness,” parking of the old essentialist view that truth is objective and transcendent.  The essentialist scholar is detached and disengaged, showing “lack of concern,” missing the sense in which truth is ultimately personal, a matter of the will, demanding personal responsibility and choice.  In the new order, the scholar will be fully engaged in service to the community.  Academic freedom is alienating, a function of the old commitment to moral and intellectual absolutes.

And what this meant in practice could be seen in the Bavarian Minister of Culture’s directive to professors in Munich, that they were no longer to determine whether something “is true, but whether it is in keeping with the direction of the National Socialist revolution” (Hans Schemm, quoted in Hermann Glaser, The Cultural Roots of National Socialism, tr. Ernest A. Menze, 1978, p. 99).

I point all of the above out to now say that it is happening all over again, by intellectuals who unknowingly share most of the same tenets that made the horror possible the last time.

We live in a time and in a country in which the all-too modern left has virtually purged the university of conservatives and conservative thought.  This is simply a fact that is routinely confirmed.  And as a mater of routine, conservative speakers need not apply at universities.  If they are actually invited to speak, they are frequently shouted down by a relative few liberal activists.  And leftwing censorship is commonplace.  Free speech is largely gone, in a process that simply quashes unwanted views.  We have a process today in which a professor who is himself employing fascist tactics calls a student “a fascist bastard.”  And why did he do so?  Because the student gave a speech in a speech class choosing a side on a topic that the professor did not like.

We live in a society in which too many of our judges have despised a system of objective laws from an objective Constitution and have imposed their own will upon both.  Judicial activist judges have largely driven transcendent religion and the transcendent God who gives objective moral laws out of the public sphere.

Today, we live in a society that will not post the Ten Commandments – the epitome of transcendent divinely-ordained moral law – in public schools.  And why not?  Because judges ruled that:

“If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments,” which, the Court said, is “not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.”

One can only marvel that such justices so cynically debauched the thought of the founding fathers whose ideas they professed to be upholding.

Justices of the Supreme Court agreed with this fallacious ruling even as the figure of Moses holding the Ten Commandments rules atop the very building in which they betrayed our nation’s founding principles.

And thus the left has stripped the United States of America bare of transcendent moral law, just as their intellectual forebears did prior to WWII in Nazi Germany.   And thus the intellectual left has largely stripped the United States of America from free debate within academia largely by pursuing the same line of reasoning that Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger employed to do the same in Nazi Germany.  We saw this very feature evidenced by leftist scientists who threw aside their scientific ethics in order to purge climatologists who came to a different conclusion.

The climate that led to fascism and to Nazism in Germany did not occur overnight, even though the final plunge may have appeared to be such to an uninformed observer.  It occurred over a period of a half a dozen decades or so, with the transcendent and objective moral foundations having been systematically torn away.  And after that degree of cancer had been reached, it only took the right leader or the right event to plunge the world into madness.

Bismilah al rahmán y rahim

Ginebra ha sido asesinada por los suizos y las suizas, hijos e hijas de Guillermo Tell, que han votado con amplia mayoría a favor de una ley islamófoba y en contra de una iniciativa justa, promovida por el colectivo pacifista más representativo del legado idealista de la paz, en un tiempo asociado a la ciudad del borde del Lago Léman. “Catastrófico“, califica el resultado Tariq Ramadan. Yo pienso en mis amigos que siguen viviendo en aquella ciudad, musulmanes y ateos, quizás hasta cristianos y judíos, que deben estar abatidos, sentirse desolados ante unos resultados terribles y sorprendentes. Ha muerto su ciudad, asesinada en un sucio domingo fascista del siglo XXI, en nombre de la democracia. ¡Qué asco!

Am putea îndrăzni să spunem că prima „revoluţie colorată” a fost „marea revoluţie franceză” din 1789, revoluţie care, spulberând fundamentele societăţii tradiţionale, a instaurat dictatul roşu şi s-a pornit „să exporte marea schimbare” în întreaga Europă şi dincolo de hotarele ei.

Mai târziu, istoria a demonstrat ce fel de „schimbare” a adus acest val revoluţionar: inversarea valorilor şi înlocuirea principiului aristocratic cu principiul dominaţiei nemerniciei şi a banului. Toată această orgie istorică se petrecea sub patronatul, vorba marelui Petre Ţuţea, celor „trei curve metafizice”: „Libertatea, egalitatea şi fraternitatea”. Eminescu aduce şi el „laude” la adresa „triadei revoluţionare”: „Libertatea e libertatea de a exploata, egalitatea e egalitatea de a deveni tiran ca şi vecinul meu, fraternitatea – un moft ilustrat prin ghilotină”.

Firul logic al revoluţiei franceze continuă prin revoluţia bolşevică din 1917, când întregul continent fierbea în vâltoarea revoluţionară. Rând pe rând se ruinau imperiile, iar o nouă revoluţie colorată continuă (întâmplător oare?!) să poarte crezul „libertăţii, egalităţii şi fraternităţii”.

Prin urmare, nu poţi respinge revoluţia bolşevică din Rusia fără a respinge, în acelaşi timp, şi revoluţia liberală din 1789, pentru că ambele, prin esenţă, se află într-o legătură intimă de fraternitate. Nu poţi crede în umanitate şi valori supreme fiind în acelaşi timp adeptul acestei „triade” cua devărat satanice.

Începutul secolului XXI a stat şi el sub semnul revoluţiilor colorate. Pe rând au căzut Serbia, Slovacia, Georgia, Ucraina, Kârgâztan. Decoraţiile au fost peste tot acelaşi: culori, simboluri, mase, lozinci, răsturnări de guverne, mituri etc. Este adevărat, noile revoluţii se petrec fără multă scurgere de sânge, manifestându-se în spiritul veacului „umanismului şi pacifismului”, toate acestea, totuşi, nu îi schimbă esenţa. De fapt, revoluţiile nu au avut niciodată vreo legătură cu violenţa. Violenţa pentru acestea nu a fost decât un accident istoric. Schimbările puterii de stat prin forţă au fost întotdeauna „lovituri de stat”, „insurecţii”, „putci”, în timp ce revoluţiile (noţiune împrumutată din astronomie) au însemnat: „schimbarea radicală a sistemului de valori şi a sistemului politic”.

Confuzia vine din cauza faptului că „marile schimbări” liberale şi apoi comuniste, iniţial au putut fi posibile doar cu ajutorul mijloacelor, care, în mod obişnuit, se aplică în perioada de război: operaţii militare, război informaţional utilizate împotriva propriei ţări, împotriva propriului stat. În mod firesc, nici o minte sănătoasă nu putea accepta perversiunile pe care le propunea Robiespierre sau Lenin, perversiuni ideologice, care totuşi au devenit, mai târziu, „idei progresiste” urmate, mai târziu, de un adevărat „viol al mulţimilor”.

Revoluţiile în ziua de azi nu se mai fac de către revoluţionarii flămânzi, cu ciubotele nespălate şi cu puşca în mână, ci de indivizi la cravată, cu aere aristocratice, care se plimbă dintr-o parte în alta a globului şi ştiu „ce vrea prostimea”. Aceştia, pentru câteva zeci sau sute de milioane de euro, sunt gata oricând să organizeze la comandă „revoluţii” în orice colţ al lumii. Mă refer la specialiştii în tehnologii politice (sau „politehnologi”, cum se mai spune prin părţile noastre), pentru care campaniile de promovare sau discreditare, de instaurarea sau demitere a unui guvern au devenit o profesie.

Dacă „revoluţiile” franceze şi ruse au fost o expresie ale epocii moderne, a distrugerii societăţii premoderne (tradiţionale), revoluţiile colorate de la începutul secolului XXI au devenit o expresie a erei postmoderne, a unei post-politici, a unui post-stat a unei post-ideologii, a unei post-societăţi.

Dacă ar fi să aleg un prototip al unei astfel de revoluţii, aş alege „revoluţia oranj” din Ucraina, pentru că mi se pare cel mai reprezentativ şi cel mai cras model al unei revoluţii post-moderniste, un model care înglobează toate elementele „revoluţiilor” din Serbia, Slovacia şi Georgia.

Revoluţiile postmoderne se deosebesc de cele moderne prin faptul că decurg la o deconstrucţie a sensului politicii, înlocuindu-l cu „mesaje”, „imagini” livrate iraţionalului prin intermediul mass-media şi reţelelor de relaţii sociale, prin „acţiuni non violente” („non-violente” doar convenţional), prin culori-simboluri („oranj”, „galben”, „verde” etc.), prin acţiuni în masă, care bombardează continuu poporul cu mesaje ce duc la stări de agonie şi psihoză colectivă. Revoluţiile postmoderne nu au programe, nu au scop, ele sunt asemenea acelor detergente care „spală mai alb”, chiar dacă nu există culori „mai albe decât albul”.

Odată ce este făcut primul pas, „revoluţia colorată” devine o normă. Întregul proces politic devine o „revoluţie colorată” continuă. Chiar şi personajele („tiranii”, „dictatorii”) împotriva cărora au fost îndreptate primele „revoluţii” intră în joc, preluând şi ei tehnicile „de luptă” în aşa hal, încât nu mai există nicio cale spre o „contrarevoluţie”, spre reîntoarcere la modelul politic iniţial. Locul politicii este ocupat de o “postpolitică”.

În acest an, la sfârşitul unui ciclu electoral, mai multe persoane îşi aduc aminte, „cu nostalgie”, de „valul revoluţionar” de acum 5 ani, când Iuşcenko se îmbrăţişa cu Timoşenko pe „Maidan Nezalejnosti”, inundat de steaguri şi corturi portocalii, când Băsescu striga la Bucureşti de pe scena plină de balonaşe oranj „Să trăiţi bine!”. Când masele populare din cele două capitale, în extaz, cu feţele pline de lacrimi, credeau că iată-iată acum a venit „sfârşitul istoriei”, a venit multaşteptata „schimbare”. Desigur, totul nu a fost decât un spectacol.

Acelaşi entuziasm au simţit şi americanii acum un an, când oligarhia albă din SUA a plasat tactic pe „piaţa politică” figura neagră a lui Barack Obama, un personaj  lipsit de carismă sau calităţi deosebite, dar care timp de jumătate de an, cu susţinerea întregii mass-media din SUA, a fost transformat într-un „mesia” al naţiunii americane şi al întregului glob pământesc. Anume în astfel de cazuri este valabilă cunoscuta afirmaţie a lui Karl Marx: „religia este opiu pentru popor”.

Astăzi cetăţenii SUA se trezesc mahmuri după marea beţie electorală şi încearcă să înţeleagă ce se întâmplă, dar acest exerciţiu nu va dura prea mult timp. Îndată ce capul va începe să dea semne de limpezire, va veni o nouă „revoluţie”, cu o nouă „mare schimbare”, iar jocul politic va continua într-o aparentă „mişcare”. Realitatea este că revoluţiile postmoderne sunt revoluţii fără scop, fără sens, fără logică, în care maselor li se rezervă doar rolul de consumatori „activi” aparent, „pasivi” în realitate, ai politicii postmoderne. Revoluţiile „postmoderne” sunt modele preluate ale campaniei de promovare a mărfurilor, când orice idiot, asemenea unei mărci comerciale, poate fi transformat peste noapte în „erou naţional”.

Astăzi Moldova se află între beţie şi mahmureală. Va urma o perioadă de „durere de cap” şi lipsă de „bună dispoziţie” în rândurile „poporului muncitoresc”, după care cu siguranţă va urma o nouă „mare beţie electorală”.

Evil Emergents believe in Contemplative Prayer. Contemplative  Prayer was invented by Hindus and Papists. Romanists/Papists, Hindus and Muslims are of the devil and are members of the Synagogues of Satan. Barak Obama is a Muslim and the  political anti-Christ. Evil Emergents voted for Obama therefore Contemplative Prayer is destroying America and the Church:

Our excellent discernmentalist and researchmentalist skills which God gifted us with Himself have led  us to conclude these Absolute Truth facts—so if you are anything like us (Elect of God, regenerate, American, Ultra Right Wing Conservative Fundamentalist Calvinist Republicans, warmongers, capitalist materialists, non-Marxists, Saved, inerrant, etc.),  you should avoid Contemplative Prayer like the plague. And if you are an Evil Emergent then all we have to say to you is Repent that is if God lets you repent—because We Know with Absolute Certainty that you Emergents are of the non-Elect, unregenerate, anti-American, Arminian, Neo-Marxist, socialist, communist, anti-capitalists, reprobated and unsaved—because of your impure doctrines. Afterall, God only listens to Imprecatory Prayers   which we are praying against  you Emergents right now—and the only meditation one needs is on the Holy Inerrant Infallible Word Of God—the King James Bible AV1611.

“Remake” and “original” are loaded words.

The Prisoner, AMC’s remake of the 1967 British series of the same name, is nothing like its predecessor.  Or at least that’s what I’m told—not having seen the first version, I watched the new miniseries with a mind wiped as clean of preconceptions as one of the brainwashed members of The Village.  And along with most of them, I liked what I saw—The Prisoner (2009) was a strong, character-driven, self-contained story: an original in its own right.

Brilliant, enigmatic, and utterly horrifying in the way all good dystopian science fiction is—the final scene alone was enough to bring up a wave of déjà vu from reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four for the first time and naively imagining torture and death were the worst O’Brien could do to Winston (or in this case, Two to Six).

I was wrong.

Throughout the miniseries, Six’s single-minded dedication to escape—“I am not a number!” he cries on multiple occasions, “I’m a free man!”— is almost heartbreaking.  Mental conviction, Six (James Caviezel) insists during early episodes, is stronger than anything the manipulative leader of The Village, Two (Ian McKellan, in a terrifying departure from the grandfatherly Gandalf), can throw at him.

But the theme of The Prisoner seems to be that the mind is not as secure a vault as we might imagine.  Six, after all, can’t even remember the name he supposedly had in his supposed other life and its supposed other world.  Any evidence he or any other number in the village has is as fragile as the wisp of a dream left after waking up—literally.  “Dreamers,” who draw fragments of their other lives on scraps of paper (the Statue of Liberty, a stick figure with a bag over its head), are disruptive elements in a society that sees them as crazy.

Add self-doubt to the mix and getting out starts to look impossible for the increasingly irresolute Six.

From my own experience, I’d say viewers can relate—as Six attempts to piece together memory fragments of a creepy corporate life at a mysterious surveillance company called Summakor (and his own quitting, even though “Nobody resigns from Summakor”), we’re trying to straighten out the plot from a thoroughly disjointed, non-linear story structure.  Episode one, “Arrival,” I’ll warn you, is nearly incomprehensible.

It’s not easy for anyone to straighten out the mysteries of The Village—neither us nor its own denizens—but the nonlinear narrative is as masterfully done an example of television text painting as I’ve ever seen.  The series, after all, is all about manipulating the human mind.

And no one’s better at that than Two, whose “death-cold eyes” (as described by one terrified villager) and gelid calm are absolutely convincing—I’m pretty sure smiling benignly while playing catch with a grenade is something only an elder statesman of drama like Sir Ian McKellan could pull off.

The rest of the cast, as well, is stellar, successfully portraying incredible depths of characterization (careful! some spoilers below) —

Two’s son, 11-12 (Jamie Campbell-Bower) shifts chillingly between the frigid self-possession of his father and the tortured confusion he picked up from Six;

Ruth Wilson’s self-composure as 313 is flawless, until the total disassociation of her “real” self from the “real” world is revealed, and makes a jarring contrast;

And Caviezel’s disorientation and resolution to escape are through the early episodes are utterly believable—only makes his ultimate end even more horrifying (here’s a hint: remember Winston Smith?).

But The Prisoner recalls Aldous Huxley as much as George Orwell: Two’s seemingly sincere belief that he can “help” people, perfect humans against their will, makes The Village as brave a new world as Huxley imagined for London of the 26^th century.

“The great war is psychological.  It’s in here,” Two insists, tapping his head.  And he’s right—not just in terms of the control he exerts over the minds of Six, 313, and his son 11-12 (for a while, at least).

“Postmodern” nonlinear editing doesn’t mean that the themes aren’t relevant, or predictive rather than contemporary—The Prisoner’s emphasis on the difference (or lack thereof?) between what’s real and what’s a construct is a very modern moral dilemma in an age when scientific and technological advances blur the line between the “real” the synthetic.

(Is 313’s love natural, or manufactured?  And even if it is a product of Two’s nefarious gene therapy, does that make it less real now that she does feel it?  Does The Village exist in any physical space, or just the mind?  Does it make a difference?)

In any case—with a disjointed structure, an just-barely-comprehensible storyline, a nightmarish conclusion, and a concept disconcertingly contemporary, watching AMC’s The Prisoner was something like having a bad dream, only to wake up and shudder that it could be possible.

But if Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World are any sort of examples (or Shakespeare’s tragedies, or Euripides’, or Sophocles’…), dystopia and tragedy have a long shelf life.

I’m definitely buying the DVD.

10/ Re-Animator (1985)

Re-Animaniac Herbert West injecting some life into proceedings

Is it just me or were they having more of a laugh making horror films in the 80s? It seems like such a golden age for grisly, messy, witty, silly and absolutely bloody genius gorefests. And with Re-Animator Stuart Gordon prescribes a deliriously high dosage of all the above… then pours an extra geyser of blood on top. Just to be sure. Based on a classic H.P. Lovecraft story, this madcap tale about screwball medical student Herbert West, and his scientific breakthrough that enables him to re-animate dead tissue, is both a subtle poke at the dangers of nonsensical scientific progress and also an absurdly unsubtle slice of 1980s horror humour. Jeffrey Combs puts in a delightfully demented turn as West, the evil orchestrator of the ensuing gory exuberance, as the film bounces from one bizarre scene to the next. An oft-forgotten gem.

Best bit – The ghastly re-re-animation of Daniel’s unfortunate cat. Having already been killed , brought back to life and battered back to death, West then gleefully gives the poor, crippled pussy one last resurrection to prove his shocking genius to Daniel.

9/ Candyman (1992)

Born in the imagination of horror maestro Clive Barker, in at number 9, comes the legend of Candyman. We’ve all heard it. There aren’t too many adolescent horror fans who haven’t dared to test themselves by defiantly pronouncing ‘Candyman’ five times to their own spotty reflections in the mirror. The genius of this film is not in spawning this myth, nor even in creating one of the most enduring icons in horror film folklore. The genius of ‘Candyman’ derives from its intelligent investigations into the power of these myths themselves. In her efforts to prove the non-reality of the Candyman myth, sacrificial victim Helen Lyle unwittingly conjures the Candyman myth out of myth and into reality… and, in the process of her horrific torture, creates a fresh Candyman myth to inhabit the imaginations of trembling teenagers. Because Candyman doesn’t live in reality. He dwells where he was born… in the imagination.

Best bit – The hair-raising (and head-scorching) finale, as Helen battles to save a baby from inside a rapidly accelerating bonfire, with Candyman’s furious bellowing echoing around her, as she becomes wrapped up in flames.

8/ Videodrome (1983)

James Woods gives his TV some head

Another gory classic from the 80s, this time from the master of macabre body-horror, and Toronto’s own, David Cronenburg. Its about Max Renn, played by pokerfaced James Woods, a porn industry executive looking for the freshest, most controversial content he can lay his grubby mitts on. When he stumbles upon Videodrome, a plotless, violent show of sexual cruelty, he thinks he’s found it. What he doesn’t realise is that he hasn’t found Videodrome, Videodrome has found him. His exposure to its signal transforms his brain and body into a human vehicle for Videodrome’s desires, even to the point where its evil executives can put video-tapes inside a yawning wound in his stomach to command his every action. The hallucinatory chaos that follows has to be seen to be believed, as televisions spew guts and video recorders sprout veins. Clever, if somewhat mind-boggling, this is Cronenburg’s finest hour… and a half.

Best bit – As the hallucinations start to take hold, Max is so seduced by the image of Debbie Harry (yep, Debbie Harry of Blondie…she gets naked too) that he jams his face into his television, finding the squishy screen surprisingly yielding to his efforts.

7/ Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)

Wes Craven's Fred refuses to drop dead

I love horror films. I love postmodernism. And I loved the first Nightmare on Elm Street film. So it seems only natural that I should love this final, final, Nightmare on Elm Street, as Wes Craven, inventor and director of the original Elm Street, chucks all three ingredients into a fuming, fiery melting pot, boiling over with imagination. Because this is a film on a mission. And that mission is to save Craven’s 1984 creation Freddy Krueger from the direness he had been doused in during a decade littered with excruciatingly banal sequels. It’s a brilliantly realised concept, as the actors from the first film play themselves making one final sequel to the Freddy series whilst Freddy himself battles to break out of the dreary fictional world he has been consigned to and into the real world, where he gruesomely tortures the increasingly confused cast by bringing the world of the first film with him. It’s postmodernism all over and a great way for Craven to have his own, final say, on the Freddy phenomenon he created, whilst at last preserving Freddy’s soul in a sequel worthy of his monstrous cinematic status. Although, come to mention it, I did quite like the 3^rd one.

Best Bit – When the events, and even the film set, start to mirror the first film, beginning with the babysitter’s ceiling-crawling demise at the clawed hands of an invisible Freddy. John Saxon is especially creepy when he starts muttering lines his character once said, ten years before.

6/ Psycho (1960)

Norman Bates: Just don't do any 'ya mum' jokes

It might be the oldest film in the top 10 but this fact has no bearing on the power of Psycho to unsettle audiences, nearly half a century since its release. Horror directors working today would chop off their limbs (well, they’re certainly eager to chop enough off their characters) if they could create even half the dread the late, great Alfred Hitchcock generated in audiences with Psycho, one of the all-time classics of any film genre. For this is cinema of the highest order, as the tension is cranked up early, though faintly at first, during thieving Marion Crane’s paranoid getaway, and then is blown completely off the scale by the sudden, brutal nature of that shower scene. Despite only lasting 12 seconds its impression on the mind is unshakeable, even when you know it’s coming. From then on the viewers’ frayed nerves are set to tweak at the slightest provocation. And Hitchcock makes damn sure that this happens.

     Anthony Perkins’ twitchy performance as momma’s boy Norman Bates is spot-on,  sensationally bringing to the screen Norman’s insecure social bungling, edgy temperament and fierce psychotic eruptions. Psycho is the original slasher/serial killer flick and is still yet to be topped in the nerve-wracking stakes, even to this day.

Best Bit – It would be far too predictable to pick the infamous shower slicing scene. The most powerful moment, for me, comes in the final five minutes, after Norman’s psychosis is explained, and we are granted very brief access into his mind… to find the crazed mother reigning there… and a twisted satisfaction on Norman’s face.

5/ Scream (1996)

The killer reflected as the victim Drew in her first scream

Because I’m not content with drooling uncontrollably over Wes Craven’s deployment of postmodernism in his ‘New Nightmare’ film, I shall now conduct more pandering to the postmodern arts by worshipping Scream, his shrewd celebration of slasher flicks. Ok, so I’m obsessed, but it’s just so clever! I’ll explain myself. Scream is a slasher flick about slasher flicks; a slasher flick that is aware of its generic status as a slasher flick and even has its characters making consistent slasher flick references to their own slasher flick situations. Erm, maybe I should try and refrain from using the term slasher flick from now on. Randy “there are certain rules that one must abide by” Meeks is the embodiment of this genre appreciation, and his witty, know-it-all remarks on proceedings enlighten the cast and audience throughout. Why, he even knows who did it. “There’s always some stupid bullshit reason to kill your girlfriend” he observes midway through, “Besides, if it gets too complicated, you lose your target audience.” A canny self-referential line that is typical of the film as a whole.

     Of course, it helps if you’re already a fan of such splatterfests, because the references and in-jokes come thicker and faster than the mounting bodycount, but for horror fans it is a welcome dose of originality in a genre not often renowned for it. A particularly superb sequence comes near the end, when the soundtrack from classic slasher flick (Oh crap! I said it again!) ‘Halloween’ emanates from the tv in the background, adding extra tension to the climactic scenes. And, let’s not forget, Scream is a horror film first and foremost, so crucially this genre referencing doesn’t detract from the gory thrills on offer… in fact, it even succeeds as a well-disguised whodunit.

 Best bit – Has to be the marvellous 12 minute, pre-credit torturing of Drew Barrymore, as she makes chit-chat with a killer who ‘wants to play a little game’, has her horror movie knowledge put to the most bloodcurdling of tests, and eventually ends up ‘sliced and diced’ and hanging from a tree.

4/ Ju-on: The Grudge (2003)   

Eeeerrrrrrgggghhh!!!

In the last decade, whilst Western horror films have predictably regurgitated all manner of diabolical re-makes (The Wicker Man with Nicolas Cage anyone?!) and mindless violent bollocks (Hostel, the Saw sequels), east of the globe the Japanese have steadily been laying down their own brutal markers for truly disturbing horror.

     The plot of The Grudge is simple and really just a foundation on which to unleash set-piece after set-piece of relentless, mounting dread on increasingly uncomfortable audiences. A house where dreadful violence once occurred holds the deathly essence of these events within it and anyone who sets foot inside is tainted fatally by it, no matter where they go. But, like I said, this basic premise is the mere foundation on which the experience is built, for the entire essence of the film, like the house itself, practically oozes an evil that comes crawling at you from every crevice. There is no clever point to it, there is no subtle character or plot development, it is all just there to scare you shitless. And it’s very effective, a rollercoaster of pure tension with little release, leaving you hanging on the edge of the drops way longer than is healthy for your blood pressure. Each terrifying scene builds and builds to the point where, after 90 minutes of being perched rigidly on the edge of your seat, your arse, as well as your angst-riddled mind, begins to ache with the effort. But, this is what horror is all about. I know, I read it on the back of a trashy Dean Koontz novel.  

     As always, Hollywood just couldn’t resist rehashing it and, as much as Sarah Michelle Gellar’s image is never nauseating, dull, soulless re-gurgitations like that most certainly are.

 Best bit – The twisted descent of the ghoul down the staircase in the final climax; an act of contortion more gruesome than your average circus performer.

3/ The Shining (1980)

Here's Johnny!

I have the greatest of respect for Stephen King… as a writer. As a film critic however, I’ve got to be honest, he sucks big time. How can he possibly mistake this masterpiece of grandeur and suspense for the worst adaptation of one of his stories, finding it ‘dreadfully upsetting’ and the only one he can ‘remember hating’? Has he not seen ‘Dreamcatcher’, ‘Needful Things’ or the juvenile attempts at scariness offered by the guff ‘Children of the Corn’ series? Please Stephen, stick to what you do best eh?

     The Shining, in its novel form, is a shimmering example of what King does do best, with it’s meticulously constructed character flaws (including his trademark struggling writer turned alcoholic), brooding supernatural menace and devastating explosions of horror. Kubrick naturally had to adapt it for the screen the best way he could, and so rightfully discarded any potentially preposterous sequences, such as when the hedge animals come alive. The focus of Kubrick’s film is taken away from the alcoholic tendencies of Jack, the tortured father and husband, and placed confidently in the realm of ambiguity. No tightly plotted character background to explain the mental degeneration of Jack Torrence here; the horror of the events are far scarier when the root cause for Jack’s mania is up in the air. Was Jack Torrence mad to begin with? Have the supernatural forces of the hotel merely brought them out? Or would the malicious hotel have claimed the sanity of any would-be caretaker, no matter who it was?

     The gloriously unhinged, career-defining performance of Jack Nicholson helps to create an image of a man who might be nearing the end of his tether right from the off, so when his psychosis starts to show itself it just seems to make sense. The film is unnervingly precise in its approach, patient but forceful, as the dread escalates towards the axe-happy ‘Here’s Johnny’ moments of the finale. King should be proud. His work inspired one of the only true ‘works of art’ the horror genre has been blessed with.

 Best bit: I just love the moment when dopey housewife Shelley Duvall finally discovers the very real depths, and apparently long-lasting, madness of her husband, by flicking through the end product of his countless days hunched over the typewriter.

2/ Alien (1979)

The Perfect Organism: "Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility"

Firstly, a quicky explanation. Alien has made this horror top 10 because it is a horror film… set in space. Aliens, though awesome, is not. It is an action blockbuster… set in space. Alien is a horror film because it’s a haunted house movie, set on a spaceship, which is terrorised by one of the scariest monsters in cinema history. It’s dark, it’s claustrophobic, and it’s damn horrifying when it wants to be.  My Dad showed me this film, his favourite of all-time, when I was a wee nipper and though it had me quivering under my sheets at night, tossing nervous glances at the bedroom door to check no extra-terrestrial menaces with bitey tongues were coming to devour me, I’m very glad he did. Because it has become one of my all-time favourites too. Ridley Scott’s masterful direction is composed, patient, and utterly ruthless when going for the jugular. The timing and the twists are all the more devastating because of his deft approach. James Cameron went on to scale spectacular new heights with Aliens seven years later (also one of mine and my Dad’s favourite films) but its Ridley Scott’s initial shocker that carves the deeper scars in one’s consciousness.

Best Bit – Sorry, but I’m going to have to be predictable with this one. Yep, you guessed it, it’s the chestbursting scene. It might just be the best, and most shocking, scene ever. Brilliantly executed by Scott, it still has a powerful effect on me when I watch it, even now, 15 years since it first terrified me.

1/ Evil Dead 2 (1987)

Dead by Dawn! Dead by Dawn!

The best of the best when it comes to awesome 80s, low-budget, blood-gushing free-for-alls. It was no small task choosing between this and the 1981 original for the top spot (because, let’s face it, it had to be one of them) but this manic feast of eye-popping inventiveness has nabbed the honours by the rotting skin of its zombie teeth. And it was soooo close. The first one had the endlessly cringe-worthy pencil stab to the Achilles scene; and then who can forget the glorious bit of tree rape in the woods. But this riot of a sequel, which is not so much a sequel than a total re-vamping of the first, ups the gross-out comic ante even further, and is full to bulging with memorable moments.

Bruce didn't really need a hand at that moment

This is the film where undead-warrior Bruce Campbell cemented his cult status, really coming into his own as his girlfriend falls prey to the zombie horde early on, leaving him alone to fight the steaming menace from the woods. From then on the ghastly laughs escalate at a frenetic rate, as scene by gore-drenched scene hurtles past, cram-packed with such mania as zombie waltzes in the night, spiteful heads in vices, eyes popping out into screaming mouths, chortling mooseheads, bitter squabbles with mirrored reflections, zombies anxiously gnashing for mouthfuls of hair, and the most epic duel in the history of epic duels between one man and his severed hand. It’s a hoot, from start to finish, but it also has so much to teach us. I mean, I for one know what to do when the dead eventually do start stalking me from their graves. Grab a chainsaw, chop off my own hand, attach said chainsaw to my arm where the hand used to be, rev it up, and in my good hand brandish my boomstick at any foolhardy deadite that comes crawling. Easy. Or, should I say… Groovy!!

Best Bit – aagh! Don’t make me pick one…………… ok, since I’ve found an awesome picture, I’ll opt for Ash’s war with his pesky and persistent right hand. It’s a fantastic sequence, though why he thought putting it in a bucket with the book ‘A Farewell to Arms’ on top would work remains a constant bafflement.

hai, trage frunzele astea la xerox, aşa se întâmplă în fiecare toamnă, ne cade părul într-o veselie maniacă, stai liniştită, promit… am uitat drumul spre cârciumă… ultima dată m-au înghiţit valurile acordeonului, lăutarul belea dinţii ca o javră bătrână, iar eu îi îndesam tristeţe cu halba… mai ştii, dimineaţa venea cu pleoape cusute, iar vocea ta… vocea ta… erai supărată pe mine de fiecare dată când rămâneam în arest la cârciumă, da, vocea ta mă tăia ca un brici, un fel de autopsie bugetară, asta îmi făceai, începeai: cât ai băut, mai ai vreun ban, etc etc… hai, hai… încetează, trage frunzele astea la xerox, nervura ta de evă este excitată, dacă vrei pot să fiu şi eu câine, în timp ce tu faci pe coasta… serios, nu vreau copii, aşa se întâmplă în fiecare toamnă, vrei copii, nu vezi, lipsă de calciu, ne cade părul, tu vrei copii, să ne cadă dinţii, nasurile, mâinile, picioarele… vezi tu, copiii sunt carne tocată, sunt carnea noastră tocată, trage frunzele astea la xerox, hai promit, mă fac băiat cuminte, mă fac băiat cuminte… dacă ai şti tu acordeonul ţiganului cu clapele ieşite precum coastele unui evreu supt de lagăr, dacă ai şti măcar… hai trage frunzele astea la xerox.

Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason wants Christians to be “ambassadors for Christ”. What’s that?

Here is a dictionary definition of ambassador:

1. a diplomatic official of the highest rank, sent by one sovereign or state to another as its resident representative (ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary).

2. a diplomatic official of the highest rank sent by a government to represent it on a temporary mission, as for negotiating a treaty.

3. a diplomatic official serving as permanent head of a country’s mission to the United Nations or some other international organization.

4. an authorized messenger or representative. Abbreviation: Amb., amb.

Greg Koukl says that a good ambassador needs 3 things: knowledge, wisdom and character.

Greg writes:

I’ve heard it said that sometimes you will be the only living Bible that anyone can read. Well, that’s what it means to be an ambassador. You will speak for Christ. One way or another, for good or for ill, you will speak for Him if you are a follower of Jesus Christ. So we want to strengthen good representatives, and we know that takes emphasis in three areas.

One are to strengthen as an ambassador is knowledge. In other words, you’ve got to know a few things that your sovereign wants you to represent to the rest of the world. So you’ve got to have this knowledge base.

Secondly, you’ve got to communicate that knowledge in a way that is sensitive to the people that you’re sent to. You need to understand their way of thinking. You need to understand their language after a fashion. You must be diplomatic, tactical after a fashion. So there is a certain wisdom, the right use of knowledge, that’s necessary for you to be an effective ambassador.

A good ambassador, any ambassador, packages that knowledge and strategy in the manner of delivery in himself or herself. It’s all wrapped up in an individual, and if that individual is offensive, if that individual is a bad representative, it doesn’t matter that the knowledge and tactics are sound. If the individual is wrong then the message loses its force. This is why we emphasize not just knowledge, not just wisdom, but also character. You must package the entire message in you personally so that you can be an effective, accurate, and virtuous representative or ambassador for Jesus Christ.

I think that a good ambassador for Christ needs to be motivated, as well. A good ambassador is concerned when some people have false beliefs about God’s existence, character and purposes. An ambassador cannot stand by and do nothing while God’s reputation is diminished in public. It is this concern for God as a friend that drives people to study apologetics, as well as theology,science, history, etc. We want to know what God is like, what he’s done and how we can show these things to be true.

The mission of Christian ambassadors

Consider 2 Corinthians 5:11-21, especially verses 11 and 2:

¹¹Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men. What we are is plain to God, and I hope it is also plain to your conscience.

¹²We are not trying to commend ourselves to you again, but are giving you an opportunity to take pride in us, so that you can answer those who take pride in what is seen rather than in what is in the heart.

¹³If we are out of our mind, it is for the sake of God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you.

¹⁴For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died.

¹⁵And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.

¹⁶So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.

¹⁷Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!

¹⁸All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:

¹⁹that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

²⁰We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.

²¹God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

This passage about reconciling God and man is one of my favorites in the Bible.

God has chosen us to communicate on his behalf to people who don’t know him. An ambassador doesn’t treat God as a means to achieving happiness, security, health and wealth in this life. Nor is the ambassador’s job to let other people be happy without a relationship with the real God who is really there. The ambassador has a responsibility to explain God’s existence, character and purposes to those who are still ignorant of him. And that takes effort. God is not interested in making his human “pets” happy. He’s given us a task to accomplish – a task that may well consume a good deal of time, effort and money. A task that may diminish our happiness by making us different and unpopular.

Apologetics demonstrates your friendship with God

I often think about how to test others to see whether they are genuine Christians or not. This can be done for friendship or even when testing a prospective mate. A subjective “Christian” who invents their own view of God subjectively, using intuition and emotions, is not going to put themselves second for God and serve him as an ambassador. Instead, they’ll think that a relationship with God really means projecting their own desire for happiness onto God. “God” is there to make them feel happy, not to make demands on them.

And if a person doesn’t want a relationship with God as a real person, they won’t relate to you as a real person, either. If a person doesn’t think that God has purposes and feelings distinct from their own, they won’t think you have purposes and feelings distinct from their own. If a person thinks that God’s purpose is to make them happier, then they’ll think that your purpose is to make them happier. If a person is not willing to sacrifice their interests for God’s interests, they aren’t going to sacrifice their interests for your interests, either.

Recently, I had posted a debate from the Unbelievable radio show, which is broadcast in the UK. The topic of the debate was whether India should pass an anti-conversion law to prevent Christians from trying to convert people to Christianity. Basically, many Hindus in India want Christians to adopt the Hindu notions of polytheism and religious pluralism. They want Christians to accept that Jesus is one incarnation of the divine among many, and they want to outlaw the Christian practice of using speech to convince people to become Christians.

You can listen to the debate here in my original post.

But I wanted to highlight another debate that occurred in the comments of this blog, between me and a Hindu reader, who challenged me for being intolerant because I said that Hinduism was false.

His initial comment is here.

Guys, all religions teach the same things. Its how each religion is interpreted that makes it different. If you follow any religion persistently, it will lead you to a peaceful and happy life.

[...]If one feels happy following Christian rituals, he may follow Christianity; if he feels happy following Hindu rituals, he is good to a Hindu. It all depends on what makes sense to the person. Enforcing or luring someone to another religion is wrong…It should be a personal choice. And no one should oppose a conversion made by personal choice.

[...]To say that someone’s God or method of worship is false or not real is absolute rubbish according to me.

[...]If one says that other’s God or religion is false, he/she is not tolerating the other’s beliefs. And its immoral. Such things lead to religious conflicts.

[...]I believe in Jesus and so in my religion which is Hinduism.

[...]Why convert when a human being’s main aim is to be happy? Every religion has scriptures that tell how to become happy and attain heaven/liberation.

[...]Everyone loves his/her religion. They would not want to hear anything bad about it.

And I replied:

Our view as Christians is that the purpose of religion is not to live a happy life and to be “good”. Our view is that we want to believe what is true and to know God as God really is. We believe that God is a person, with a real personality – likes and dislikes.

What you’re proposing is a Hindu approach to religion, except with Christian symbols and rituals. But Christians don’t care about symbols and rituals much. We are more interested in history, science and propositional logic. We treat religion like… any other area of knowledge. First we discover the truth, then we act on it.

Additionally, you have a Hindu approach to conversion, and you are trying to force that on Christians. You can keep your Hindu approach to yourself, and tolerate the fact that we have a different approach to conversion.

[...]You’re not in a position to know what Christianity teaches, or what Jesus believes, since you haven’t looked into these things at all. You know Hinduism. And you are projecting Hinduism onto other religions. But Hinduism is totally different than Christianity. They conflict in many areas, like cosmology and history. We believe that the universe had a beginning, you think it’s eternal. And science can arbitrate that claim. We are willing to change our beliefs to be in line with what we can test in the external world, using the laws of logic, and the study of science and history.

[...]You write “To say that someone’s God or method of worship is false or not real is absolute rubbish according to me.”, yet you think that Christianity is false, and not real. But I am actually not offended by that at all. You are welcome to think I am wrong. I don’t mind, this is the way that the game plays. Only one of us can be right, and if you were right, I would have to switch over to your view and that would be fine with me.

[...]You write “Everyone loves his/her religion. They would not want to hear anything bad about it.” No that’s your view. You identify Hindusim with India and patriotism and your people and culture. I don’t identify Christianity with anything except truth. I like it because it’s true. And that the only reason I like it.

[...]When I say that Hinduism is false, I am not “talking bad about your religion” any more than I am talking bad about the view that 2 + 2 = 5, when I say that 2 + 2 = 4. It’s not talking bad about an idea to say it is false.

And then he replied:

Do you believe that people who worship idols are devilish or all religions except Christianity are false? If yes then explain me with proper scientific reasoning and provide me a proof in the recent decades that logically explains the above two statements. You need to prove me that what you believe is experimented by scientists and proven by technology.

[...]I believe in all Gods no matter what religion because God is One. For me and this generation of educated Indians, we believe in tolerance and respect for all religions. We believe in co-operating with each other and not pointing flaws in others beliefs until its proven scientifically and attested by scientific authority. And we believe that people’s belief be respected!

Then I replied:

The current best theory of the origin of the universe is called the big bang theory. It states that all the matter, energy, as well as time and space and time, came into being from nothing. It is backed by experimental data from red-shift measurements, cosmic microwave background radiation measurements, and light element abundance measurements, etc. The theory states that the universe began 14.7 billion years ago. Additionally, the universe will not recollapse because measurements of mass density from Maxima and Boomerang show that the universe will expand forever.

The big 3 monotheistic religions agree with the universe coming into being from nothing. Unfortunately, other religions think that the universe is eternal, such as Mormonism and Hinduism. On that basis, I reject Hinduism, which requires that the universe be eternal.

“I believe in all Gods no matter what religion because God is One.” That view (pantheism/polytheism) is called Hinduism. You are a Hindu. Christianity (monotheism) is mutually exclusive with Hinduism, because the teachings are in conflict, (as with the example of cosmology). As a Hindu, you therefore think that Christianity is false. On your definition, you don’t “tolerate” Christianity – you think it’s false. You don’t “respect” Christianity, because you want to force your view (Hinduism) and your view of conversion (don’t tell other people their religion is false) on Christians.

[...]Note: I am ok with you saying that I am wrong and that Christianity is false.

And then we sort of wound things down from there.

Anyway, the point of this exchange is most people in most religions think that the point of religion is to be happy, to have a sense of community and to get along with everyone by never talking about whether religious claims about the external world are true or false. But that view of the purpose of religion is not the Christian view. On the Christian view, the goal is to seek the truth. And part of Christian practice is to defend Christianity in public, and trying to convince other people that Christianity is true.

So, I think that Christians need to be a bit tougher, and recognize when someone who is not a Christian is trying to get them to accept that the purpose of religion is not to seek the truth. That’s their view. That’s not our view. It doesn’t make any sense for someone to say that I am evil for thinking they are wrong, when they are thinking that I am wrong. I think a better way forward is to allow other people to disagree with you, but to keep the disagreement focused on arguments and evidence.

And just because you disagree with someone else, it doesn’t mean you have to be mean to them. In my office, I am friends with Hindus, Muslims, atheists and Jews. We try to outdo one another in good deeds to make our religions look good! And when we debate which religion is true, we use arguments and evidence to attack and defend. What I’ve found is that you get a much stronger friendship when you are comfortable being yourself. I keep telling my co-workers – it’s OK to disagree.

Related posts

• the problem of religious pluralism and religious truth claims
• the problem of postmodern skepticism
• the fate of the unevangelized (what about those who never heard of Jesus)
• the hiddenness of God (why isn’t there more evidence for God’s existence?)
• are all religions basically the same?
• what about the blind men and the elephant?
• isn’t faith is opposed to reason and evidence? (a debate between a Christian and a postmodern relativist)
• what makes Christianity different from other religions?

Mentoring

• the importance of being able to argue both sides of a question
• why does talking about religion make people uncomfortable?
• how to talk to your co-workers about your faith

Apologetics advocacy

• does the Bible teach that faith is opposed to logic and evidence?
• the six enemies of apologetic engagement
• why men flee the feminized church
• why won’t Christians defend their faith in public?

Christians are hearing about the Manhattan Declaration with great excitement.  It is a tremendous document with tremendous support from some tremendous Christian figures.

The actual declaration (linked to above) is some 4,000 plus words long, and is available to read at the link above.  But here is the nutshell version:

Christians, when they have lived up to the highest ideals of their faith, have defended the weak and vulnerable and worked tirelessly to protect and strengthen vital institutions of civil society, beginning with the family.

We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are:

1. the sanctity of human life
2. the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife
3. the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

Inasmuch as these truths are foundational to human dignity and the well-being of society, they are inviolable and non-negotiable. Because they are increasingly under assault from powerful forces in our culture, we are compelled today to speak out forcefully in their defense, and to commit ourselves to honoring them fully no matter what pressures are brought upon us and our institutions to abandon or compromise them. We make this commitment not as partisans of any political group but as followers of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

I hope you stand with me – and with (at last count as of November 24, 2009) 106,738 other believers – and sign this declaration.

It reminds me of another time, and another declaration: the Barmen Declaration of 1934, which was a point-by-point denunciation of the fascist and racist ideological doctrines of Nazism and a positive expression of true Christian faith against a government and a culture that had become evil.

Adolf Hitler attempted to redefine – or “Nazify” – the Church and transform it into a component of his ideological agenda.  At one point in its history Germany had been the seat of the Protestant Reformation, and while Germany had since become the most secular humanist nation in Europe, there was still a vestige of Christianity remaining.  And Hitler wanted to harness that still-influential vestige toward his own ends.  The government thus passed resolutions to limit the influence or dictate the agenda of the church.  One demanded the purging of all pastors who rejected “the spirit of National Socialism.”  Another resolution categorically rejected the very foundations of Judeo-Christian transcendent morality even as it tried to conflate “being a German” with “being a Christian”:

“We expect that our nation’s church as a German People’s Church should free itself from all things not German in its services and confession, especially from the Old Testament with its Jewish system of quid pro quo morality.”

The German Confessing Movement was a reaction against the German government’s attempt to impose its agenda upon the Christian Church in Germany.  As Gene Edward Veith put it in his book Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview:

The Barmen Declaration thus sets itself against not only the German Christian aberration but against the whole tradition of modernist syncretism that made it possible.

[Article 1 affirmed Christ as the transcendent authority and source of values (as opposed to the German race, the Nazi revolution, or the person of Adolf Hitler)].  Article 2 asserts the sovereignty of Christ over all of life.  Article 3 asserts Christ’s lordship over the church and rejects “the false doctrine, as though the Church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political conventions.”  That is to say, the world does not set the agenda for the church.  Article 4 teaches that church offices are for mutual service and ministry, not for the exercise of raw power.  Article 5 acknowledges the divine appointment of the state, but rejects the pretensions of the state to “become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the Church’s vocation as well.”  Article 6 affirms the church’s commission to proclaim the free grace of God to everyone by means of the Word and the sacraments.  “We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans [pp. 60-61].

One article, entitled “Hitler’s Theologians: The Genesis of Genocide,” takes time to describe how various key German liberal theologians systematically tore apart the Bible and orthodox Christianity – and in so doing systematically undermined the ethics and morality of the German people in preparation for the hell to come.  The author begins with Friedrich Schleiermacher, called “the founder of Liberal Protestantism,” and profiles the “contributions” of Friedrich Nietzsche, Julius Wellhausen, and Adolf von Harnack.

Georg Lukacs has observed that tracing the path to Hitler involved the name of nearly every major German philosopher since Hegel: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthy, Simmel, Scheler, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Weber [page 5, The Destruction of Reason].  And Max Weinreich produced an exhaustive study detailing the complicity of German intellectuals with the Nazi regime entitled Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People.  Ideas have consequences, and it was the ideas of these liberal theologians, philosophers and scholars who provided the intellectual justification and conceptual framework for the Holocaust.  Thus Nazism did not merely emerge from a liberal theological system, but from a distinguished secular humanist intellectual tradition as well — a distinguished intellectual tradition that had repudiated all the moral and spiritual values inherent to the orthodox Christianity of the Confessing Church.

Josef Hromadka wrote that:

“The liberal theology in Germany and in her orbit utterly failed.  It was willing to compromise on the essential points of divine law and of “the law of nature”; to dispose of the Old Testament and to accept the law of the Nordic race instead; and to replace the “Jewish” law of the Old Testament by the autonomous law of each race and nation, respectively.  It had made all the necessary preparation for the “Germanization of Christianity” and for a racial Church.”

Veith subsequently says, “in deciding whether or not to sign the Barmen Declaration … the dividing line was clear.”  And he states, “The German Christian theologians predictably denounced the confessional movement as being ‘narrow’ and ‘fundamentalist.’”  He rightly described the opponents of the Barmen Declaration as being “modernists,” “existentialists,” and “dialectical” in their thinking.  The theologians who rejected Barmen were men like Emanuel Hirsch, who taught that the resurrection of Christ was only a spiritual vision, and that the idea of a physical resurrection distorted Christianity by focusing attention to the hereafter rather than to the culture and community of the present.

In short, it was Christians who thought like the evangelicals and fundamentalists of today who signed the Barmen Declaration and openly opposed Nazism, and it was “Christians” who thought like the mainline liberals of today who stood for the German Christian Nazification of Christianity and for the resulting Nazification of German ethics and morality.

Confessing Church pastors and priests who resisted this Nazification of the church paid dearly.  Thousands of clergymen were hauled away to the concentration camps.  According to the Niemoller archives, 2,579 clergymen were sent to Dachau alone – and 1,034 of them died in the camp.  And that only refers to the priests and pastors – not the untold thousands of devout Christians such as the Ten Booms who perished in the death camps for their opposition to Nazism.

An article entitled “Asking ‘Why Nazism?’” reviewing a book by Dr. Karla Poewe has this:

“One of the dangers of liberal Christianity, where all sorts of interpretations are permitted, is that it can easily slip into becoming a new religion,” Poewe says. “This is what happened. In a bid to rid Germany of what it saw as Jewish Christianity, several home-grown practices sprang up, including some that incorporated Icelandic and pre-Christian sagas, as well as ideas from German Idealism.”

Although initially these new religions were separate and disorganized entities, they eventually came under the umbrella of what was known as the German Faith Movement. Hitler saw in it a mechanism for transmitting and reinforcing the National Socialist worldview. “He shaped its followers into a disciplined political force but dismissed its leaders later when they were no longer needed,” Poewe says.

We’re clearly not to the point where Jews, or Christians, or anyone else are being gathered by the thousands and placed in death camps.  But we’re beginning to see a trend that is frightening, as government, with the assistance of liberal “Christian” churches and organizations, are trying to impose their will upon the church and its agenda.

We’ve had a “hate crimes” law imposed upon us that makes homosexuality a protected behavior.  And one evangelical expresses the Confessing Church position in a nutshell:

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said in a written statement the bill “is part of a radical social agenda that could ultimately silence Christians and use the force of government to marginalize anyone whose faith is at odds with homosexuality.”

In another recent case, a Christian mother who has homeschooled her child is being forced to put her ten-year old child in public school, not to improve her academic education, but to limit her exposure to Christianity and forcibly expose her to a government-approved “public” point of view:

According to the court order, the guardian concluded that Amanda’s “interests, and particularly her intellectual and emotional development, would be best served by exposure to a public school setting in which she would be challenged to solve problems presented by a group learning situation and…Amanda would be best served by exposure to different points of view at a time in her life when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief and behavior.”

This is a shocking case, in which the government is usurping both parental and religious freedoms.  And there are many similar usurpations today, in which our government is actively opposing Christian values.

Nearly fifty million babies have been killed in this country by a government-sanctioned “pro-choice” system.  Gene Edward Veith addresses the “pro-choice” movement and its philosophical underpinnings:

Existential ethics brackets the objective issues on abortion entirely.  At issue is not some transcendent moral law, nor medical evidence, nor a logical analysis.  The content of that choice makes no difference.  If the mother chooses to have the baby, her action is moral.  If she chooses not to have the baby, her action is still moral.  If she bears a child against her will or aborts a child against her will — then and only then is the action evil.  Those who believe that abortion should be legal do not consider themselves “pro-abortion.”  They are “pro-choice.”  The term is not only a rhetorical euphemism but a precise definition of existential ethics.

Existentialism is also reflected in those who are “pro-choice” but personally oppose abortion.  They do not believe in abortion for themselves, but refuse to impose their beliefs on others.  In this view, a belief has no validity outside the private, personal realm of each individual.  Moral and religious beliefs are no more than personal constructions, important in giving meaning to an individual’s life, but not universally valid.  Or, to use another commonly accepted axiom, “what’s true for you may not be true for me.”

Such a view of truth flies in the face of all classical metaphysics, which sees truth as objective, universal, and applicable to all” (page 96, Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview).

We can return to the historical analysis of Nazism presented by Karla Poewe, and what happened when such “anything goes” belief systems were allowed to rule.  [I am writing an article describing how existentialism became a primary component of Nazism, and will link to it here when I am finished writing it].

Before we leave the issue of abortion as a vile violation of Christian ethics and morality, let us consider one more voice:

“But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child – a direct killing of the innocent child – murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?” — Mother Teresa

Christians should fight for life.  And allowing a human being to live should not be a “choice,” but a duty.

In 2003 one David Allen Black wrote an article bearing the question, “Do We Need A New Barmen Declaration?“  No Christian with a knowledge of history can answer any other way than, “YES!“

The Barmen Declaration was written in 1934, but in many ways it was already too late: The Nazis were already in power.  Hitler was in his second year of power; and the ideas of the liberal theologians, the existentialist philosophers, and the amoral intellectuals were already firmly in place.

It is my fervent hope that we finally have that “New Barmen Declaration” to answer the evils of our own day.  If we already should have written one, then every day that passes is one more day wasted; if we are acting pro-actively, then let us thank God that we acting before it is too late.

From the UK Telegraph:

At last, Christians draw a line in the sand against their PC secularist persecutors

By Gerald Warner UK Last updated: November 24th, 2009

At long last, Christian leaders have faced up to their persecutors in the secularist, socialist, One-World, PC, UN-promoted axis of evil and said: No more. In the popular metaphor, they have drawn a line in the sand. For harassed, demoralised faithful in the pews it will come as the long-awaited call to resistance and an earnest that their leaders are no longer willing to lie down supinely to be run over by the anti-Christian juggernaut. This statement of principle and intent is called The Manhattan Declaration, published last Friday in Washington DC.

It is difficult to believe that so firm an assertion of Christian intransigence in the face of persecution will not have some beneficial effects even here. For this Declaration is no minor affirmation by a few committed activists: on the contrary, it is signed by the most important leaders of three mainstream Christian traditions – the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church and Evangelical Protestants. For an ecumenical document it is heroically devoid of fudge, euphemism and compromise.

The Manhattan Declaration states that “the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions”.

For Barack Obama, the PC lobby, the “hate crime” fascists and, by implication, their opposite numbers in Britain, the signatories have an uncompromising message: “We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.” That is plain speaking, in the face of anti-Christian aggression by governments. The signatories spelled it out even more unequivocally: “We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but we will under no circumstances render to Caesar what is God’s.”

In a world where a Swedish pastor has been jailed for preaching that sodomy is sinful, similar prosecutions have taken place in Canada, the European Court of Human Rights (sic) has tried to ban crucifixes in Italian classrooms, Brazil has passed totalitarian legislation imposing heavy prison sentences for criticism of homosexual lifestyles, Amnesty International is championing abortion, David Cameron has voted for the enforced closure of Catholic adoption agencies, and Gordon Brown’s government has just been defeated in its fourth attempt to abolish the Waddington Clause guaranteeing free speech – this robust defiance is more than timely.

The signatories are unambiguously expressing their willingness to go to prison rather than deny any part of their religious beliefs. Those signatories are heavyweight. On the Catholic side they include Justin Cardinal Rigali, Archbishop of Philadelphia; Adam Cardinal Maida, Archbishop Emeritus of Detroit; the Archbishops of Denver, New York, Washington DC, Newark, Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Kansas City, and Louisville; and other Bishops. The Orthodox include the Primate of the Orthodox Church in America and the Archpriest of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. There are also the Anglican Primates of America and Nigeria, as well as a host of senior Evangelical Protestants.

In terms of influence on votes and public opinion, this is a formidable coalition. It has served notice on the US government that further anti-Christian legislation will provoke cultural trench warfare and even civil disobedience. As regards the sudden stiffening of resistance among the usually spineless Catholic leadership, it is impossible not to detect the influence of Benedict XVI.

We need more declarations like this, on a global scale, and the requisite confrontational follow-up. This is Clint Eastwood, make-my-day Christianity – and not before time. From now on, any governments that are planning further persecution of Christians had better make sure they have a large pride of lions available for mastication duties. The worm has turned.

As a young Christian, I was inspired by the music, lyrics, and album cover of Keith Green’s album, No Compromise.  The cover says it all:

The Manhattan Declaration – like the Barmen Declaration – calls for Christians who are willing to stand up and be singled out even in the face of persecution or punishment.

I hope you are willing to be one of those Christians.

SFU Gallery, Burnaby Campus – October 31-December 12,2009

After a horribly boring tutorial on sound in early cinema (blech), I needed something to cheer me up and calm me down. Lucky for the me the Simon Fraser University Gallery was holding an exhibit that seemed to suit my mood perfectly.

The exhibit is entitled Take Your Time, curated by SFU Gallery Director, Bill Jeffries.

The exhibition showcased eight artists (Rebecca Brewer, Ron den Daas, Colleen Heslin, Damian Moppett, Heather Passmore, Gary Pearson, Ben Reeves, and Neil Wedman) with sixteen pieces of art. All of these artists are based in Vancouver with the exception of Gary Pearson (Kelowna).

The exhibit is a commentary on how the feeling “calm” is slowly dissipating as society lives life in “an accelerating pace of change”.

This exhibit showcases “the state of calmness in B.C. painting” which “is the local eye in the global storm of conspicuous freneticism”.

These paintings reflect the way calmness, leisure, and recreation are identified by each of these artists. Today’s leisure is understood as rapid consumption, fast and quick get-aways, and fitting in as much activity as possible until we have to return back to our lives of chaos and schedule.

This exhibit acknowledges that “‘taking your time’ might be something all of us should consider”; a revolution of slowness.

I thought this exhibition was the perfect addition to my day. While sitting in class silently stressing over the assignments that needed to get done for the day (15 page paper) and trying to allocate my time effectively in order to complete this assignment, visiting the gallery provided me with a feeling of calmness. Through contemplating how these artists think of “taking your time”, and through taking my own time to walk through the exhibition I, myself, was able to slow down in a point in my day when I felt overwhelmed by time and the fast pace at which it is meant to move.

In my own way I was taking part in this revolution of slowness, and essentially resisting the “so-called information age” which has “new expectations based on accelerated communication and ‘access’”.

As a communication student, I am able to understand this exhibit in its postmodernity, through going back to traditional techniques and ideas as opposed to the more contemporary art which finds itself in a more modern ideology.

This time in November is a crazy time for everyone. With the advent of the Olympics, going to work, finishing up school for the fall semester and worrying about the holidays. If you feel a need to slow down and find yourself at SFU (somehow I doubt you just miraculously FIND yourself at SFU), then I suggest this exhibit. My favourite painting would have to be Ron den Daas’ painting of a lifeguard at the beach. Not only is the technique exquisite, but the content of the work is pretty spectacular too. The scene seems to take place at Second Beach near English Bay, with North Vancouver in the background and the sea wall visible to the right. It’s a sunny beautiful scene and it just makes me think of a beach day in late June, with not a care in the world except for how to get rid of those nasty tanlines and where to go for a cold beer after a day in the sand.

I also really enjoyed Colleen Heslin’s Reclining Reader. It is simplistic and relaxing. Looking at that work makes me wish I were in my own bed reading a novel with a book cover that matches the colour of my walls.

I’ll try to grab some more pictures in the future. Great exhibit, highly recommended.

Simon Fraser University Gallery (Take Your Time)

(My apologies for the shoddy photography – camera phone… ohhh technlology)

*quotes taken from documents available in the gallery

Ceea ce contează şi-mi pasă

este că ţigara rămâne aprinsă

şi-n ploaie.

Sunt fericit, văd luna ca o troacă spartă

şi câinii vagabonzi cum latră…

şomez cu vântul şi cu ploaia

iar de ceva zile m-a lăsat şi… aia..

sunt atât de fericit

încât o să mă sinucid;

greierii borfaşi latră la mine în cor,

cred c-o să mă spânzur cu lătratul lor.

Alan Skokal played a nasty trick on academics in 1995.  He purposely created a lunatic article for publication to point out the misuse of science by Kristeva, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and others who implied that science was a social construct.  Not only did the hoax reveal the questionable standards of academic journals, but Skokal’s article revealled a deeply anti-science, anti-rational viewpoint within academia.  This is not a theory per se, but it serves as an interesting cautionary tale.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/index.html

http://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~bohmmech/BohmHome/sokalhoax.html

Câinii put năpârlesc şi put vreau să spun câinii put năpârlesc şi sunt frumoşi latră la lună luna se sperie şi se ascunde după o pasăre de noapte… după ce pasărea trece ai spune că luna este un ou făcut de pasărea asta de noapte aşa ai spune dar… câinii latră put năpârlesc acum luna e schiloadă şi roşie ca două buze de femeie… pe fundal– greieri dezacordaţi; s-ar spune că sunt trist aşa s-ar spune dar nu sunt nu sunt nici măcar plictisit nici măcar nervos nu sunt sunt ceea ce ai numi un om perfect normal nici măcar nu filozofez ca-n alte dăţi când îmi pun întrebarea „oare” nu… sunt incredibil de liniştit incredibil de liniştit de două ori dar câinii latră năpârlesc părul lor ia forma lucrurilor ia forma oraşului eu inspir respir adânc tuşesc tuşesc păr de câine dar asta nu mă deranjează nu mă irită chiar schiţez un zâmbet îl schiţez aşa cu creionul apoi cu gura cu ochii… ies pe străzi luna îmi cade pe umărul stâng ca un al doilea cap… câinii mă latră latru şi eu şi put cu ei

This poster from Despair.com accurately communicates the general worthlessness of 99% of the blogosphere.  And yet, every once in a while in this sea of insignificance you come across an island with a buried treasure.

Thanks to Justin Taylor’s link, I found one today.  Kevin DeYoung’s post about the “New Gospel” (written in response to this letter to unbelievers by Shane Claiborne) is the most significant blog post I have read in a long time, perhaps ever.  Do not miss it.

Every generation faces challenges to the true gospel.  Every alternative gospel that arises contains some elements of truth and therefore possesses some measure of plausibility.  In our day the most popular alternative gospel is the one that accomodates itself to the prevailing climate of postmodern uncertainty.  This “new gospel” is not entirely wrong.  In fact, it gets many things right, even offering a much-needed corrective to older emphases and formulations.  And therein lies its chief danger: it represents an ever-so-subtle denial of truths that belong to the very essence of the true gospel of Jesus Christ. 

Read Shane Claiborne’s letter.  And then read Kevin DeYoung’s post.  The latter will likely be the most significant thing you will read today.

Welcome to Obama’s America, where there are only three truly evil acts: 1) being a conservative; 2) working for Fox News; 3) being a patriot who tries to keep America safe from its enemies.

These SEALs are at least guilty of number 3, and are most likely also guilty of 1 as well.  That’s more than enough for Obama.

And of course Fox reported on the story.  But we already know they’re guilty of Crimes Against Obama.

Navy SEALs Face Assault Charges For Capturing Most-Wanted Terrorist

Tuesday, November 24, 2009
By Rowan Scarborough

Navy SEALs have secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq — the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004. And three of the SEALs who captured him are now facing criminal charges, sources told FoxNews.com.

The three, all members of the Navy’s elite commando unit, have refused non-judicial punishment — called an admiral’s mast — and have requested a trial by court-martial.

Ahmed Hashim Abed, whom the military code-named “Objective Amber,” told investigators he was punched by his captors — and he had the bloody lip to prove it.

Now, instead of being lauded for bringing to justice a high-value target, three of the SEAL commandos, all enlisted, face assault charges and have retained lawyers.

Matthew McCabe, a Special Operations Petty Officer Second Class (SO-2), is facing three charges: dereliction of performance of duty for willfully failing to safeguard a detainee, making a false official statement, and assault.

Petty Officer Jonathan Keefe, SO-2, is facing charges of dereliction of performance of duty and making a false official statement.

Petty Officer Julio Huertas, SO-1, faces those same charges and an additional charge of impediment of an investigation.

The three SEALs will be arraigned separately on Dec. 7. Another three SEALs — two officers and an enlisted sailor — have been identified by investigators as witnesses but have not been charged.

FoxNews.com obtained the official handwritten statement from one of the three witnesses given on Sept. 3, hours after Abed was captured and still being held at the SEAL base at Camp Baharia. He was later taken to a cell in the U.S.-operated Green Zone in Baghdad.

The SEAL told investigators he had showered after the mission, gone to the kitchen and then decided to look in on the detainee.

“I gave the detainee a glance over and then left,” the SEAL wrote. “I did not notice anything wrong with the detainee and he appeared in good health.”

Lt. Col. Holly Silkman, spokeswoman for the special operations component of U.S. Central Command, confirmed Tuesday to FoxNews.com that three SEALs have been charged in connection with the capture of a detainee. She said their court martial is scheduled for January.

United States Central Command declined to discuss the detainee, but a legal source told FoxNews.com that the detainee was turned over to Iraqi authorities, to whom he made the abuse complaints. He was then returned to American custody. The SEAL leader reported the charge up the chain of command, and an investigation ensued.

The source said intelligence briefings provided to the SEALs stated that “Objective Amber” planned the 2004 Fallujah ambush, and “they had been tracking this guy for some time.”

The Fallujah atrocity came to symbolize the brutality of the enemy in Iraq and the degree to which a homegrown insurgency was extending its grip over Iraq.

The four Blackwater agents were transporting supplies for a catering company when they were ambushed and killed by gunfire and grenades. Insurgents burned the bodies and dragged them through the city. They hanged two of the bodies on a bridge over the Euphrates River for the world press to photograph.

Intelligence sources identified Abed as the ringleader, but he had evaded capture until September.

The military is sensitive to charges of detainee abuse highlighted in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The Navy charged four SEALs with abuse in 2004 in connection with detainee treatment.

I’d first like to thank these SEALs for their service; second, I’d like to thank them for capturing Ahmed Hashim Abed; third, I would like to thank them for giving this slimebag a fat lip.

Let’s assess the record of this administration: repeatedly attempting to contact al-Qaeda — merits a promotion; giving a terrorist murderer a fat lip — merits a court martial.

This is what happens under the Obama worldview that requires providing Miranda rights to terrorists and according them all the rights and privileges of American citizens.

It is a cancer that resulted in the Obama administration declassifying vital intelligence secrets which kept this country safe in order to use it as a political weapon

It is a cancer that resulted in the Obama administration literally attempting to criminalize the role of our intelligence professionals at the CIA for their role in desperately striving to keep this country safe.  Now, surprise, surprise, the morale at the CIA is at a 30-year low (dating back to the last time a Democrat tried to destroy the Agency).

It is a cancer that resulted in a Muslim captain who’d had regular email contact with al-Qaeda as well as “soldier of Allah” on his business card getting promoted to major before murdering 14 human beings and wounding more than 30 more at a military base – as he screamed ‘Allahu akbar!’ – while our own SEALs get disciplined for capturing such murderous bags of slime.

It is a cancer that resulted in five confessed terrorists going from requesting the death sentence at a military tribunal to getting an opportunity to plead not guilty and use the civilian trial Obama gave them as a platform for their jihadist worldview while putting America (and George Bush) on trial.

It is a cancer that has resulted in a president dithering for nearly three full months while ignoring his own handpicked general’s request for more troops in Afghanistan.  While nearly twice as many American soldiers have died (so far!) than died under George Bush.

Today Obama came out and – while continuing to criticize Bush for not having the right “strategy” – said he intends to “finish the job” without bothering to have any kind of explanation as to what the “job” even is.   Which is to say, some fat load of good his three months of “policy reviews” has done.  Meanwhile, the morale of our troops is sinking, while the morale of the Taliban and the number of the American body count is rising.

And we have Barack Hussein to thank for inflicting us with this cancer.  The sooner he is gone, the sooner our healing from cancer can begin.

Note to fools: there is no CSI Kandahar, and there is no CSI Baghdad.  We cannot possibly ask our soldiers to gather evidence and turn battlefields into crime scenes.  We are worse than idiots for demanding that our warriors on foreign battlefields act like domestic police officers.  It is a blatant category fallacy.

Prayer for Barack Obama:

Psalm 109:8 – “Let his days be few, and let another take his office.”

I actually had a different post in my queue, but this conversation got so interesting that I thought that I would throw my two cents in and bring it front and center before continuing with my own modest critique of science and introducing the phenomenology of Charles Sanders Peirce as planned.

Tom, I haven’t as yet read Feyerabend, but I certainly will now, and when I do I will print my thoughts here. I have been re-reading Thomas Kuhn on the nature of scientific revolution, a little Wilfred Sellers and his critique of science and some contemporary philosophers namely Joseph Margolis and Robert Brandom. These have all given me a great deal to think about in terms of placing science in context of the progression of human thought.

At Brian’s suggestion I have also read a couple of Michael Shermer’s books and he is, of course, a scientific apologist, ever defending logic and rationality against the dogma of religion and belief. I don’t think he is a joke, in fact he seems like a thoughtful critic of certain entrenched ideas (and he often presents himself as more open-minded than he is sometimes represented by Brain.) In some ways, however, he strikes me as fighting a battle that has already been won – at least among the people I tend to associate with in Integral/Evolutionary circles. Few people in that group are struggling with belief in unfounded dogmatic ways, they either have given up dogma for something new (which could always be a new dogma) or they have found reasons to feel comfortable holding on to more traditional religious beliefs as they move into the future. I think Michael Shermer is largely talking to a different audience.

In one recent book Shermer dismantles the “Intelligent Design” evolutionary position. I myself ascribe to a variation on this idea – that there is some form of teleology in the universe – but the way I think of teleology is far from the intelligent designer personified that is often being promoted by many in the Intelligent Design movement. Pulling apart Intelligent Design as a cardboard veneer stapled over Christian Creationism isn’t terribly hard, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. There is lots of sloppy thinking and bad science mixed in with the great stuff in the intelligent design debate and Shermer has many years of good work ahead clearing it up. Yet again, I don’t think that I or we are really his audience; we are already on his side in that battle.

The battle that I am currently following is the battle in the second half of the 20^th century that Tom is referring to in which the shortcomings of science have been placed under a microscope by some brilliant and insightful thinkers. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Science has no method, although Feyerabend may change my mind. I still see science as the triumph of the Western World that has given us so much we enjoy in modern life. I am not ready to tell all the scientists to pack it up and go home because they are not really following a method. I want them to keep going with their method and discover new cures to diseases, better methods of communication and travel, and generally continue to improve the standard of living for people on this planet.

On the other hand and in accordance with many of sciences critics, I don’t want them dictating what is real and what is unreal. When science brought logical positivism, rationality and empiricism to the for front of the Western Mind it rightfully claimed that it had a better handle on truth than did the traditional religion that was its main competitor. At the same time the traditional religions had a right to tell science not to move so fast and throw out the baby with the bathwater. After all it wasn’t science that pulled Western Europe through the Dark Ages. It was, for all it faults, Christianity that stopped warlords from killing each other and everyone else in the process by getting them to pledge allegiance to a common king in the person of Jesus and then sending them off to fight a common enemy in the crusades. As horrendous as the crusades were – and they were for sure – they also bought Western Europe enough peace to rebuild the population that had been decimated by the plagues and then move beyond the system of feudalism to the nation state.

Similarly as the limits of science are being explored we also want to keep the discussion in a historical context. Science is a perspective on reality that mistakes itself for the whole of reality – hmmmm, the same could be said about religion. The kind of objective handle on truth that science claims is not objective. Science often fails to see its assumptions about reality as assumptions and mistakes them for “givens” (Wilfred Sellers). Science also fails to see itself in the historical context in which it was developed (Kuhn) and therefore neglects the cultural forces that have helped shape its point of view.

So the modernism of science has been overrun in some quadrants – and not those in which Michael Shermer is currently fighting the good fight of modernism  – by post-modernism. Post-modernism sees right through the problems of science. It sees how scientists fail to recognize that their point of view is not merely a strictly objective assessment of observed facts. Science is a perspective that has been shaped by some complex of conclusions based on observed facts, personal preferences and biases of the scientists involved, and cultural influences that are often mistaken for reality. And so science has been on the run – again in certain quadrants – for decades trying to prove itself and finding its truth claims falling short of its promise in many ways.*

In turn post-modernism is and will find that its own foundation – that all knowledge is a matter of perspective and cultural influence – is also a perspective. Once again we will have mistaken the most recently discovered part of the picture for the whole of reality and we will get up, dust off and continue with our rush toward an ever more integrated understanding of knowledge, ourselves and our relationship to the world. 

*(An interesting example of science on the run is the defense of Behaviorism that Carl is often an eloquent champion of in this blog. I often find myself agreeing with everything Carl says about the powerful perspective of seeing human activity as pure behavior, and yet disagreeing with the spoken and unspoken implications that go along with it. I have read some things that Carl has generously given to me and I can’t (as yet) agree with the hard determinism and denial of internal being that seems to come along with that view. I have also read other contemporary thinkers on the matter and from what I have found the strict interpretations of Behaviorism are generally disregarded as already haven been proven wrong (although I haven’t found that proof in a satisfactory form yet.) Often I think what Carl and some of his circle like Robert Epstein are acctually doing are advancing Skinner’s original work to keep Behaviorism in step with more recent advancements in science, but this is a digression from my original point although an avenue of inquiry that I want to keep on the table.)

I was walking down the old dirt paths and slowly navigating my way through the landmine of pinecones and taking in each snapshot of scenery that dripped with raw beauty. I was taken in by all the things around me. The sweet harmonious melodies of the birds singing in choired unison and the romantic whispered chirpings of the cicadas’ calling me deeper into the forest, deeper into the night. It is this call that leads me to wonder if there is more to life than a book? Is all that life is, summed up in the pages of 66 authors?

I wouldn’t be able to share with you my experience in a captivating forest if all I did was read about the forest. I might be able to give you glimpses and a sort of scientific approach to what it might feel like if I were in a forest, but the experience is vastly different than the science. One is factual, the other is life-altering. This isn’t to say that facts don’t have the ability to change our lives, but studies have shown that one out of one person are always changed by their experiences, whether good or bad. I could have explained to you a map of the forest, but it wouldn’t have given you the contours, colors and outlines that you can only experience in person.

You can sit down and read a really good book. You might even feel like you are one of the characters drifting through each of the pages, but there is nothing like living your own story. If we replace the word living with writing, then maybe what we might be able to say is that all of us are still writing not just our story, but God’s story as well. We get to write with Him. In The Bible: The Biography by Karen Armstrong, she asserts that before the Old Testament was canonized that the Jews had this belief that they were responsible to reinterpret scripture as much as possible so that it was relevant and spoke to the current structures of society. In fact, one place, she even says that they had thrown out certain parts of scripture because it wasn’t relevant to the time. For most, this is a different view to what we have been taught(but just because it’s different doesn’t mean its not true). And if it is true, then what are the ripples in the pond? I think for those who believe the Bible holds all the answers then it seems like an attack rather than an enquiry, because it seems a bit reductionistic to try and make the Bible anything other than the Word of God. Yet, this is isn’t the hope of postmoderns or those with questions. It is to experience God as those in scripture did. So rather than see the bible as trail map to be studied, it is more like an invitation between friends to come and walk with God and discover the raw unedited beauty of the journey. To come and discover God. To “taste and see that he is good”. Both words for taste and see in the Hebrew when translated mean “to experience”. God is inviting us all not to simply read the pages, but live the pages. Write the pages. And Be the pages.

Postmodernism is running through the halls of our churches and fortune 500 companies and classrooms, but is postmodernism the enemy? Can’t postmodernism be a good thing too? It can help us revisit things and begin asking hard questions that maybe aren’t that comfortable but might be necessary to pursue together to find the answers to. Postmodernism is simply asking the question “Is there more to life than this? Is there more to the Bible than this? Is there more to truth than this?” The ancient Jewish followers of YHWH believed it was imperative to ask questions. To be Jew meant you had questions. To be a person who lived and breathed meant you were a person who was driven to seek answers to those questions, no matter how long the journey took. No matter where those questions took you, it was your responsibility as a Jew to make sure you found the answer.

NB: This craziness is for my Visual Culture seminar, and I would really appreciate it if y’all would leave critical comments: dis/like Twilight (film and/or novel, the cultural phenomenon), what ya think of the piece, what ya think of the theoretical response(s), should I wear an orange Jayne-hat everywhere I go. Ya know, the general. I even made a poll so that it would be easier! (ETA: Evidently, LJ won’t let you take the poll unless you’re a member, so I’ve attached the poll questions at the end of this note. Have I told y’all how much I love you?)  Also, the images are linked so that you can take a closer look at them if you so please (and I hope you do please!).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Mina Murray’s Response to deconstruction: Twilight

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Artist’s Statement:

deconstruction: Twilight is a postmodern, poststructuralist critique of Twilight and, since the novel cannot be separated from the associated media that has grown up around it, its cultural phenomenon, utilizing the fragmented and decontextualized text of the novel to create a sculpture that references not only the text but the semiotic signs and signifiers of cultural, consumptive practices such as tweenster bedroom culture and media obsession. Due to the structure of the sculpture and the continued readability of the text on the sculpture, the text refuses easy (dis)closure and insists that it be read since, in true Derridaian fashion, the most effective way to refute a text is with the text; despite this refutation, the readability of the text does not forcibly require viewers to agree with the work but, rather, to take in the interpretation and decide for themselves.. Additionally, the art tradition of the male gaze, which acts as an artistic ground for the sculpture as well as a cultural ground, is redirected due to the slippage between the sculpture’s gaze and the viewers’ object/abjectification of the masculinized, sexualized, and fetishized text.

Poll Questions Since Livejournal is Mean!:

What do you think of the vampire genre?

• J’adore!
• BLECH!
• ‘Tis okay.
• Not my cuppa tea.
• Meh.

What vampire movies (or books) have you seen (or read)?

Are you familiar with Twilight?

• *stabs eyes out*
• *draws hearts and Team Edward/Team Jacob diagrams–with hearts*
• Yes. *eyes warily*
• Yes! \o/
• Um, isn’t that that thing that happens every evening when the sun goes down?

Cultural phenomenon surrounding Twilight

• OMG! The tweensters need to stop with the Twilight obsession!
• I’m totally for it! I <3 Twilight
• What is this Twilight of which you speak?
• I could really care less as long as the tweensters don’t get glitter on me.

If you would be so kind, please explain your answer.

Twilight the novel

• Like
• Dislike
• Hate it with the passion of a thousand suns
• Luuuuuuurve it with all my little heart
• Meh

Please explain your answer

Twilight the motion picture

• Like
• Dislike
• Hate it with the passion of a thousand suns
• Luuuuuuurve it with all my little heart
• Meh

Please explain your answer.How do you feel deconstruction: Twilight is responding to the culture phenomenon of the Twilight novel and motion picture? Again, if the answer doesn’t fit, please continue it in the comments.

Why do you think that vampires have re-emerged into contemporary visual culture? If there isn’t enough room here, please continue in the comments.

Ce monotonă ar fi viaţa

dacă nu s-ar auzi

tocurile femeilor la metrou,

am dormi pe noi

cu orbul pleoapei fugit de-acasă

şi rasăritul ar fi cu ochii trişti

ca de viţel

dacă nu s-ar auzi

tocurile femeilor la metrou…