I think this statement from Steve Brizel wins the prize:
'Many who leave Torah observance have unresolved issues that prevent them from living with doubts.'
'Unresolved issues that prevent them from living with doubts? What the heck is that supposed to mean?!
Anyway, I've actually become more laid back about fundamentalists. Why? Well, I know people who are extremely well educated, who grew up Conservative, and decided to become Orthodox. What are you going to say to such a person? You're delusional? You're brainwashed? Your'e indoctrinated? You're biased? None of these arguments work against a highly intelligent and highly educated person who grew up Conservative or Secular and then decided on the basis of intellectual reasons alone to become frum. And, these people know all about the Documentary Hypothesis too.
And, to argue that they only became frum because of emotional reasons would be hypocritical, since we reject that argument about people who go OTD.
So what are you going to say? People make all sorts of decisions in their lives for all sorts of reasons. People are complex and life is too. I don't think you can narrow the cause behind religious decisions down to a few simple reasons.
HALOSCAN COMMENTS
Friday, December 7, 2007
R Micha Berger on going Off the Derech
RMB writes:
"The difference between willing to live with a question, looking for an answer, and deciding the question disproves the whole, is almost always emotional state. "
There's definitely a lot of truth to that. In general, when something is proven false, wrong or whatever, normal people accept the proof. But when it's their own religion that is disproven, the stakes are obviously way too high for most people to acknowledge it. They have way too much emotional attachment to their religion, they have family and communal commitments, they have a lifetime of religious, spiritual, cultural, intellectual and financial investment. Can you imagine not being in an emotional state in such a situation?!
So of course, rather than just go with the evidence, they will prefer to 'live with the question'. Conversely, the people who go with the proof and decide to leave their religion are generally less emotional and more detached, and more able to objectively decide upon the truth, and make their decisions accordingly.
'Which group is 'better', you're thinking?(or at least I'm thinking) Yeah, I guess that's a dumb question, since 'better' is subjective.
HALOSCAN COMMENTS
"The difference between willing to live with a question, looking for an answer, and deciding the question disproves the whole, is almost always emotional state. "
There's definitely a lot of truth to that. In general, when something is proven false, wrong or whatever, normal people accept the proof. But when it's their own religion that is disproven, the stakes are obviously way too high for most people to acknowledge it. They have way too much emotional attachment to their religion, they have family and communal commitments, they have a lifetime of religious, spiritual, cultural, intellectual and financial investment. Can you imagine not being in an emotional state in such a situation?!
So of course, rather than just go with the evidence, they will prefer to 'live with the question'. Conversely, the people who go with the proof and decide to leave their religion are generally less emotional and more detached, and more able to objectively decide upon the truth, and make their decisions accordingly.
'Which group is 'better', you're thinking?(or at least I'm thinking) Yeah, I guess that's a dumb question, since 'better' is subjective.
HALOSCAN COMMENTS
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
A Rabbi Experiments with Scientific Studies: Guest post by Rabbi Uren Reich
[File Under: "What if...?!']
'All systems have basic premises which cannot be proven, Science too. Mine are the ikkarim'
For some years I've been troubled by an apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigor in certain precincts of the American Chareidi community. But I'm a mere Rabbi: if I find myself unable to make head or tail of Cosmology and Gosse Theory, perhaps that just reflects my own inadequacy.
So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American convention of Chareidi Rabbis -- whose rabbinical collective includes such luminaries as Rabbi Mattisyahu Solomon and Rabbi Reuven Feinstein -- allow me to give a speech liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded frum and (b) it flattered the Rabbis' ideological preconceptions?
The answer, unfortunately, is yes. Interested readers can find my speech, `The Gemara is metziyus: It's also emes veyatziv.' in the Spring/Summer 1995 Agudah Convention.
What's going on here? Could the Rabbis really not have realized that my speech was written as a parody?
In the first paragraph I deride the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Chareidi intellectual outlook'':
…If the Gemara tells us a metziyus, it’s emes veyatziv. There’s nothing to think about. Anything we see with our eyes is less of a reality than something we see in the Gemara. That’s the emunah that a yid has to have.
Is it now dogma in Chareidi Studies that there exists no possibility of Chazal being wrong? Or that there exists an external world but science obtains no knowledge of it?
In the second paragraph I declare, without the slightest evidence or argument, that Chazal don't have to be reconciled with Science:
Unfortunately, I don’t know where or why this is, but recently there’s been a spate of all kinds of publications – I don’t know where they’ve come from – questioning things that have been mekubel midor dor, that every child learns, together with his mother’s milk, al titosh Toras imecha, we learn that every word of Torah is emes, every word of Chazal hakedoshim is emes. We’re coming to hear new kinds of concepts, that we have to figure out a way to make Torah compatible with modern day science – it’s an emunah mezuyefes! There’s a tremendous emunah that these people have for scientists in the outside world – everything they say is kodesh kadoshim! And then we have to figure out according to what they say, how to fit in the Gemara with this newfangled discoveries that the scientists have taught us?!
Throughout the speech, I employ religious and philosophical concepts in ways that few Theologians or Philosophers could possibly take seriously.
These same scientists who tell you with such clarity what happened sixty-five million years ago – ask them what the weather will be like in New York in two weeks’ time! “Possibly, probably, it could be, maybe” – ain itam hadavar, they don’t know. They know everything that happened 65 million years ago, but from their madda, and their wissenschaft, we have to be mispoel?!
In sum, I intentionally wrote the speech so that any competent Theologian or Philosopher would realize that it is a spoof. Evidently the Rabbis of the Agudah felt comfortable listening to a speech on Science and Torah without bothering to consult anyone knowledgeable in the subject.
[XGH: OK, that's about enough of that! You can read the rest of Sokal's article here. And needless to say, Rav Uren Reich wasn't joking].
HALOSCAN COMMENTS
'All systems have basic premises which cannot be proven, Science too. Mine are the ikkarim'
For some years I've been troubled by an apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigor in certain precincts of the American Chareidi community. But I'm a mere Rabbi: if I find myself unable to make head or tail of Cosmology and Gosse Theory, perhaps that just reflects my own inadequacy.
So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American convention of Chareidi Rabbis -- whose rabbinical collective includes such luminaries as Rabbi Mattisyahu Solomon and Rabbi Reuven Feinstein -- allow me to give a speech liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded frum and (b) it flattered the Rabbis' ideological preconceptions?
The answer, unfortunately, is yes. Interested readers can find my speech, `The Gemara is metziyus: It's also emes veyatziv.' in the Spring/Summer 1995 Agudah Convention.
What's going on here? Could the Rabbis really not have realized that my speech was written as a parody?
In the first paragraph I deride the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Chareidi intellectual outlook'':
…If the Gemara tells us a metziyus, it’s emes veyatziv. There’s nothing to think about. Anything we see with our eyes is less of a reality than something we see in the Gemara. That’s the emunah that a yid has to have.
Is it now dogma in Chareidi Studies that there exists no possibility of Chazal being wrong? Or that there exists an external world but science obtains no knowledge of it?
In the second paragraph I declare, without the slightest evidence or argument, that Chazal don't have to be reconciled with Science:
Unfortunately, I don’t know where or why this is, but recently there’s been a spate of all kinds of publications – I don’t know where they’ve come from – questioning things that have been mekubel midor dor, that every child learns, together with his mother’s milk, al titosh Toras imecha, we learn that every word of Torah is emes, every word of Chazal hakedoshim is emes. We’re coming to hear new kinds of concepts, that we have to figure out a way to make Torah compatible with modern day science – it’s an emunah mezuyefes! There’s a tremendous emunah that these people have for scientists in the outside world – everything they say is kodesh kadoshim! And then we have to figure out according to what they say, how to fit in the Gemara with this newfangled discoveries that the scientists have taught us?!
Throughout the speech, I employ religious and philosophical concepts in ways that few Theologians or Philosophers could possibly take seriously.
These same scientists who tell you with such clarity what happened sixty-five million years ago – ask them what the weather will be like in New York in two weeks’ time! “Possibly, probably, it could be, maybe” – ain itam hadavar, they don’t know. They know everything that happened 65 million years ago, but from their madda, and their wissenschaft, we have to be mispoel?!
In sum, I intentionally wrote the speech so that any competent Theologian or Philosopher would realize that it is a spoof. Evidently the Rabbis of the Agudah felt comfortable listening to a speech on Science and Torah without bothering to consult anyone knowledgeable in the subject.
[XGH: OK, that's about enough of that! You can read the rest of Sokal's article here. And needless to say, Rav Uren Reich wasn't joking].
HALOSCAN COMMENTS
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
BEWARE: The Torah State Will Come
[From Areivim, in reference to this article about a Chareidi take over of Bet Shemesh]
Who says a taliban-type approach is wrong? How many times in the torah does it talk about lo tachanem and uviarta harah mikirbecha? Maybe each non-haredi town/village etc NEEDS to be converted over time, and like in the block-busting eras of the 60s-70s US, maybe a tipping point is reached, and then [the neighborhood] falls to the victor (and the haredi commmuity benefits--since prices then are lower). The non-haredim can try to cluster into other areas, but [they] will always lose in the end due to smaller families, massive post-zionist yerida etc. It could be that it is actually a VERY good thing that is happening in these areas.
And when the State reaches 40-50% haredi, others would be even more inclined to leave - thus the Torah state will come.....
[and thus all the Chareidi sub groups will spend all day fighting each other, and the country will be a disaster. Also the country will get destroyed by the Arabs cos no one will be left to serve in the Army. Great plan! Not.]
HALOSCAN COMMENTS
Who says a taliban-type approach is wrong? How many times in the torah does it talk about lo tachanem and uviarta harah mikirbecha? Maybe each non-haredi town/village etc NEEDS to be converted over time, and like in the block-busting eras of the 60s-70s US, maybe a tipping point is reached, and then [the neighborhood] falls to the victor (and the haredi commmuity benefits--since prices then are lower). The non-haredim can try to cluster into other areas, but [they] will always lose in the end due to smaller families, massive post-zionist yerida etc. It could be that it is actually a VERY good thing that is happening in these areas.
And when the State reaches 40-50% haredi, others would be even more inclined to leave - thus the Torah state will come.....
[and thus all the Chareidi sub groups will spend all day fighting each other, and the country will be a disaster. Also the country will get destroyed by the Arabs cos no one will be left to serve in the Army. Great plan! Not.]
HALOSCAN COMMENTS
The True Story of Channukah
Seems like Chanukah is everyone’s favorite holiday, from Reform Jews to Chassidim. How can this be? Simple, each group reads into the story whatever version suits them best.
Chassidim/Chareidim: Chanukah represents the victory of the Torah True Maccabees over the Modern Orthodox Misyavnim.
Modern Orthodox Jews: Chanukah represents the victory of the nice, normal Macabees over the Reform Hellenizers.
Reform Jews: Chanukah represents victory for the nice Jews over the Nazi like Greeks.
My Kids: Chanukah represents presents! Lots of presents.
Me: Mmmm, sufganiyot.
HALOSCAN COMMENTS
Chassidim/Chareidim: Chanukah represents the victory of the Torah True Maccabees over the Modern Orthodox Misyavnim.
Modern Orthodox Jews: Chanukah represents the victory of the nice, normal Macabees over the Reform Hellenizers.
Reform Jews: Chanukah represents victory for the nice Jews over the Nazi like Greeks.
My Kids: Chanukah represents presents! Lots of presents.
Me: Mmmm, sufganiyot.
HALOSCAN COMMENTS
Hitchens Bashes Hannukah
[Yes, it's that time of year again. Time that is for the Skeptics to point out that Chanukah (a) didn't happen like Chazal said it did, and (b) Was a victory for religious coercion and intolerance. This year, Christopher Hitchens joins in the fun.]
Bah, Hanukkah
The holiday celebrates the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness
Christopher Hitchens
High on the list of idiotic commonplace expressions is the old maxim that "it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness." How do such fatuous pieces of folk wisdom ever get started on their careers of glib quotation? Of course it would be preferable to light a candle than to complain about the darkness. You would only be bitching about the darkness if you didn't have a candle to begin with. Talk about a false antithesis. But at this time of year, any holy foolishness is permitted. And so we have a semiofficial celebration of Hanukkah, complete with menorah, to celebrate not the ignition of a light but the imposition of theocratic darkness.
Jewish orthodoxy possesses the interesting feature of naming and combating the idea of the apikoros or "Epicurean"—the intellectual renegade who prefers Athens to Jerusalem and the schools of philosophy to the grim old routines of the Torah. About a century and a half before the alleged birth of the supposed Jesus of Nazareth (another event that receives semiofficial recognition at this time of the year), the Greek or Epicurean style had begun to gain immense ground among the Jews of Syria and Palestine. The Seleucid Empire, an inheritance of Alexander the Great—Alexander still being a popular name among Jews—had weaned many people away from the sacrifices, the circumcisions, the belief in a special relationship with God, and the other reactionary manifestations of an ancient and cruel faith. I quote Rabbi Michael Lerner, an allegedly liberal spokesman for Judaism who nonetheless knows what he hates:
Along with Greek science and military prowess came a whole culture that celebrated beauty both in art and in the human body, presented the world with the triumph of rational thought in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and rejoiced in the complexities of life presented in the theater of Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes.
But away with all that, says Lerner. Let us instead celebrate the Maccabean peasants who wanted to destroy Hellenism and restore what he actually calls "oldtime religion." His excuse for preferring fundamentalist thuggery to secularism and philosophy is that Hellenism was "imperialistic," but the Hasmonean regime that resulted from the Maccabean revolt soon became exorbitantly corrupt, vicious, and divided, and encouraged the Roman annexation of Judea. Had it not been for this no-less imperial event, we would never have had to hear of Jesus of Nazareth or his sect—which was a plagiarism from fundamentalist Judaism—and the Jewish people would never have been accused of being deicidal "Christ killers." Thus, to celebrate Hanukkah is to celebrate not just the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness but also the accidental birth of Judaism's bastard child in the shape of Christianity. You might think that masochism could do no more. Except that it always can. Without the precedents of Orthodox Judaism and Roman Christianity, on which it is based and from which it is borrowed, there would be no Islam, either. Every Jew who honors the Hanukkah holiday because it gives his child an excuse to mingle the dreidel with the Christmas tree and the sleigh (neither of these absurd symbols having the least thing to do with Palestine two millenniums past) is celebrating the making of a series of rods for his own back. And this is not just a disaster for the Jews. When the fanatics of Palestine won that victory, and when Judaism repudiated Athens for Jerusalem, the development of the whole of humanity was terribly retarded.
And, of course and as ever, one stands aghast at the pathetic scale of the supposed "miracle." As a consequence of the successful Maccabean revolt against Hellenism, so it is said, a puddle of olive oil that should have lasted only for one day managed to burn for eight days. Wow! Certain proof, not just of an Almighty, but of an Almighty with a special fondness for fundamentalists. Epicurus and Democritus had brilliantly discovered that the world was made up of atoms, but who cares about a mere fact like that when there is miraculous oil to be goggled at by credulous peasants?
We are about to have the annual culture war about the display of cribs, mangers, conifers, and other symbols on public land. Most of this argument is phony and tawdry and secondhand and has nothing whatever to do with "faith" as its protagonists understand it. The burning of a Yule log or the display of a Scandinavian tree is nothing more than paganism and the observance of a winter solstice; it makes no more acknowledgment of the Christian religion than I do. The fierce partisanship of the holly bush and mistletoe believers convicts them of nothing more than ignorance and simple-mindedness. They would have been just as pious under the reign of the Druids or the Vikings, and just as much attached to their bucolic icons. Everybody knows, furthermore, that there was no moving star in the east, that Quirinius was not the governor of Syria in the time of King Herod, that no worldwide tax census was conducted in that period of the rule of Augustus, and that no "stable" is mentioned even in any of the mutually contradictory books of the New Testament. So, to put a star on top of a pine tree or to arrange various farm animals around a crib is to be as accurate and inventive as that Japanese department store that, as urban legend has it, did its best to emulate the Christmas spirit by displaying a red-and-white bearded Santa snugly nailed to a crucifix.
This is childish stuff and if only for that reason should obviously not receive any public endorsement or financing. The display of the menorah at this season, however, has a precise meaning and is an explicit celebration of the original victory of bloody-minded faith over enlightenment and reason. As such it is a direct negation of the First Amendment and it is time for the secularists and the civil libertarians to find the courage to say so.
HALOSCAN COMMENTS
Bah, Hanukkah
The holiday celebrates the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness
Christopher Hitchens
High on the list of idiotic commonplace expressions is the old maxim that "it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness." How do such fatuous pieces of folk wisdom ever get started on their careers of glib quotation? Of course it would be preferable to light a candle than to complain about the darkness. You would only be bitching about the darkness if you didn't have a candle to begin with. Talk about a false antithesis. But at this time of year, any holy foolishness is permitted. And so we have a semiofficial celebration of Hanukkah, complete with menorah, to celebrate not the ignition of a light but the imposition of theocratic darkness.
Jewish orthodoxy possesses the interesting feature of naming and combating the idea of the apikoros or "Epicurean"—the intellectual renegade who prefers Athens to Jerusalem and the schools of philosophy to the grim old routines of the Torah. About a century and a half before the alleged birth of the supposed Jesus of Nazareth (another event that receives semiofficial recognition at this time of the year), the Greek or Epicurean style had begun to gain immense ground among the Jews of Syria and Palestine. The Seleucid Empire, an inheritance of Alexander the Great—Alexander still being a popular name among Jews—had weaned many people away from the sacrifices, the circumcisions, the belief in a special relationship with God, and the other reactionary manifestations of an ancient and cruel faith. I quote Rabbi Michael Lerner, an allegedly liberal spokesman for Judaism who nonetheless knows what he hates:
Along with Greek science and military prowess came a whole culture that celebrated beauty both in art and in the human body, presented the world with the triumph of rational thought in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and rejoiced in the complexities of life presented in the theater of Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes.
But away with all that, says Lerner. Let us instead celebrate the Maccabean peasants who wanted to destroy Hellenism and restore what he actually calls "oldtime religion." His excuse for preferring fundamentalist thuggery to secularism and philosophy is that Hellenism was "imperialistic," but the Hasmonean regime that resulted from the Maccabean revolt soon became exorbitantly corrupt, vicious, and divided, and encouraged the Roman annexation of Judea. Had it not been for this no-less imperial event, we would never have had to hear of Jesus of Nazareth or his sect—which was a plagiarism from fundamentalist Judaism—and the Jewish people would never have been accused of being deicidal "Christ killers." Thus, to celebrate Hanukkah is to celebrate not just the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness but also the accidental birth of Judaism's bastard child in the shape of Christianity. You might think that masochism could do no more. Except that it always can. Without the precedents of Orthodox Judaism and Roman Christianity, on which it is based and from which it is borrowed, there would be no Islam, either. Every Jew who honors the Hanukkah holiday because it gives his child an excuse to mingle the dreidel with the Christmas tree and the sleigh (neither of these absurd symbols having the least thing to do with Palestine two millenniums past) is celebrating the making of a series of rods for his own back. And this is not just a disaster for the Jews. When the fanatics of Palestine won that victory, and when Judaism repudiated Athens for Jerusalem, the development of the whole of humanity was terribly retarded.
And, of course and as ever, one stands aghast at the pathetic scale of the supposed "miracle." As a consequence of the successful Maccabean revolt against Hellenism, so it is said, a puddle of olive oil that should have lasted only for one day managed to burn for eight days. Wow! Certain proof, not just of an Almighty, but of an Almighty with a special fondness for fundamentalists. Epicurus and Democritus had brilliantly discovered that the world was made up of atoms, but who cares about a mere fact like that when there is miraculous oil to be goggled at by credulous peasants?
We are about to have the annual culture war about the display of cribs, mangers, conifers, and other symbols on public land. Most of this argument is phony and tawdry and secondhand and has nothing whatever to do with "faith" as its protagonists understand it. The burning of a Yule log or the display of a Scandinavian tree is nothing more than paganism and the observance of a winter solstice; it makes no more acknowledgment of the Christian religion than I do. The fierce partisanship of the holly bush and mistletoe believers convicts them of nothing more than ignorance and simple-mindedness. They would have been just as pious under the reign of the Druids or the Vikings, and just as much attached to their bucolic icons. Everybody knows, furthermore, that there was no moving star in the east, that Quirinius was not the governor of Syria in the time of King Herod, that no worldwide tax census was conducted in that period of the rule of Augustus, and that no "stable" is mentioned even in any of the mutually contradictory books of the New Testament. So, to put a star on top of a pine tree or to arrange various farm animals around a crib is to be as accurate and inventive as that Japanese department store that, as urban legend has it, did its best to emulate the Christmas spirit by displaying a red-and-white bearded Santa snugly nailed to a crucifix.
This is childish stuff and if only for that reason should obviously not receive any public endorsement or financing. The display of the menorah at this season, however, has a precise meaning and is an explicit celebration of the original victory of bloody-minded faith over enlightenment and reason. As such it is a direct negation of the First Amendment and it is time for the secularists and the civil libertarians to find the courage to say so.
HALOSCAN COMMENTS
Monday, December 3, 2007
Over the weekend I read an entire book on PostModernism! OK, so it was a short book, but I read it cover to cover
Over the weekend I read an entire book on PostModernism! OK, so it was a short book, but I read it cover to cover. Here is what I learned.
Post Modernism is a broad term, applying to art, architecture, linguistic theory and philosophy. At its core, it doesn't mean anything really specific, but rather tries to capture a general change in attitudes which started to become prevalent in the 60s and 70s. According to this book, PoMo has almost run it's course now.
In Art, PoMo was all about totally new forms of art, for example a toilet, or a pile of garbage. If only I'd known that piles of garbage were art, I could have saved a lot of effort cleaning my house. Why are these art? I'm not sure, but by calling this stuff art, it forces the viewer to ponder deep questions, and this kind of assult on the viewer is very PoMoish. What kinds of questions does it present to the viewer? Probably, 'Why the heck is this toilet called art?'
In literary theory, PoMo is linked to deconstructionism and structuralism. Deconstructionism when applied to a text basically means to tear the text apart, uncover the author's biases and contradictions, his frameworks and assumptions. Structuralism is the idea that all concepts are linked to all other concepts, and nothing really has objective meaning except in terms of everything else. Since language must be used to explain any idea, and since all words only makes sense in the context of anything else (the dictionary is circular: every word is defined in terms of another word!), this means that nothing can ever be said objectively.
Because language doesn't mean much anyway, or rather means whatever you take it to mean, PoMo authors have had a field day writing all sorts of crazy sounding stuff. It's so bad, that PoMo authors regularly win competitions for the World's Worst Writing, without intending to. Here is the first prize winner from 1997:
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
Not sure who the writer is but it does sound a lot like Josh Harrison of Reshimu. (OK I admit, I'm jealous. I wish I could write like that!).
Even worse, some PoMo writers use scientific concepts (such as Quantum Physics), in new and totally gibberish ways, infuriating Scientists in the process. PoMo writing was famously parodied by Alan Sokal who submitted a completely fake article to a prestigious PoMo magazine, and they didn't notice. Actually, it wasn't fake at all, but was very good PoMo gibberish, which was exactly the point.
Since all language is subjective, and all concepts are subjective, and all people are subjective, then (taken to the extreme), PoMo means that any idea we have, even science, is only subjective. Most people reject this extreme version of PoMo, except for Kiruv Clowns and sophisticated fundamentalists, who are eager to have a modern philosophy which bashes science. However before we bash the Chareidi PoMo crowd, we should acknowledge that Eugene Borowitz, a famous Reform Rabbi, constructs his entire Theology on the basis of PostModernism, and even mentions in one of his essays that he was pleased to discover that Science isn't objective.
So what do I think of PoMo? Well, there is obviously a little bit of truth in it. People are indeed subjective. But Science (at least the good parts of Science) is about as objective as you can get in this world, so bashing Science is rather stupid. Does PoMo open up new avenues for religious faith? Not really. I think it was always common sense that Science isn't the whole story, and could never be, you don't need PoMo for that, just a little philosophy of Science.
I also think that when certain skeptics bash any attempt to go with extra-rational thought (e.g. based on intuition or feelings or faith) as being 'PoMo' that's just plain wrong. Even though I reject extreme PoMo, and don't really think my toilet is art, I do think that the fundamentalist "I shall only believe things which are proven" skeptics are wrong. There's more to being human than being a robot logic machine. People have feelings, intuition and even faith. This is normal, natural and healthy. If it wasn't, we probably wouldn't have evolved that way.
HALOSCAN COMMENTS
Post Modernism is a broad term, applying to art, architecture, linguistic theory and philosophy. At its core, it doesn't mean anything really specific, but rather tries to capture a general change in attitudes which started to become prevalent in the 60s and 70s. According to this book, PoMo has almost run it's course now.
In Art, PoMo was all about totally new forms of art, for example a toilet, or a pile of garbage. If only I'd known that piles of garbage were art, I could have saved a lot of effort cleaning my house. Why are these art? I'm not sure, but by calling this stuff art, it forces the viewer to ponder deep questions, and this kind of assult on the viewer is very PoMoish. What kinds of questions does it present to the viewer? Probably, 'Why the heck is this toilet called art?'
In literary theory, PoMo is linked to deconstructionism and structuralism. Deconstructionism when applied to a text basically means to tear the text apart, uncover the author's biases and contradictions, his frameworks and assumptions. Structuralism is the idea that all concepts are linked to all other concepts, and nothing really has objective meaning except in terms of everything else. Since language must be used to explain any idea, and since all words only makes sense in the context of anything else (the dictionary is circular: every word is defined in terms of another word!), this means that nothing can ever be said objectively.
Because language doesn't mean much anyway, or rather means whatever you take it to mean, PoMo authors have had a field day writing all sorts of crazy sounding stuff. It's so bad, that PoMo authors regularly win competitions for the World's Worst Writing, without intending to. Here is the first prize winner from 1997:
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
Not sure who the writer is but it does sound a lot like Josh Harrison of Reshimu. (OK I admit, I'm jealous. I wish I could write like that!).
Even worse, some PoMo writers use scientific concepts (such as Quantum Physics), in new and totally gibberish ways, infuriating Scientists in the process. PoMo writing was famously parodied by Alan Sokal who submitted a completely fake article to a prestigious PoMo magazine, and they didn't notice. Actually, it wasn't fake at all, but was very good PoMo gibberish, which was exactly the point.
Since all language is subjective, and all concepts are subjective, and all people are subjective, then (taken to the extreme), PoMo means that any idea we have, even science, is only subjective. Most people reject this extreme version of PoMo, except for Kiruv Clowns and sophisticated fundamentalists, who are eager to have a modern philosophy which bashes science. However before we bash the Chareidi PoMo crowd, we should acknowledge that Eugene Borowitz, a famous Reform Rabbi, constructs his entire Theology on the basis of PostModernism, and even mentions in one of his essays that he was pleased to discover that Science isn't objective.
So what do I think of PoMo? Well, there is obviously a little bit of truth in it. People are indeed subjective. But Science (at least the good parts of Science) is about as objective as you can get in this world, so bashing Science is rather stupid. Does PoMo open up new avenues for religious faith? Not really. I think it was always common sense that Science isn't the whole story, and could never be, you don't need PoMo for that, just a little philosophy of Science.
I also think that when certain skeptics bash any attempt to go with extra-rational thought (e.g. based on intuition or feelings or faith) as being 'PoMo' that's just plain wrong. Even though I reject extreme PoMo, and don't really think my toilet is art, I do think that the fundamentalist "I shall only believe things which are proven" skeptics are wrong. There's more to being human than being a robot logic machine. People have feelings, intuition and even faith. This is normal, natural and healthy. If it wasn't, we probably wouldn't have evolved that way.
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