"...I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me..." [Deuteronomy 5:8-10]

Monday, June 28, 2004

Postmodernist religious fundamentalism
First a quote:

...postmodernist fundamentalists insist upon defending their right to employ the mythos of their faith (i.e., all that was meant to be a source of intuitive meaning and experiential insights) to redefine the logos (all that is rational, empirical) of natural science.

Postmodernist defenders of the faith demand the right, to quote Alvin Plantinga, a well-known philosopher of religion, “to pursue science.. as Christians, starting from and taking for granted what we know as Christians.” Structurally similar arguments appear again and again in other faiths, defending their right to pursue “Vedic science” or “Islamic sciences,” complete with miracles and other manifestations of the supernatural. Indeed, among Hindu and Islamic faithful, the right to their “own” science is asserted with a special vehemence, because it is mixed up with anti-colonial and anti-Western rhetoric...

By Meera Nanda, Religious Fundamentalisms, Modernist and Postmodernist
As Nanda stresses, the craziness of "Postmodernist" Fundamentalism is that it provides no basis for rejecting one set of religious truth claims from any other. (I've touched on Plantiga previously in my old article "Why faith and science don't mix"). But while Fundamentalism borrows the language of postmodernism, it corrupts the latter's central tenant of incredulity towards metanarratives. Fundamentalism is itself a metanarrative, feigning "reasoned" scepticism towards the beliefs of others, and "reasoned" but blind acceptance of its own particular mythos. More on this to come...

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