Podcasts about postmodernists

A Sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas St. Matthew 2:13-23 by William Klock For us, a week has passed since we heard Matthew's account of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem and the visit by the shepherds.  But as we come to today's Gospel, roughly two years have passed in the story of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary.  For now, we'll skip over Matthew's account of the visit of the wisemen.  (That's for this coming week as we celebrate the Epiphany.)  So today we pick up the story at Matthew 2:13, Matthew tells us that after the wisemen had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.  “Get up,” said the angel, “and take the child and his mother and hurry off to Egypt.” I can only imagine what Joseph was thinking.  This is the second time an angel has come to him to tell him what to do.  Remember from last Sunday's Gospel, Jospeh was thinking through how best to extricate himself from his upcoming marriage to Mary after he found out she was already pregnant.  The angel came to him in a dream.  “Don't be afraid!”  The famous first words of every angel.  “Don't be afraid.  Mary didn't cheat on you.  She's pregnant by the Holy Spirit and she's going to have a son and you need to name him ‘Jesus'—which means 'Yahweh saves'—because he will save his people from their sins.” So it's not like Joseph didn't know there was something special about Jesus.  Ditto for Mary.  Matthew tells the story from Joseph's perspective.  Luke tells it from Mary's.  Luke tells us about the visit she had from the angel and how the angel told her—also—to name the baby “Jesus”.  Why?  “Because he will be called the son of the Most High.  The Lord,” the angel said to her, “will give him the throne of David his father, and he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever.  His kingdom will never come to an end.”  That was all familiar messianic language to Mary.  There's that song that popular Christmas song that asks over and over, “Mary did you know?”  Yes.  She did.  She even composed a song about it that she shared with her cousin Elizabeth—who, you remember—was pregnant with John, who would prepare the way for Jesus.  Mary knew what her baby meant.  Think of the words she sang out in praise: My soul doth magnify the Lord… He hath shewed strength with his arm, he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the might from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath send empty away. He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel, as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed, for ever.   That night that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph both knew with absolute certainty that in him the God of Israel was about to act and that the world would never be the sme.  And not that he was about to act in some unforeseen way that exploded into history totally unexpectedly.  No.  This was the fulfilment of prophecy.  This was the fulfilment of the Lord's promises to his people.  The fact that shepherds came, having been told by angels; the fact that wisemen came, having been guided by a star—these were no mysteries to Mary and Joseph.  They knew from the beginning who Jesus was.  I'm sure they had lots of other questions: Why us?  How is this going to work?  But they knew from the beginning that this child would one day cast down the powers, the gods, the kings of the present evil age and set their world to rights.  That's what Mary's song is all about. So they knew that Mary's baby was a challenge to everything and everyone that stood in the way of God's new age.  As much as scripture gives us every reason to think that they trusted the Lord, I have to think that if they're anything like us, they still had their worries.  At the top of the list had to be King Herod.  And so, I suspect, Mary and Joseph probably didn't go around town announcing any of this.  Surely word got around at least a bit.  There were, of course, the shepherds.  But I expect Mary and Jospeh kept what the angel had told them on the low down as much as they were able.  And then the magi—the wisemen from far away—no one could mistake them riding into town with their camels.  And to hear that they'd been to see Herod, to ask about the new-born King of the Jews.  That was not good news.  Not at all.  Because now Herod knew about Jesus and Herod was what people today might call a “psycho”. Herod was an Idumean—today we'd call him an “Arab”.  His ancestors had been absorbed into Judaea, were circumcised and converted to Judaism—at least nominally.  Most people saw Herod as a pretender.  His decadent lifestyle was out of step with Judaism, but most of all, people hated him for the way he cozied up to the Romans and betrayed his people.  He had no right to call himself King of the Jews.  The Roman Senate had given him that title.  He was no descendant of David.  And all this made Herod more than a little insecure.  Deep down he knew he had no right to Israel's throne and it made him paranoid.  He murdered his own family members—even his wife—because he thought they were scheming against him.  Just before he died, he ordered the leading citizens of Jericho to be killed so that the people would be weeping as his funeral procession passed through the city. So Joseph and Mary had to be worried to hear that Herod had been told about this young “King of the Jews” in Bethlehem.  If Herod would murder his own family at a hint of sedition, what would he do to a new-born rival?  I expect Jospeh was already trying to think through their best course of action.  And then the angel came and said, “Get up and take the child and his mother and hurry off to Egypt.  Stay there until I tell you.  Herod is going to hunt for the child to kill him.” Matthew says that Joseph wasted no time: “He got up and took the child and his mother by night, and went off to Egypt.  He stayed there until the death of Herod.”  And then Matthew adds a quote—just as we saw him do in Chapter One, last week, with that quote from the Prophet Isaiah about the virgin conceiving and bearing a son whose name means “God with us”.  Matthew does it again.  He does this all through is Gospel, but we have to know our Jewish scriptures to know who he's quoting.  In this case it's Hosea 11:1.  Matthew's Jewish audience would have recognised it instantly and it's an indictment against our poor knowledge of the Bible that we need a footnote in our Bibles to tell us.  Anyway, Matthew writes, “This happened to fulfil what the Lord said through the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I called my son.'”  We'll come back to this in a bit. Matthew then continues with the story.  You'll remember that instead of reporting back to Herod about the child as he'd asked them to do, the wisemen—because of their own visit from the angel—they bypassed Herod on their way home.  So Matthew tells us that when Herod realised that he'd been tricked by the wisemen, he flew into a towering rage.  He dispatched men and killed all the boys in Bethlehem and in all its surrounding districts, from two years old and under, according to the time the wisemen had told him.”  And then another quote from the Prophets, this time from Jeremiah 31:15: “That was when the word that came through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled:  There was heard a voice in Rama, crying and loud lamentation.  Rachel is weeping for her children, and will not let anyone comfort her, because they are no more.” And then another visit by an angel.  Matthew writes in verse 19: “After the death of Herod, suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt. ‘Get up,' he said, ‘and take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel.  Those who wanted to kill the child are dead.'  So he got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel.  But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling Judaea instead of his father Herod, he was afraid to go back there.  After being advised in a dream'—again—he went off to the region of Galilee.  When he got there, he settled in a town called Nazareth.  This was to fulfil what the prophet had spoken: ‘He shall be called a Nazarene.'” Again, we sort of have this idyllic scene of Christmas in our heads: Jesus in a manger.  No crying he makes, of course.  The shepherds kneel adoringly.  Mary and Joseph sit there peacefully with their halos glowing.  Even the animals stifle all their natural noises and gather around to adore the baby.  “Silent night…all is calm…sleep in heavenly peace,” loops in our heads. But when you read the actual story as Matthew tells it things aren't nearly so peaceful.  Matthew tells us of the birth of Jesus at a time and a place of trouble, of violence, and of fear.  Jesus was born in a world of darkness, into a world controlled by powers and gods and kings who stood opposed to him.  Before he had learned to walk or to talk, the wrath of a psychotic king forced his family to flee to Egypt.  The shadow of the cross lies dead across the Christmas story.  And yet all this is in keeping with what Matthew told us last week.  If Jesus is the fulfilment of Isaiah's prophecy of Immanuel—of God with us—we'd expect this.  God's people longed for his presence, they longed for his deliverance, because the world was not as they knew it should be.  And so God came to them in the midst of the darkness, the brokenness, the evil, the pain—the violence and injustice—the sin and death.  God entered the world of a king who would murder dozens of innocent children just to keep his investment in the present evil age secure.  Think about the fact that on the three days after Christmas Day the Church commemorates St. Stephen, St. John, and the Holy Innocents.  John was exiled to the island of Patmos for preaching the good news about Jesus.  Stephen—the first martyr—was stoned to death outside Jerusalem for preaching to the people that Jesus was the fulfilment of Israel's story.  And the Holy Innocents—the collateral damage of the first attempt on Jesus' life.  It's a reminder that, yes, the light has come into the darkness, but that there are those who love the dark and there are those invested in it. Brothers and Sisters, as much as the light has shined in the darkness and as much as the darkness has not overcome it—as St. John writes in the opening of his Gospel—the darkness still remains and the darkness still fights back.  Herod's murder of the innocents of Bethlehem—probably a few dozen baby boys—pales in comparison to the millions of unborn children murdered in modern times in our once Christian nations.  The wars and violence of Herod's or of Caesar's day pale in comparison to the wars and violence of the last century—all too often perpetrated by supposedly Christian nations, kings, presidents, and prime ministers.  We see the light around us too often subverted by the darkness.  First by Modernists and now by Postmodernists, the gospel virtues that once transformed the West are plucked from the gospel tree, left to go feral, and fed back to our culture, twisted and abused—darkness masquerading as light. It's easy to get discouraged, isn't it.  Last year I read historian Tom Holland's book Dominion.  It's about how Christianity transformed the West.  The Gospel came into a world of Herods and Caesars and taught us things like mercy and grace that hadn't been known before.  It transformed sexual ethics.  It gave status to women and children and to the poor.  It ended slavery.  And now you look at the world around us and everythings reverting back into the darkness.  Large segments of the church have or are selling out.  I look at the alumni page for my seminary on Facebook and it seems everyone is “deconstructing”—and it always ends the same way—with denying the exclusivity of Jesus and an embracing of Postmodernism and the twisted sexual ethics of our post-Christian culture.  I've listened to local pastors who spend their time apologising for the Bible, blurring the lines it makes clear, and walking their people through deconstructing their faith.  Others have sold out to the materialism of our secular culture and are preaching a crossless gospel of health and wealth.  The gospel—the real gospel—is the answer, but it seems like it falls on deaf ears these days and that the people lost in today's darkness have become resistant to it.  It's easy to lose hope. But Brothers and Sisters, that's when I think of Matthew as he drops his quotes from the Prophets through his telling of the good news.  Remember that I said last week that Matthew saw God's promises down through the ages as lights in the darkness.  Last summer Veronica I did some railgrade riding on our bikes.  We rode through some tunnels—some of them long and windy enough that there was no light at the end—at least not at first—and so there were small lights at intervals, guiding the way, until you finally came around that final corner and daylight blazed into the tunnel.  I didn't appreciate those lights until I rode through the Adra Tunnel in the mountains between Kelowna and Penticton.  It's one of the longest rail tunnels in BC and it's been closed since the 80s.  Volunteers have spent the last few years making repairs and it's just about ready to be reopened.  At present the trail bypasses it and there are fences across the old railgrade to keep people out of the tunnel.  But when I got there, the fences were off to the side.  I took the turn and pretty soon found myself inside the tunnel.  It goes through something like a 270° turn and pretty soon I was in pitch dark, riding slowly, cold water dripping on me.  There are no little lights to light the way.  And I almost ran—smack!—into a grader that was parked in the dark.  I could just as easily have run off the grade and into a ditch or a wall. Like the lights in those tunnels, God's promises led his people through the darkness—around the corners, keeping them out of the ditch, keeping them from running—smack!—into obstacles sitting in the darkness—so that he could lead them out into the light.  At the time those little lights seemed like really big deals—those little lights like Passover and the Exodus, like the torah and the tabernacle, like King David and like the return from Exile.  They gave the people some bearings.  The lights gave them hope.  But what many didn't realise at the time was that those lights were leading the people—preparing them—to understand how God works, to understand that he is faithful, so that when they finally came out into the bright light of Jesus, into the bright light of the gospel—they'd understand that this is where the story had been taking them all along.  This is what Matthew's up to all through his Gospel.  Like we saw last Sunday with that bit of Isaiah and the baby, Immanuel, who served as the sign to accompany the Lord's promise to deliver his people from Israel and Syria.  And here, Matthew quotes Hosea 11:1, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”  At first it looks like Matthew is ignoring what that passage means in Hosea.  It's not looking forward.  It's looking back.  Israel was the Lord's son whom he had called out of Egypt.  That meant—at the time, back in the dark days of Hosea—that the Lord would not abandon the people: Israel was his beloved son and he'd gone to great lengths to deliver Israel from Egypt.  And Matthew saw that little light back there in the darkness of Hosea's day and it led him towards the light that had come in Jesus.  Jesus brings Israel's story to completion.  He's not just “God's son” in the sense that he's divine.  He's “God's son” in the sense that he is the embodiment of Israel.  Remember what I've said before: the King represents his people.  And so Jesus came to represent his people, to finally accomplish what they'd failed at all those centuries, and then to die on their behalf the death that they deserved. Matthew does something similar with the prophecy spoken by Jeremiah.  He holds up Rachel weeping for her children as a backdrop to Herod's murder of the baby boys of Bethlehem.  But when Jeremiah spoke those words, he was drawing on the imagery of Rachel to describe the pain of Israel's exile to Babylon and to proclaim the hope of God's promise to renew his covenant and to restore his people—to bring Israel back from her long exile.  The long darkness is full of weeping and mourning, but at the end is the Lord's deliverance. And then that bit of Isaiah 11 that Matthew quotes about Jesus being a Nazarene.  Isaiah uses the Hebrew word nazir.  It means “branch” and through Isaiah the Lord promises that he will be faithful to the promises he'd made to David and his descendants.  A branch will grow out of the stump of Jesse.  It's about a new beginning for the royal line of David.  Matthew hinted at this already in Joseph's genealogy.  The fact that the Old Testament nowhere mentions Nazareth, the fact that the Isaiah passage about the branch has nothing to do with Nazareth, that's okay.  Matthew knew that the lights along the tunnel—even if it doesn't look like it—they all lead to the same place.  Everything in Israel's story was leading to Jesus and so he takes Isaiah's prophecy of the nazir, the branch, and ties it to Jesus' hometown of Nazareth.  Matthew's sort of saying that we know Jesus is the promised branch because he came from “Branchville”.  Maybe it's a more “creative” way of using the Old Testament than we're comfortable with, but for Matthew it worked—again—because he knew that everything God said and everything God did—the whole story of the God of Israel and his people—was leading them through the darkness to Jesus and to the light of this new age, this new world, this new creation. And Brothers and Sisters, that's why as much as it's tempting to lose hope as we look at the surrounding darkness and even as the darkness creeps in and takes ground that was once won by the gospel, I don't lose hope.  Because the scriptures assure me of the faithfulness of God to his promises.  Because I know he has, in the birth, in the death, in the resurrection of Jesus done the hard part already.  Because he has poured out his Spirit.  And as surely as he called Abraham and his family and led them through the darkness—through slavery and through exile and everything in between—and then brought them finally out into the blazing glory of Jesus and the gospel, I know that God, who has established his church and has equipped us with his own Spirit to proclaim the good news—to carry his light into the darkness—will not fail to bring us eventually to that day when his glory covers the earth as the waters cover the sea, when every last enemy has been put under his feet, even death itself, when every tear is wiped away, and everything is once-and-for-all set to rights. Matthew saw God's promises fulfilled all through the story—even at its darkest.  As Jesus was arrested in Gethsemane he said, himself, “All this has taken place that the writings of the prophets might be fulfilled.”  God is sovereign and God is faithful, Brothers and Sisters.  Even as the darkness mustered its forces and rose to its full height to deal a death blow to Jesus, it was doing so as part of a plan orchestrated by the Lord.  Darkness, unwittingly, concentrating itself all in one place so that, through Jesus, it could be defeated when he rose, triumphant over sin and death.  And that is why I remain full of hope.  God's faithfulness to his promises did not end in the First Century.  He remains faithful today.  If we will only walk with him in faith, his light—his gospel promises, his Spirit indwelling us—will lead us through today's darkness. Let's pray: Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word:  Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Deception is simply taking a piece of the truth, and twisting it. That's what makes it so convincing. It sounds right... sort of. Almost. I believe I first read in one of C.S. Lewis's books, probably in several of them, that evil defines itself by the absence of God, just as darkness defines itself as the absence of light. Satan cannot create anything; all he can do is pervert something that God made, and intended for good.   The introduction of Jonathan Cahn's most recent book, "The Dragon Prophecy," puts this extremely well, so I'm going to just quote him. He writes, "If God is good, then how could there be evil? And if God is evil, then how could God be good? But if God did not create evil, then how could evil exist? Or how could God be God?... If evil was created, it would not be a problem, nor would it be evil. Evil is a problem for the very reason that it was not created. It should not exist, because it was not created, and yet it does. The existence of evil defies the created order. It is not of the creation and thus exists in opposition to the created order. Evil exists in defiance of existence... evil is not simply a force, like that of an earthquake, a hurricane, or a fire. All these bring calamity and destruction. But none would constitute true evil. Serial killers are. Why? The hurricane is an impersonal force. It acts without consciousness, will, choice, volition, or intent. But the serial killer commits his acts with conscious intent, will, an volition--and so is evil. And so evil is not an impersonal force--but a personal one, requiring consciousness, volition, will, and intent. Thus in our search for an answer to evil, we are led to personhood... Evil is an inversion--an inversion of truth, of reality, of existence. Evil is, by nature, inverted and, by nature, inverts. It twists, bends, and turns existence in upon itself. It exists as anti-existence. Its being is anti-being, and its nature, anti-nature. It is a negation and therefore seeks to negate, a nullification that exists to nullify. It has no true, ultimate, or absolute existence and therefore acts to bring that which exists into non-existence... Possessing no absolute or true existence of its own, evil is, as well, by nature, parasitic... Evil must use the good. And so though good can exist without evil, evil cannot exist without good. Truth can exist without falsehood, but falsehood cannot exist without truth. Laws can exist without crimes, marriage without adultery, and life without murder. But crimes cannot exist without laws, adultery without marriage, nor murder exist without life. Destruction requires structure, immorality requires morality, and sin requires the holy. The good is primary. Evil is the parasitic inversion of the good. And so the existence of evil inadvertently testifies not against the existence of the good--but for it. It bears witness, unwillingly, to the existence of the good--the existence of God" (9-10). So if evil itself is an inversion of something created to be good, then nearly everything God created for our pleasure and enjoyment can also become evil... but because it contains the seeds of something that was originally good, Satan can also use that kernel of goodness, or truth, to convince us that the twisted version is actually good and true, too... and if we don't know the truth well enough to tell the difference, we'll fall for it.  The Syncretism Trend According to Dr George Barna's research with the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, the dominant worldview of Americans (92%) now is syncretism (https://www.arizonachristian.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/CRC-Release-AWVI-2-April-23-2024.pdf): that is, an amalgamation of disparate and contradictory beliefs, pulled from multiple religious or philosophical ideologies, according to an individual's personal inclinations and emotions. Syncretism is therefore not a single worldview, but a mishmash of beliefs--hence the common phrase, "your truth" and "my truth." The implication is that these can be mutually exclusive, without any logical contradiction. This strategy of Satan's is nothing new. He is a liar and the father of lies by nature (John 8:44). He sticks with this approach because it works.  Syncretism in the Old Testament Syncretism has  been around since the days of the Old Testament, and was the main reason why the Israelites couldn't seem to stay on the "blessing" side of God's covenant (Deuteronomy 28). Literally the first of the Ten Commandments was "You shall have no other gods before Me" (Ex 20:3)--and al, the Hebrew word translated "before", also means "by" or "beside." So God wasn't saying they simply had to worship Him the most, but it was okay if they occasionally sacrificed to Baal or Molech or Asherah--so long as He was the most important. No; they were to have no other gods besides Him. Period. The entire Old Testament history is a cycle of the Israelites' disobedience of this one commandment. The first example after the Ten Commandments were given is the golden calf that Aaron made with the spoils from Egypt while Moses was up on the mountain receiving God's law (Ex 32). These Israelites had spent their entire lives in Egypt, where a pantheon of gods were worshipped (many of whom God specifically humiliated by the plagues chosen to eventually force Pharaoh to let them go). When they made the golden calf, the Israelites declared that this was God--the One who had delivered them from Egypt (Ex 32:4). So they weren't exactly abandoning Yahweh for some other god; rather, they were mixing Him with the gods they had grown up with. Then, the Israelites tended to mix worship of Yahweh with worship of the gods of neighboring nations, even before they ever got to the Promised Land. Israel's enemies feared God, and one of them (King Balak of Moab) sent for Balaam, a local seer, to curse Israel (Numbers 22-24). God wouldn't allow Balaam to curse Israel, but Balaam wanted Balak's money... so instead, he told Balak how to get the Israelites to curse themselves, by placing themselves on the "cursing" side of God's covenant (Deuteronomy 28). Numbers 25 shows the result: the Moabite harlots used sex to entice the men of Israel into idolatry. The issue in this case wasn't so much the sex, as it was that sex was used in worship of false gods.  The cycle repeats throughout the Old Testament: Israel falls into idolatry, they fall under the 'cursing' side of God's covenant as a result (bringing themselves out from under His protection, and subject to Satan's machinations), they get oppressed by their enemies, they cry out to God, and God delivers them. They renew their vows to and worship of the One True God in varying degrees, but then they forget again, fall into idolatry, and the cycle repeats. God had laid out very clearly that they would be blessed if they followed His laws, and cursed if they didn't (Deut 28), and the very first commandment was no gods before Him. It was the first for a reason: God knows that we were made to worship something, and we treasure what we worship. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (Matt 6:21), and our hearts guide the course of our lives (Prov 4:23).  Eventually Israel split into two kingdoms (Northern and Southern, or Israel and Judah) over this very issue. Most of the subsequent kings of both nations perpetuated idolatry, though a few tried to purge the nation of idolatry to varying degrees, and enjoyed the 'blessing' side of the covenant for a time as a result (Deut 28). But God sent prophet after prophet to the Northern and Southern nations (writers of most of the major and minor prophetic books of the Old Testament), warning them of impending destruction if they did not repent of their idolatry. They ignored the warning, and eventually both nations were taken into captivity because of their idolatry: Israel to Assyria and Judah to Babylon. (Though of course, God was not done with Israel, and His promises to them still stand--Ezekiel 37 prophesied their restoration to their own land as a resurrection of dry bones, which miraculously took place on May 14, 1948. And the nation of Israel takes center stage throughout most of the book of Revelation, from chapter 5 on.)  Syncretism in the New Testament  Syncretism was around during the time of the early church, too, particularly in Paul's ministry. God sent him as the apostle to the Gentiles, who practiced varying forms of pagan beliefs already. They attempted to mix Jesus with these beliefs, until Paul's preaching convicted them to follow Jesus only, burning their books of magic arts and getting rid of their idols of Greek and Roman gods (Acts 19:11-20--which turned into a big riot in the city, v 21-41). Paul described the end times as being a time of "unrighteous deception among those who perish" (2 Thess 2:10), so we can expect that as we approach that day, this will only increase. Jesus told us that in the last days, "if possible, even the elect" would be deceived (Matt 24:24). The Greek work for deception in these verses is planao, and it means "to lead away from the truth, to lead into error." This inherently means that there is such a thing as truth. If you believe something contradictory to that truth, that is deception. We're living in an age that largely borrows from postmodernism as part of the syncretic worldview. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "Postmodernists deny that there are aspects of reality that are objective; that there are statements about reality that are objectively true or false; that it is possible to have knowledge of such statements (objective knowledge); that it is possible for human beings to know some things with certainty; and that there are objective, or absolute, moral values." Holders of this worldview are therefore confused about even observable or mathematical truths, let alone those that are not observable (such as whether or not there is a God, and if there is, how many, and which one, how do we get to Him, etc). So before we even approach the topic of how to avoid being deceived, we have to establish that there is such a thing as objective truth. If there isn't, then there is no such thing as deception, either, since deception derives its definition from truth (just as darkness derives its definition from light, by the absence of it). What Is Truth (i.e. Is There Such A Thing As Objective Reality?) The best argument I've heard on the topic of whether or not there is an objective reality comes from Dr Jason Lisle's "The Ultimate Proof of Creation" (which is a book, but here is his lecture on the argument https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ_UxcV-xcM). While there is an abundance of apologetic evidence for the scientific and historical accuracy of scripture (here's the first in an apologetics series I did on the subject, https://www.drlaurendeville.com/anthropic-fine-tuning/), Lisle points out that none of these arguments can be definitive, because someone who holds a different worldview can simply invoke a "rescuing device" to explain away any evidence that seems to contradict his own position. We all do this, and it's not necessarily a bad thing--for example, if someone points out an apparent contradiction in scripture, my first reaction isn't, "Oh, I guess the Bible is wrong!" Rather, I assume there's additional information I don't happen to know about yet, which resolves the apparent contradiction, and then I go look for it. Even if I can't find it at the time, I am still certain it exists, and someone will find it eventually. That's a rescuing device, to preserve an otherwise deeply held worldview without logical contradiction. The real key to establishing which worldview is correct lies in that last statement: "without logical contradiction." There are laws that govern the way the world and the universe works--laws that we all have to believe in and abide by in order to know anything at all. C.S. Lewis expounded on this concept in "Mere Christianity" (https://www.authorcagray.com/posts/mere-christianity/) with respect to morality, in particular--the idea that we all know that there are universal laws of decency and conduct, and we further know that we don't live up to them. But, that being the case, who made those laws? Where did they come from? He argues that their very existence necessitates a lawgiver. Lisle takes this argument further--the existence of non-moral rules that govern how the material world works, such as the laws of logic, and principles of math and science, are the presuppositions upon which all knowledge is based. Everyone has to abide by these, no matter what their worldview is, or it would be impossible to know anything at all. But who made those rules? Where did they come from? Why does math work? Why do we all assume the laws of logic in order to have a coherent conversation? This, too, necessitates a creator. Many who abide by laws of math, science, and logic (and morality, for that matter) don't happen to have a theistic worldview, but that in and of itself is a logical inconsistency; they can't account for those rules in their worldviews at all. They have to borrow from the theistic worldview in order to make any of their other arguments.  This is the very place where postmodernism diverges, though. If there is no objective reality, then knowledge of any kind doesn't exist. Most of those who hold this worldview at least believe in morality of some kind. Lewis's argument might be most relevant here--you'll never get someone persuaded by postmodernism and religious syncretism to argue that murder, or genocide, or racism are fine, for example. They know these are wrong because they "feel" them to be wrong--and they're not just wrong for them, they're wrong for everyone. Now we have at least one absolute... which necessitates a lawgiver not only for morality, but also for at least one logical law: that of non-contradiction. This already establishes the existence of an objective reality. If there is an objective reality, then necessarily, some statements about it must be true while others must be false. The world is round and not flat, for example. If a world exists at all, both things cannot be true about it at the same time and in the same way, simultaneously--that would be a logical contradiction. Which Objective Reality Is It? (Can Anybody Know?) If some objective reality does in fact exist, how do we know which one it is? How do we know that our senses are reliable, first of all, and that we're not living in a simulation a la "The Matrix," for instance--one in which the laws of morality, logic, math, and science are simply foundational to the code? This argument goes back to Descartes, who concluded that at the very least, he must exist after some fashion, because his consciousness told him he must. C.S. Lewis in "Mere Christianity" used a similar line of reasoning, arguing that if there were a deeper reality, one that created this reality, we couldn't possibly find out anything about it through our five senses. Of course we couldn't; those senses are of the physical world, and can thus only give us information about the physical world. Our consciousness, however, has no identifiable physical reality. (To this day, science cannot explain what consciousness actually is - https://www.drlaurendeville.com/electromagnetism-vital-force/.) So Lewis argues that, if there were anything knowable about the world beyond our own, the only place where we might possibly expect to find clues about it would be in our own consciousness. And there, in fact, we do find such clues: specifically, we all have a sense of right and wrong. While we might quibble about the details therein--someone might say that under such and such a condition, killing someone is not murder, for example--no one will seriously argue that murder is morally fine. One might have different rules surrounding the morals of sex, but nobody is going to say you can just have any person you like anytime you like. This establishes several things, according to his argument: the existence of a moral law outside of our reality, of how we ought to behave (even though we know we don't, or at least not always, and certainly not perfectly), which necessitates the implied existence of a law-giver. The very fact that we do not keep the law (even though we know we should) is the whole point of the law of the Old Testament, too (Romans 7)--but even those who didn't know the Old Testament were aware of the moral law to this extent, so that no one is without excuse (Romans 1:18-2:16). Once we know that there is a moral law, and that we're incapable of keeping it on our own, that narrows down the possible religions considerably. We must choose one that hinges on the concept of grace, not works. There is literally only one of those. (More on that in this podcast: https://www.drlaurendeville.com/relational-apologetics/). That's why we call Christianity the gospel, which means good news: the good news is that, while you can't make yourself righteous no matter how hard you try, you don't have to make yourself righteous because Jesus did it for you. All you have to do is accept what He did on your behalf. Once you've gotten to this place, now all the scientific apologetics (start here: https://www.drlaurendeville.com/anthropic-fine-tuning/) can fall into their proper place: as corroborating evidence for the Bible. But the Bible has to be philosophically established as authoritative first. Once we've established that the Bible is truth (John 17:17, Psa 25:5, Psa 91:4, Psa 96:13, 100:5, 117:2, 119:142, 151, 160; 138:2, Prov 3:3, Col 1:5), we've got to learn what it says--well enough that Satan can't take it out of context and feed it back to us, or add a tiny bit to it to change the meaning. That's exactly how he works, though. He even tried that with Jesus (Luke 4:1-13). Fortunately Jesus was the Word made flesh (John 1:14), so He didn't fall for it... but the less we actually know the scripture, the more vulnerable we'll be to this strategy. Knowing the Truth Well Jesus warned us that as the last days approach, Satan will double down on this strategy: that false prophets will rise up and deceive many (Matt 24:11), claiming to be Jesus returned (Mark 13:6), some with signs and wonders. At the same time, Revelation suggests that in the last days, the church will become apathetic, so prosperous materially that we will be unaware of our spiritual emptiness (Rev 3:14-22). (This sounds a lot like the seeds choked by thorns in Jesus' parable of the sower: the seed is choked by "the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches, and he becomes unfruitful", Matt 13:22). Peter tells us that "scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, and saying, 'Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.'" (2 Peter 3:3-4). Paul tells us that the last days will be accompanied by a great "falling away" (2 Thess 2:3). Deception comes in many forms, but one thing they all have in common is that they act almost like a vaccine against the truth. There's just enough truth to them, mixed with a lot of untruth, that it's hard to tease apart the good from the bad. In that way, they can deceive "even the elect, if possible" (Matt 24:24, Mark 13:22). We protect against this, in a nutshell, by knowing the truth really, really well. This is the way bankers are trained to recognize counterfeit money: they don't study every possible counterfeit (there will always be a new one). Rather, they learn what the real thing looks like so well that they'll know when something seems off, even if they can't articulate what it is. In the same way, we're to renew our minds with the Word (Romans 12:2); that's how we will recognize truth from lies. Otherwise, it's all too easy for Satan to take a sliver of truth, mix it with a lie, and so deceive us. An Old Testament example of this is found in 2 Kings 18. The back story: in Numbers 21:6-9, the people had sinned, had come out from under the protection of God's covenant, and were dying from bites from poisonous snakes. God commanded Moses to make a bronze serpent on a pole, and told the people that if they would only look at the serpent, they would be healed. We know with hindsight that this was a type and shadow of Jesus, who was made sin for us, and became our substitutionary sacrifice ("by His stripes, we are healed," Isaiah 53:5). But the Jews didn't realize that; all they knew was that God ordained healing through looking at the pole, so the pole became a symbol of deliverance. But over the centuries, they made looking at the pole into a formula: the shadow without the substance of Jesus behind it. It became an idol, which they called Nehushtan. Back to 2 Kings 18, centuries later: verse 4 tells us that King Hezekiah had torn down the high places and broke Nehushtan in pieces. Later in the chapter, Judah is threatened with destruction by a messenger from the King of Assyria, Rabshakeh. This would have been especially terrifying, since Israel (by this point they has become two nations, Israel and Judah) had already been carried into captivity by Assyria, in punishment for the fact that the people kept falling into idolatry and had forsaken God. So when Rabshakeh threatened the people with destruction, he said, "You broke down God's symbols of worship! Why would He come through for you?" (2 Kings 18:22). The people of Judah had to know God and His word well enough to know that what Hezekiah did was actually right in God's eyes (2 Kings 18:5-7). God had originally ordained the serpent on the pole, yes, but the people had made it into an idol, which broke the first of the Ten Commandments. Hezekiah's actions had placed the Jews on the right side of God's covenant (Deut 28), so they, unlike their sister nation of Israel, could trust that God would come through for them. But if the people had not understood all the back story, they might easily have believed Rabshakeh's taunts. They could have lost faith that God would come through for them, convinced that they would go the way of Israel before them, and turned against Hezekiah, thinking he'd brought them out from under God's protection. This is how the enemy works. The serpent is subtle and cunning (Gen 3:1, 2 Cor 11:3-4). Satan tried to deceive Jesus not even by misquoting scripture, just by quoting it out of context (Matt 4:6). This happens to us today all the time. One common example is the teaching that God causes or (directly) allows sickness in order to discipline us, or to teach us something, or for the "greater good". This sounds so spiritual, and a host of out of context scriptures even seem to back it up--yet Deut 28 makes it clear that sickness is always considered a curse. Jesus became a curse for us and redeemed us from the curse (Gal 3:13-14), and even before that, He healed all who came to Him (Matt 15:30, Matt 4:23-24, Matt 8:16, Matt 9:35, Matt 10:1, Matt 12:15, Matt 15:30, Luke 4:40, Luke 10:9). Jesus He was a perfect representation of the Father (John 5:19, 5:30, 8:28, 12:49). So this cannot be right. He may take what the enemy meant for evil and turn it for good (Gen 50:20), but that doesn't mean He caused the evil in the first place. Not even close. (For more on this, see https://www.drlaurendeville.com/why-bad-things-happen-from-a-biblical-perspective/). Truth is the foundation of the spiritual armor (Eph 6:14)--it must go on first, before anything else. The Bible can testify to us that not only is the Word truth, but God is the God of truth (Isa 65:16), that Jesus is the truth (John 14:6). Only knowing the truth will make us free (John 8:32). If we focus on knowing the truth, we will recognize deception. It's important to also rely upon the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth (John 14:17, 15:26, 16:13, 1 John 5:6), to guide us, rather than on our own understanding (Prov 3:5-6), or the wisdom of the world (1 Cor 1:20-2:7), or any other spirit besides the Holy Spirit. The world is confused about what truth is (John 18:37-38) because they don't hear His voice--but we do. This shouldn't be a problem for us.  Cross-Reference What You Hear Along those lines, just because we hear a doctrine preached from the pulpit doesn't mean it's so. It's our responsibility to be like the Bereans in Acts 17--when Paul and Silas preached the word to them there, Luke writes of them, "These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so. Therefore many of them believed" (Acts 17:11). They didn't just take Paul and Silas's word for it; they went straight to the source text to confirm it. Paul later wrote to the Galatians, "even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed" (Gal 1:8-9). He repeats himself, because this is so important. Forget him--even if an angel preaches it, let him be accursed! We are not to blindly follow any person simply because of his or her authority. (We're to respect authority of all kinds, Romans 13:1-7--that's a different issue. But when what someone in authority says comes in conflict with God's word, we obviously go with God's word, Acts 4:19). There are plenty of warnings about false teachers in scripture (though one important note here--there's a difference between a false teacher, and a good person doing his or her best who is simply flawed. None of us is going to get everything right. This is the reason why James says that not many should become teachers, as they will "receive a stricter judgment. For we all stumble in many things," James 3:1-2.)  A false teacher, though, is one who will distort the truth (Acts 20:29-30, 2 Peter 3:16), by mixing it with myths/fables (Titus 1:14) or "merely human commands" (Matthew 16:1-12) or the traditions of men (such as forbidding to marry, abstaining from certain foods, 1 Tim 4:3), according to the principles of the world (Col 2:4-8). They will pretend to be godly or moral, though (2 Cor 11:13-15, 2 Tim 6:5)--so we must use discernment. There are a few criteria we're given to distinguish a false teacher from just a flawed human being, in process like the rest of us: Anyone who denies that Jesus is the Christ is a false teacher (1 John 2:22-23, 4:2-3) Some may lie intentionally for their own gain (Deut 18:20, Ezekiel 13:9, Jer 14:14, Jer 23:16, Titus 1:10-11) or in hypocrisy (1 Tim 4:2-5), using "godliness" as a means of their own selfish gain. Others may be so blind that they truly believe they are doing God a favor in persecuting His true followers (John 16:2). Romans 16:18: Paul said in this verse that these individuals use good words and fair speeches and deceive the hearts of the simple. This means that they flatter people (2 Timothy 4:3) and appeal to the same selfish desires that they themselves have, to draw people after themselves (Acts 20:30). We can't judge another person's motives (Matthew 7:1-3), but we can, and should, judge the fruit of their lives and ministries (Matthew 7:15-20, 1 John 3:7-9). There are many who claim to be believers but aren't (Matthew 7:21-23) and they'll be among us until the end of the age, when God will finally separate them out (Matthew 13:24-30). Truth, "Signs," and Our Emotions We are the gatekeepers of our hearts (Prov 4:23), and have to guard its boundaries, careful of what we allow in. I always thought the parable of wheat and tares (Matthew 13:24-30) only referred to evil people sown amongst the good people of the church. But what if it also means good and bad ideas from good and bad spirits within a given individual-- in other words, we can bear good fruit and bad fruit from different 'trees' even within our own hearts? This might be why Jesus could tell Peter "get behind me Satan" (Matt 16:23) and James and John, "you don't know what spirit you are of" (Luke 9:55), but the men themselves were still His. This also probably goes along with the Parable of the Sower (Matt 13:3-15)... the 'tares' we allow into our own hearts are part of what can choke the word and render it unfruitful. Truth of course must correspond to an accurate description of reality (Gen 42:16)--which should negate any postmodernist philosophy, or syncretism, blending contradictory descriptions of reality. Once we know the truth, we are to continue in what we were taught (Col 2:6-7, 1 John 2:24), not mix a little Christianity with a little of some other contrary message. Paul rails against this practice in many of his letters. In 2 Cor 11:3-4, Paul is angry that the Corinthians' minds may be corrupted so that they receive the one preaching a different Jesus or gospel from the one he preached. In Galatians 1:6-9, as mentioned earlier, the Galatians are falling prey to a perverted gospel, and Paul curses those who preach such a gospel. In Eph 4:14, he writes that only "children" in Christ are tossed about by every wind and wave of doctrine, taken in by trickery and craftiness and deceit. We're supposed to guard against not just what we hear from other humans, but to test what the spirits say too--hence Paul's angel comment (Gal 1:8-9). John also tells us, "do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God" (1 John 4:1). In a lot of denominational churches that don't believe in the supernatural gifts of the spirit (1 Cor 12), this may not come up much. But in those that do, or for individuals who might ascribe to varieties of syncretism (believing in "signs from the universe" if they seem especially coincidental, perhaps), this will become important. Just because a prophet seems to be speaking from a supernatural source doesn't mean what they're saying is from God. It might be, but we have to test it. Just because an idea out of left field pops into our minds doesn't mean it was the Holy Spirit who put it there. Just because a black crow perches on a tree doesn't mean it's an omen foreshadowing our future. Just because we see the same state license plate on every car doesn't mean God is telling us to move there, etc. Solomon writes, “A simple man believes anything, but a prudent man gives thought to his steps” (Prov 14:15). Elsewhere "simple" is used as a synonym for "fool" (Prov 7:7, 8:5, 9:13). We have to remember that the physical world is a battleground. Until the earth lease is up, Satan is still technically the god of this world (2 Cor 4:4). So God can send us signs in the physical realm, yes--but so can Satan. God can whisper thoughts to our minds--but so can Satan (in fact, this is his primary tactic, 2 Cor 10:3-6). Peter writes that the scriptures are a "more sure word of prophecy" even than hearing an audible voice from heaven (2 Peter 1:19-21), probably for this exact reason: anything using the physical realm has the potential to be counterfeited. That doesn't mean God can't use physical means to communicate with us, but it's clear that the primary means He uses for His own are the scriptures, and the Holy Spirit (John 14:17, 26), who also often speaks to us by bringing the scriptures we know to our remembrance. He also will speak through the prophets (1 Cor 12:1-11), dreams and visions (Acts 2:17-18), but we have to check all of this against the Word. Scripture will divide between soul and spirit (what originates with us vs Him, Hebrews 4:12), as well as what might originate with a malevolent spirit sent to lead us astray. David tells us it's the scriptures that make the simple wise: "The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple" (Psalm 19:7). What if an idea comes to us as an idea, a dream, a vision, a prophecy, or a "synchronicity" moment that seems supernatural, and it's something that isn't addressed in scripture at all, though? How do we know if it's from God, from us, or from the enemy then? The first thing to check there is whether or not the message is consistent with God's character. Jesus said we can ask anything in His name and He will give it to us (John 14:14). What's in God's name (https://www.drlaurendeville.com/names-of-lord-psalm-9-9-10-meditation/)? He is Jehovah Nissi (the Lord my Banner), Jehovah-Raah (the Lord my Shepherd), Jehovah Rapha (the Lord that Heals), Jehovah Shammah (the Lord is There), Jehovah Tsidkenu (the Lord our Righteousness), Jehovah Mekoddishkem (the Lord who Sanctifies You), Jehovah Jireh (the Lord who Provides), Jehovah Shalom (the Lord is Peace), Jehovah Sabaoth (the Lord of Hosts).  The next thing to check is the fruit that message produces (Gal 5:19-23, Romans 8:6-8). God won't lead us into anything producing negative fruit--if the fruit is bad, it's from the flesh or the enemy, and not the Spirit. If it passes those tests, though, then as we continue to pray about the message (dream, vision, prophecy, idea, etc) then it's also biblical for us to ask for additional confirmations of the message--Paul says in 2 Cor 13:1 that every word should be established by two or three witnesses. If the message is from God, He'll make sure you know it. His Spirit guides us into all truth (John 16:13). And as you continue to seek Him and pray about it, peace (a fruit of the Spirit) should grow, confirming that the message comes from God (Col 3:15). Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

Dike Blair (b. 1952, New Castle, Pennsylvania) uses gouache, oil, his own photographs, and strategies appropriated from Postminimalist sculpture to create intimate tableaux that transform quotidian sights and materials into exercises in formalism. A writer and teacher as well as an artist, Blair came up in the downtown scene of 1970s New York among punk rockers and Postmodernists. In the early 1980s, against prevailing art world trends toward Neo-Expressionism, he began rendering scenes from his life in gouache on paper. These ongoing diaristic paintings are devoid of human figures but nonetheless evoke the specter of the artist whose daily life plays out at a remove across their finely-wrought surfaces. Blair lives in New York and Sullivan County. Blair's recent solo exhibitions include Edward Hopper House, Nyack, New York (2024); Karma (Los Angeles, 2023, New York, 2022); Various Small Fires, Seoul (2020); The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2019); Linn Lühn, Düsseldorf (2019); Secession, Vienna (2016); and Jüergen Becker Gallery, Hamburg (2016). In 2022, Karma presented an exhibition of Blair's paintings of Gloucester alongside Edward Hopper's paintings of the same small Massachusetts city. Blair's work is featured in the collections of the Whitney Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others. Blair's work is on view in Matinee: Dike Blair at Edward Hopper House, Nyack, New York through October 27, 2024 and at Karma, New York through October 26, 2024. Dike Blair, Untitled, 2024, Gouache, pencil and chalk on paper, 15 x 20 inches, 38.1 x 50.8 cm, 16 5/8 x 21 5/8 inches, 42.23 x 54.93 cm (framed), © Dike Blair. Courtesy the artist and Karma. Dike Blair, Untitled, 2024, Gouache, pencil and chalk on paper, 15 x 20 inches, 38.10 x 50.80 cm, 16 5/8 x 21 5/8 inches, 42.23 x 54.93 cm (framed), © Dike Blair. Courtesy the artist and Karma. Dike Blair, Untitled, 2024, Oil on aluminum panel, 28 1/8 x 21 1/8, 71.44 x 53.66 x 2.54 cm, 28 3/4 x 21 3/4 inches, 73.02 x 55.24 cm (framed), © Dike Blair. Courtesy the artist and Karma.

Writer David Shields joins Geoff Shullenberger to discuss his new book and documentary How We Got Here. We ask whether postmodernists are to blame for our post-truth predicament and explore Trump's instinctive postmodernism, the propaganda techniques of Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov, and David's own theories on reality and (non-)fiction.Listen either here on Substack or on your preferred podcast app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compactmag.substack.com/subscribe

Questions about how to start conversations with postmodernists about the need for repentance and what question one can use to put a stone in the shoe of a Buddhist friend. In a postmodern world, what tools can believers use to start a conversation about the need for repentance? What question can I use to put a stone in the shoe of my Buddhist friend?

Today we look at the interaction between Jesus and Pilate, as Jesus continues his march toward the cross. Pilate asks six different questions in the Mark text, and we're going to look at each one of them to see what we can learn about Pilate's search for truth. Before we get to the six questions in Mark, we'll start with a question that Pilate asks in John's gospel. --The PursueGOD Truth podcast is the “easy button” for making disciples – whether you're looking for resources to lead a family devotional, a small group at church, or a one-on-one mentoring relationship. Join us for new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Find resources to talk about these episodes at pursueGOD.org.Help others go "full circle" as a follower of Jesus through our 12-week Pursuit series.Click here to learn more about how to use these resources at home, with a small group, or in a one-on-one discipleship relationship.Got questions or want to leave a note? Email us at podcast@pursueGOD.org.Donate Now --John 18:38 (NLT) “What is truth?” Pilate asked.What is truth? Such a profound question for a politician to ask!Today's fluid concept of truth in the postmodern worldChatGPT: Postmodernism challenges traditional notions of truth by suggesting that truth is not objective and universal, but rather subjective and context-dependent. In this view, truth is not a fixed reality waiting to be discovered, but rather a product of social, historical, and cultural influences. Postmodernists argue that different groups or individuals may have their own truths that are valid within their own frameworks or perspectives, and that these truths are not necessarily in conflict with each other. Here's today's key question:Q. How will you handle the truth about Jesus?A Few Good Men: “You can't handle the truth!” Colonel Nathan R. Jessup, played by Jack NicholsonNow we're ready to turn to the text. Mark chapter 15…Mark 15:1 (NLT) Very early in the morning the leading priests, the elders, and the teachers of religious law—the entire high council—met to discuss their next step. They bound Jesus, led him away, and took him to Pilate, the Roman governor.Let's talk about Pilate.(Expositor's Bible Commentary: Abridged Edition (2 Volumes)) Early in the morning, because that is when Pilate held trials, Jesus was led to Herod's palace. This explains why the Sanhedrin held their session late at night and very early in the morning.(Pillar New Testament Commentary) The Gospel of Mark was probably written in the middle 60s during Nero's reign. The Roman Empire, in contrast to the earlier Republic, was a totalitarian state, and at no time more so than under Nero. Discretion, if not loyalty, dictated that Rome be portrayed in the best possible light in Mark's Gospel. Mark desired to encourage Christians in Rome, who were themselves victims of persecution, by Jesus' faithful example before Pilate. At the same time, he wanted to avoid making claims that could be regarded treasonous, lest his Gospel become cause of further trouble for Christians in the Empire. The delicate task before Mark in chap. 15 is how to report the crucifixion without causing unnecessary offense to the Romans who crucified him. Mark needed to exercise sensitivity in the crucifixion narrative because the tyranny of Pilate paled in comparison to the tyranny of Nero, under whom the recipients of the Gospel were living.The Jewish historian Josephus and the Jewish philosopher Philo both provide some insights into the...

In this episode Ruben watches Jordan Peterson's wild new music video titled "the Postmodernists drinking song." A wildly bad attempt at satire or signs of a break from reality?You be the judge. So tune in to see Ruben sit through Jordan Peterson's philosopher diss track. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ruben-ryan/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ruben-ryan/support

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Always know where your abstractions break, published by lsusr on November 27, 2022 on LessWrong. General relativity plus quantum field theory can describe almost everything in the universe. There are a few exceptions like cosmic expansion and black holes but to human beings confined to a single solar system, fundamental physics is (for all practical purposes) a solved problem. Yet there are many things we don't know. It's as if the universe were a game of chess; we've learned the basic rules but are still figuring out the strategies. All the universe cares about is fundamental physics. The universe always obeys the small-scale fundamental laws of physics. The universe never does anything else. It doesn't care about evolution or chemistry or orbital mechanics or beauty. All of those things are high-level abstractions we (or evolution) invented to make sense of the world. Most of the time we think about how the world works we don't think about fundamental physics. We use our higher-level abstractions instead. Which is fine.most of the time. The problem is that any theory other than "the universe always obeys the fundamental laws of physics" is wrong in the sense that it is not perfectly generalizable. There are many ways abstractions can malfunction when misapplied. All abstractions have limited domains of applicability. Modern political ideologies—Marxist revolutionary theory, libertarianism, feminism—were invented in the context of an industrial civilization. Try too hard to apply these ideas to New Guinean hunter-gatherers or to medieval Japan and they'll cloud your ability to understand what's actually going on. All high-level abstractions are, ultimately, probabilistic. Statistical mechanics almost always works. Almost. Perhaps most importantly, "the concepts we use in everyday life are fuzzy, and break down if pushed too hard". Even Newton's Laws of Motion break when you apply them to too small of a scale. Even general relativity and quantum field theory are not not universally generalizable. General relativity breaks on small-scale phenomena. Quantum field theory breaks on large-scale phenomena. Postmodernists use the idea of leaky abstractions to dismiss the idea of objective truth entirely. That's like driving your car into the ocean and then declaring that cars don't work. Cars do work, but you need to take care of yours and drive it only on the terrain it functions on. The most dangerous philosophers aren't the postmodernists who believe nothing is true. The most dangerous philosophers are the ideologues who believe their particular ideology is true. There is nothing wrong with believing true things are true. One absolutely should believe true things are true. The problem with ideologues is that they believe their personal ideology is absolutely true. If you believe an ideology—any ideology—is absolutely true then you are wrong because high-level abstractions are always imperfect models of reality. Ideologues' tools malfunction because ideologues don't know the limits of their own tools. They aren't even aware their tools have limits. Those who understand ideologies' limits aren't ideologues. Every idea has a domain it can be applied to, beyond which the idea will malfunction. If you don't understand an idea's limitations then you don't understand that idea. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Always know where your abstractions break, published by lsusr on November 27, 2022 on LessWrong. General relativity plus quantum field theory can describe almost everything in the universe. There are a few exceptions like cosmic expansion and black holes but to human beings confined to a single solar system, fundamental physics is (for all practical purposes) a solved problem. Yet there are many things we don't know. It's as if the universe were a game of chess; we've learned the basic rules but are still figuring out the strategies. All the universe cares about is fundamental physics. The universe always obeys the small-scale fundamental laws of physics. The universe never does anything else. It doesn't care about evolution or chemistry or orbital mechanics or beauty. All of those things are high-level abstractions we (or evolution) invented to make sense of the world. Most of the time we think about how the world works we don't think about fundamental physics. We use our higher-level abstractions instead. Which is fine.most of the time. The problem is that any theory other than "the universe always obeys the fundamental laws of physics" is wrong in the sense that it is not perfectly generalizable. There are many ways abstractions can malfunction when misapplied. All abstractions have limited domains of applicability. Modern political ideologies—Marxist revolutionary theory, libertarianism, feminism—were invented in the context of an industrial civilization. Try too hard to apply these ideas to New Guinean hunter-gatherers or to medieval Japan and they'll cloud your ability to understand what's actually going on. All high-level abstractions are, ultimately, probabilistic. Statistical mechanics almost always works. Almost. Perhaps most importantly, "the concepts we use in everyday life are fuzzy, and break down if pushed too hard". Even Newton's Laws of Motion break when you apply them to too small of a scale. Even general relativity and quantum field theory are not not universally generalizable. General relativity breaks on small-scale phenomena. Quantum field theory breaks on large-scale phenomena. Postmodernists use the idea of leaky abstractions to dismiss the idea of objective truth entirely. That's like driving your car into the ocean and then declaring that cars don't work. Cars do work, but you need to take care of yours and drive it only on the terrain it functions on. The most dangerous philosophers aren't the postmodernists who believe nothing is true. The most dangerous philosophers are the ideologues who believe their particular ideology is true. There is nothing wrong with believing true things are true. One absolutely should believe true things are true. The problem with ideologues is that they believe their personal ideology is absolutely true. If you believe an ideology—any ideology—is absolutely true then you are wrong because high-level abstractions are always imperfect models of reality. Ideologues' tools malfunction because ideologues don't know the limits of their own tools. They aren't even aware their tools have limits. Those who understand ideologies' limits aren't ideologues. Every idea has a domain it can be applied to, beyond which the idea will malfunction. If you don't understand an idea's limitations then you don't understand that idea. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

In the wake of the Paris 1968 student protests, Le Monde published a petition from a group of French intellectuals including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and a number of future French ministers that argued for the rights of “12- and 13-year olds” “to have relations with whomever they choose”. In this episode I want to explore why these French intellectuals were on the side of Paedophilia, why the pro-paedophilia lobby was so strong at the time and what philosophical justification they had for this view. This will involve an exploration of what happened with the Paris 1968 student protests. _________________ 

Why do Postmodernists focus so much on knowledge? How do PoMos construct their knowledge? Why is knowledge at the root of the collision between PoMo-ism and liberalism, Modernism, and Christianity? What is my philosophical camp of choice? I also reflect on Psalm 14, a John Mayer tune, and loneliness. Come laugh and think with me about knowledge!

This episode is the culmination of all the hard work we have done in the last three episodes! We are going to look at why the other worldviews we've looked at begin to fall apart because they don't accurately explain and represent reality. Resources and Articles Mentioned in This Episode: 1. Eric Metaxas interview with John Smirak 2. John Smirak article: Is the Woke Cult Just a Spastic Reaction to Darwinism? 3. Christian Headlines article on Richard Dawkins, Atheist Richard Dawkins Says Its 'Wise and Sensible' to Abort Babies with Down Syndrome, Serious Disabilities 4. Five Worldview Comparison Chart from Xenos.org 5. Postmodernists deny that there "are objective, or absolute, moral values.” 6. William Wilberforce's Christian faith and crusade to end the slave trade. 7. The testimony of John Newton 8. Martin Luther Kings' 'I Have a Dream' Speech“ *** Follow Catherine at https://catherinesegars.com/ *** Episode Image Credit: Getty/

Stephen R. C. Hicks is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, USA, Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, and Senior Scholar at The Atlas Society.Dr. Hicks received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Guelph, Canada, and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He has published five books:Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.Nietzsche and the Nazis.The Art of Reasoning: Readings for Logical AnalysisEntrepreneurial Living.Liberalism Pro and Con.In this conversation, we discuss his book Explaining Postmodernism and topics and questions that sorround it, such as Identity Politics, how to approach philosophy as a young student, what's the role of universities in today's world, has Capitalism made the world more prosperous, are all human beings committed to progress, and much more.This episode comes at a time when ideas are clashing more and more, and it seems that we are forgetting how crucial it is to dialogue with those who oppose our ideas, rather than trying to shut them down. We are approaching an era that will be defined by challenges and uncertainty, and there is no better way of thriving during these times than by creating ties with people, and not by engaging in more divisive practices. This is why I believe that my conversation with Dr. Hicks was so important, as we engaged in a meaningful dialogue that had as its purpose to engage with our ideas critically. If we want to thrive as a species, we must recognize that dialogue in our universities, and both in the public and private sphere, is a crucial component of it. We must be able to open the conversation and challenge ideas, such as the notion of progress, globalism, individuality and collectivism. I hope this conversation inspires you to open your heart and ears for those who oppose you, and that you are able to engage with them in a civil, honest and critical manner.---Website: http://www.stephenhicks.org---HIGHLIGHTS(1:40) What does philosophy mean to you?(4:15) How do you approach philosophy and big thinkers with big ideas?(6:35) W.T. Jones - A History of Western Philosophy(8:24) Do you think that there’s a Goldilocks area between subjectivism, relativism, and objective reality?(12:20) Are all human beings committed to progress?(16:45) What do we mean by “progress”? Is progress the same for everyone? Can we measure progress objectively? Is progress only subjective?(18:30) Has Capitalism helped us with progress?(26:40) Can Relativism coexist with Globalism?(34:30) United States, Collective Identities, and Individuality.(44:50) Why have we associated feeling offended with being threatened?(46:15) Reason, emotion, passion, and action.(57:00) The importance of challenging one’s ideas about the world.(59:30) The role universities have in today’s world - an essay mentioned on postmodernism versus liberal education.(1:01:00) What makes a leader great?(1:02:00) Closing Remarks.---Thanks for tuning in for this edition of Through Conversations Podcast!If you find this episode interesting, don't miss out on new conversations and subscribe to the podcast at any podcast feed you use, and leave a review. Also, consider sharing it with someone you think can enjoy this episode. I truly appreciate your support!Keep the conversation going:Instagram:@thruconvpodcastTwitter: @ThruConvPodcastWebsite: throughconversations.com---

You might think this is another story about transgender activism. And in a way, it is. But at an even deeper level, this is a story about postmodernism. Stick with me on this. Canada's National Post recently reported that a British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal heard the case of Jessica Yaniv, who accused a home beauty salon owner of illegal discrimination. The owner refused to give Yaniv a Brazilian wax. If you don't know that term, it means the complete removal of hair from, well, sensitive areas. Yaniv is a transgender woman. In other words, Yaniv is biologically and anatomically male, identifies as a woman, and has not undergone any kind of surgical transition. Salon owner Marcia Da Silva normally offers this service to women. She told the tribunal that she has no problem with LGBT individuals, and that she'd even be okay offering her services to a biological man who'd already surgically transitioned. But she was not comfortable working on male body parts. She was so shaken by the incident, she chose to shut down her business. And she's not the first victim. Apparently, Yaniv is something of an activist. He's filed over a dozen civil rights complaints against salons who refused to wax him. According to the National Post, while some of these cases have been dropped or settled, Da Silva's case went to hearing, where Yaniv compared her to a Neo-Nazi, and said that if she wasn't forced to give him the wax he wanted, it would set a “dangerous” precedent. Now, we could talk about how this circus is the inevitable result of LGBT ideology, and how, once again, the “how will my private choice affect you” line has been demonstrated false. To paraphrase one popular Twitter user, we sure escalated quickly from “bake my cake.” It's important to notice that the crusade of this narcissistic individual is based on the same claim made by those who sued Jack Philips: that a business should not discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Well, if that's really something principle courts and tribunals want to enforce, it won't just apply to gay wedding cakes. It will mean compelling beauty salon owners to do and see things in way that amounts to a sexual violation. While transgenderism is certainly one of the branches bearing this new troubling fruit of violating other's consciences, decency, and innocence, it's not the root. The root idea is an older idea: postmodernism. At its heart, postmodernism posits that neither revelation nor reason can give us the story of reality. In fact, according to postmodernism, there is no universal, discernible story of reality. Truth is a social construct for the postmodernist, even observable truths like male and female. External, seemingly objective facts are, to the postmodernist, clouded by our endless interpretations, which are shaped by our own experiences and cultural biases, and whatever meanings we want to attach to them. Postmodernists hold that certain viewpoints and interpretations have been oppressed and disempowered. So, for the last few decades, there's been a concerted effort to elevate and prioritize those viewpoints, whether they correspond to reality or not. This is how people like Marcia Da Silva find themselves dragged before human rights tribunals for not landscaping male genitalia. Somehow, in a strange ideological twist of reality, she is the oppressor, and Yaniv is the oppressed. This is exactly what's happened wherever a postmodern worldview has been applied – in the name of elevating a viewpoint, another one is oppressed. Of course, Yaniv may have never even read a postmodern philosopher. But bad ideas can become entrenched and unquestioned in our minds and our culture in all kinds of ways. And as long as we're committed to reality being something individuals can never really know, but can always remake and impose on others, the victims of these bad ideas will continue to multiply, and the demands will become ever more nakedly absurd.           

------------------Support the channel------------ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter ------------------Follow me on--------------------- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDissenterYT Dr. Stephen Hicks teaches at Rockford University, where he also directs the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. He is the author of books like Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, and Nietzsche and the Nazis. Additionally, he has published articles and essays on a range of subjects, including entrepreneurism, free speech in academia, the history and development of modern art, Ayn Rand's Objectivism, business ethics and the philosophy of education, including a series of YouTube lectures. Dr. Hicks is a return guest on the show. Please go check out our first conversation, “Postmodernism: From Rousseau to the Present”: https://youtu.be/rBTPMBKCZLs In this episode, we focus on Nietzsche's philosophy, and some of Dr. Hicks' views about it, as exposed in his book, “Nietzsche and the Nazis”. As the title of the book implies, we talk about how Nietzsche might have influenced the German National-Socialist political ideology, and, toward the end, we also get a little bit into the connections between Nazism and Postmodernism, and how Nietzsche was one of the major influences in both these political opposite ideologies. Specific topics include Nietzsche's reactionary views against the values of the Enlightenment, namely rationality and objectivity, individualism, progress, and science as whole. Time Links: 00:59 Nietzsche's take on Rationality and Objectivity 03:58 Was he an individualist? 18:47 What about progress, democracy, human rights? 26:14 About science and values 31:27 Did Nietzsche influence Nazism? Was he anti-Semitic? 35:08 Did his sister, Elisabeth, really distorted his views in The Will to Power? 44:33 In what specific ways did Nietzsche influence Nazism? 51:23 The interesting ideological parallels between Nazism and Postmodernism -- Follow Dr. Hicks' work: His Website: http://www.stephenhicks.org/ His book, Nietzsche and the Nazis: https://tinyurl.com/y8y2vyhf Also, Explaining Postmodernism: https://tinyurl.com/yarexghn And follow him on Twitter: @SRCHicks And Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Stephen.R.C.Hicks -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, JUNOS, SCIMED, PER HELGE HAAKSTD LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, RUI BELEZA, MIGUEL ESTRADA, ANTÓNIO CUNHA, CHANTEL GELINAS, JIM FRANK, JERRY MULLER, FRANCIS FORD, AND HANS FREDRIK SUNDE! I also leave you with the link to a recent montage video I did with the interviews I have released until the end of June 2018: https://youtu.be/efdb18WdZUo And check out my playlists on: PSYCHOLOGY: https://tinyurl.com/ybalf8km PHILOSOPHY: https://tinyurl.com/yb6a7d3p ANTHROPOLOGY: https://tinyurl.com/y8b42r7g

Traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown and what was manifested and, paradoxically, found the principle of its force in the movement by which it deployed that force. Those on whom it was exercised could remain in the shade; they received light only from that portion of power that was conceded to them, or from the reflection of it that for a moment they carried. Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. In this episode of Made You Think, Neil and I discuss Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. In this book Foucault discusses the history of, and differences between, discipline and punishment. We find that, despite being one of the founding fathers of postmodernism, Foucault’s ideas are reasonable and well thought out. “In monarchical law, punishment is a ceremonial of sovereignty; it uses the ritual marks of the vengeance that it applies to the body of the condemned man; and it deploys before the eyes of the spectators an effect of terror as intense as it is discontinuous, irregular and always above its own laws, the physical presence of the sovereign and of his power.” We cover a wide range of topics, including: Freedom of speech vs. Freedom from offense Whether language is interpreted by the speaker or the receiver Hierarchy in modern society A gruesome public execution How obtuse writing is intellectual signalling by serious philosophers And much more. Please enjoy, and be sure to grab a copy of Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault! If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our episode on The Riddle of the Gun about other types of Freedom, and Daily Rituals, about artists and geniuses that achieve great things because of their "discipline". Be sure to join our mailing list to find out about what books are coming up, giveaways we're running, special events, and more. Links from the Episode Mentioned in the show North Star podcast [12:30] Hardcore History podcast episode [14:15] Egalitarianism [26:28] Turnover in the richest people [29:15] The Panopticon [33:18] Nat Chat with Adil Majid [37:47] Machiavellism [38:35] Growth Machine [38:44] Self-driving cars [44:20] Slate Star Codex [46:56] Black Mirror [57:13] Unregistered podcast [58:00] UK man arrested for making offensive joke [1:08:56] V for Vendetta (2005)  [1:11:30] Students no longer support free speech [1:12:00] Kaepernick kneeling during anthem [1:13:32] Cognitive dissonance [1:21:36] Power Law distribution [1:23:40] Bruno Mars’ cultural appropriation [1:27:32] Books mentioned Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (Nat’s Notes) Daily Rituals by Mason Currey [5:47] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) The Stoics [7:16] The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault [9:26] Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician by Michihiko Hachiya [20:06] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) The Riddle of the Gun by Sam Harris [20:06] (book episode) Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari [21:12] (Nat’s Notes) Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb [28:32] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) The Sovereign Individual [30:21] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell [31:28] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) Recession Proof Graduate by Charlie Hoehn [35:40] (on Nat Chat) Seeing Like a State by James Scott [40:00] Albion’s Seed by David Fischer [46:56] Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari [48:25] Godel Escher Bach [1:07:52] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) Das Kapital by Karl Marx [1:20:05] People mentioned Michel Foucault Jacques Derrida [4:40] Immanuel Kant [5:20] Steve Jobs [5:25] David Perell [12:30] Emperor Hirohito [20:38] David Selverian [32:15] Charlie Hohen [35:40] Andrés, our Podcast Editor [36:37] Adil Majid [37:45] Eminem [39:58] Nietzsche [59:10] Aristotle [1:00:50] Stephen Fry [1:09:40] Ron Paul [1:09:55] Jordan Peterson [1:19:30] (12 Rules for Life episode) Karl Marx [1:20:05] Show Topics 00:55 - We broke a record! Up to now, every book we’ve done we’d recommend - this one we don’t recommend. We would not wish this book on other people. 01:20 - We’d intended to read a postmodernist book, having been so negative about them in the past, but it turned out this wasn’t so much about postmodernism. While it doesn’t have a lot of the key themes we see today in postmodernism, the ideas are still very relevant to the conflicts that are talked about. Big focus on power-dynamics. 02:35 - Foucault’s not really arguing for anything in particular, it’s more his interpretation of the history of punishment. The language is very verbose, it’s almost unreadable. Derrida and Foucault are both famous for being difficult to read. Intellectual signalling. There’s a temptation in philosophy to write like this. 05:30 - Fallacy of correlation: just because great people happen to have bad habits does not mean you must copy them to become great yourself. They were great despite the bad habits. 06:20 - The idea that if something is easily understood it’s not suitable for teaching at uni. 07:40 - Kept pushing this episode back because it was a slog to get through the book. There are interesting ideas in it, regardless. 08:20 - The evolution of the prison system. The book is a four part history of discipline and punishment. 09:16 - This is said to be Foucault’s best work. The writer was born in France and moved to Berkeley to teach, he was gay, and an early advocate for gay rights. He later moved to the San Francisco area to be around that scene. He eventually died of HIV/AIDS. 10:15 - Foucault’s book The History of Sexuality book is very supportive of the non-heteronormative lifestyle which is where the postmodernists get a lot of their ideas about sexuality from. 10:50 - Sign up for our email list, we send out what books we are going to cover ahead of time and because of that we feel obliged to always finish a book. Sign up to help pressure us, it’s a great email list. 12:00 - Possible follow-up episode for this that’s more about postmodernism in general. Would be interesting to see a pro argument for it. 13:30 - Let us know on twitter (@nateliason) (@TheRealNeilS) if you’d like us to try out a slightly different format for the podcast where we do more of a deep dive into a school of philosophy, find out where it came from and its key ideas. 13:50 - The history of punishment. A brutal public execution with fireworks. One of the last public executions in France. Very graphic, an all day event that people traveled to see happen, in the 1750s. It was gruesome and every part of it got botched. 16:00 - In this section, Foucault says that punishment was historically a warning to others. Punishment was a way of the sovereignty speaking to the masses, saying to them what would happen if they out-stepped their boundaries. 17:30 - Part of what Foucault is arguing is that in the transition to prison, society moved from pure punishment - in which the person who commited the crime serves as a broader example to society - to rehabilitation of the individual. 18:00 - There is a thread of humanism in the book. The idea of rehabilitation is linked to the idea of every person having a soul that can be redeemed. The idea of making a person pay in life so that God would judge them less harshly in the afterlife. 19:00 - Believing in the value of people seems to be a major shift in humanity in the last 2-300 years, but this could equally just be a function of telling history. Previous societies more communal than the modern-day, individualistic US. 22:55 - Foucault points out here that while punishment was confined to those who did wrong, discipline became a part of life. All elements of society were built around these disciplinary structures. 23:40 - Punishment started as crimes against the sovereign and shifted to crimes against others. An individual has a place, but a place also has an individual. Everybody is integrated but also interchangeable and expendable. 25:35 - The strict imposition of hierarchy in all parts of life. Before, people could be punished for breaking the law but now you could be punished for only breaking societal norms. Start of a class system. Foucault suggests these are all artificial constructs imposed on us but that we all go along with. The postmodernist idea that the patriarchy is an artificial manifestation of power rather than an emergent result of inequality. 28:32 - Taleb said in Skin in the Game that it’s not how close together wealth classes are that a society uses to measure its equality it’s how easily there is movement between those classes. In Florence, the same few families are at the top of society since the 1600s. 29:15 - 80% turnover in the richest people in the last 20 or so years. Also above 50% of people will have at least one year of being in the top 5 income. 30:26 - Possibilities of a return to city-states. 31:28 - Any idle time is a waste. Punishment punishes you for not being somewhere you’re supposed to be according to a timetable but discipline allows you to make a greater use of that time. Through discipline you can multiply your positive output, like negative reinforcement vs positive reinforcement. 32:15 - Apprenticeships are still around in the modern day only not codified as they were previously. Cold calling/emailing firms can work as a way in if you can offer them something valuable. Like Andrés, who puts together the podcasts. 39:58 - Some of Foucault’s sentences are so long you need Eminem’s lungs to read them out loud. 40:00 - Foucault says that buildings become designed to maintain control over the people within them. Cities that have emerged organically are very much unknowable from the top. So they are redesigned to zone them or make them into grids. 43:00 - Washington DC was designed from the top-down to be more organic feeling. Apparently they designed it to be hard to navigate to prevent invasions. In places like India, the cities have been constructed from the bottom up and so eCommerce is difficult as deliveries are really hard to do. 44:20 - Question of how self-driving cars will change the layouts of cities. 45:10 - There’s no great way to take skyscrapers down or even deal with them when they age, they were never planned to be taken down. In Munich there are a lot of pedestrianized areas with pop-up bars and cafes. 46:55 - There were a few main groups who founded America including the Puritans, the Quakers and Catholics, a lot of whose beliefs are codified in law, leading now to a more socially conservative country compared to much of Europe. 49:50 - Ranks and hierarchies play on our nature as social creatures and our in-built desire to know where in the hierarchy we fit in. This can be seen in the importance of titles in big companies, how it’s taken so seriously on the inside that from the outside it can seem almost funny. Titles are a cheap form of compensating somebody, like giving kids gold stars. 54:08 - Division is a big theme in the book. Among the Postmodernists the oppressor is like the entity that has the plague. Foucault calls out that humans have always had this distinction between good and bad, healthy and unhealthy. A tribal view. This is one of his ideas that we see the most in the modern day. 59:07 - Nietzsche was not a nazi, you can see how some of his ideas led to nazism but there is not a complete match up. 59:46 - There are a lot of things we think are normal now but were thought of abnormal in the past. 1:00:50 - Aristotle said that women can’t think well enough to vote; he wasn’t sexist, that’s just what people thought at the time. 1:01:10 - People take Foucault’s basic ideas too far when they say that all distinctions between individuals have to be disregarded. Foucault would say that it’s wrong to say one difference is abnormal where the other is normal but differences in themselves are fine. The difference can’t be argued but any judgement made on those differences is subjective. 1:03:00 - There was nothing objectionable in this book besides the writing style. 1:03:35 - The word “normal” is very loaded. Supermajority and outliers. Distribution judgements vs. value judgements. Gender normative views. It’s all about terminology. 1:06:32 - Words shape people’s thoughts, the use of words can change opinions and win arguments. People’s interpretations of language shapes their worldview. 1:08:00 - Postmodernism treats language as interpreted by the receiver whereas in most of life we have to treat language as interpreted by the speaker. 1:09:36 - You don’t have a right not to be offended. You can’t have freedom of speech and freedom from offense. Freedom of speech is not there so people can talk about the weather. 1:10:40 - Germany has so many anti-Nazi laws meaning that people can go to prison for things they say. It is thought of as a free country but the interpretation of freedom is very different to that in America. 1:11:50 - It’s strange that freedom of speech is something that needs to be defended. 1:13:44 - Virtue signaling with upper-middle class white kids feeling the need to do walkouts to defend minorities from being offended. Very patronizing and even offensive. 1:18:30 - Postmodernists say you have to not assume anyone’s gender because gender is fluid, and people who decide to change gender are now that gender. Logic is a patriarchal concept! These ideas are not from Foucault so the modern postmodernists must be getting them from somewhere completely different. 1:19:30 - Jordan Peterson and Foucault would get along. 1:20:00 - The issue a lot of philosophers have where their ideas get taken way further past where they themselves drew their conclusions. Karl Marx, towards the end of his life recanted some of the more extreme ideas of Das Kapital. 1:20:44 - If there is something we are missing about these arguments, please let us hear about it, tweet us (@nateliason) (@TheRealNeilS)! 1:21:36 - A lot of the most post-moderny kids on campus are the outcasts. 1:25:40 - Racial jokes used to be part of bonding but now it seems that people are too afraid to say things. 1:28:12 - Closing thought: anytime you see a modern philosophy it’s worth going to the original source. 1:30:00 – People that make this show happen: Perfect Keto is the one-stop shop for all your ketogenic diet needs. The ketogenic diet is really effective for weight loss. Perfect Keto’s exogenous ketones helps you get into ketosis. Use the 20% coupon mentioned in the episode or go to www.perfectketo.com/think. Kettle & Fire bone broth helps you warm in this winter. Theory says we were scavengers and sucked up the bone colagens. K&F bone broth is excellent to get all those nutrients we don’t get anymore. Also it helps combat modern diseases like small intestine bacterial overgrowth. The mushroom coffee from Four Sigmatic energizes you with less caffeine. Chaga mush, linesmain mush stimulants give a really nice buzz, and the Cordyceps elixir is a caffeine-free stimulant. They hot cocoas are instead relaxing and a good dessert They have a new matcha product. Finally, you can help the show for free shopping on Amazon through our affiliate link. Subscribe to the Mailing List to receive bonuses, giveaways, future episode links and more. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe at https://madeyouthinkpodcast.com

In this episode, Wes and I consider value systems ancient and modern, the degeneration of modern notions of truth, and the inability of Postmodernists to put their claims into rational arguments. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/alexander-schmid9/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/alexander-schmid9/support

Postmodernist philosophy is famous for being paradoxical. Claims like "the truth is that there is no truth" or "everything is relative" are popular - especially among academics. Many proponents are even OK with explicit contradictions in their worldview. To me, a contradiction is a demonstration of error, and not caring about intellectual consistency is a sign of dogmatism and irrationalism. But according to Dr. Stephen Hicks, that's because I have a certain psychological response to contradictions. Postmodernists have a different psychological response, and so they aren't as bothered by inconsistency. Dr. Hicks thinks it's possible to be intellectually respectable while defending internally-inconsistent views. I don't think it's possible. What do you think?

On this episode of The Renegade Report Roman and Jonathan are joined by Canadian clinical psychologist and tenured professor at the University of Toronto, Jordan Peterson. Professor Peterson gives insight into the great ideological war between the theory of Marxism as contrasted to Western values. This leads into a discussion regarding the breakdown of freedoms on academic campuses and the very real danger that Postmodernists pose to our way of life. Jonathan questions the "power hierarchy" theory and Roman probes into Professor Peterson's notion of what gives life meaning and why nihilism is a road to nowhere.