Andrewmarkmusic: decoding the headlines
and official narratives in short, terse pithy aphorisms!

This is a complex subject but I’ll try to distil it so it makes sense. Pre-modern Christians are those who take the Bible literally and live within premodern codes of behavior. The Amish would be a good example of this. This group is relatively rare in this day and age. Modern Christian’s still take the bible literally but embrace most of the advances of modernity; such as modern psychological concepts, technology, evolution, and empiricism, etc.–Francis Collins would be a good example of this (this is a very large group of people). Post-modern Christian’s no longer take the Bible literally– they’ve correctly understood modernities deconstruction of the Christian faith and have come to understand, also, The Myth of the Given: that is reality isn’t as obvious as we thought it was in premodernity. They understand most archeological evidence proves the historical narrative of Scripture to be near entirely false, or Jewish mythology. Dr. Jordan Peterson is an example of this type of Christian so I find his assault on the postmodernist full of an annoying rich irony. I suspect he’s also overly fond of NeoLiberalism, but that’s another post.

This concept is applicable to all religion and especially Islam. Islam, in general, has far more people living literal premodern modes of existence. This group is generally not a large threat to modern society although they do have some reach. The most serious demographic are modernist Islamicist’s who have embraced modernity but still take the Koran literally. There can be stresses put on this group which makes them prone to societal pathologies such as terrorism. So this group has access to modern technology and weaponry and when combined with literalism and grievance we see that the results can be quite destructive. This demographic is near impossible to ‘police’ as the numbers involved are staggering; so the Alt-Right does have a point here in that the simplest solution would be ethno-nationalist nation states–that is to say Islam should be kept to Muslim countries only. The problem with that view is this: post-modern Islamist’s understand The Koran to be tribal mythology and no longer take the narrative as fact; this group is no danger at all to civilization. This group and healthy literal modernists should not be the target of persecution!

Now I would add that the postmodern view doesn’t necessarily mean God doesn’t exist;  its healthiest enactment would mean that we couldn’t be certain about what God is should it somehow exist. I would caution, though, that this isn’t an excuse to believe any old thing when it comes to the nature of reality; metaphysical postulates within these  modes cannot be blatantly offensive to the faculties of reason and logic, although the best postmodernist’s ( post-post modern?) understand that there are limits as to what reason and logic can know.

I might add here another ‘tool’ which works well within these parameters is Fowler’s stages of faith. I might add, also, that I’m not a big fan of the stage model of evolution but rather prefer the ‘mode’ idea as far as these concepts go. We see that the highest’ octaves’ in Fowler’s model coincide nicely with the best of postmodern thought.

Okay, well, that’s all or now……….

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