That's Me, All Right!

Did you know that I am part of a "rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists?"

I am! Who knows, maybe you are, too.

That's what Princeton professor Peter Singer thinks of me, and all Christians:

"Writing in the fall issue of the magazine “Foreign Policy,” the professor of bio-ethics predicts, 'By 2040, it may be that only a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists will defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct.'" He cites the Terri Schiavo case as the turning point.

No doubt the founders of Princeton would turn over in their graves at a rate of several thousands of RPM's if they heard this coming from the mouth of a faculty menber at the institution they founded.

Singer is right about one thing. The Terri Schiavo case (which I blogged on extensively here; see the March 2005 entries) was the turning point. It just didn't turn things in the direction he thinks it did.

Music Is Your Only Friend, Until...?

Oh, my, my -- one could go on and on for hours about this one -- the appalling pop-ification and de-Christianizing of even ostensibly Christian funerals.

The best line of many memorable lines in this wonderful piece (I'm not sure the writer is a believer) is that nowadays, one's funeral is "the last me moment."

Here is what most of your friends and mine actually believe:

"To us hymns are just half-remembered school songs; prayers are comforting but broken spells; God's name has been sullied by hypocrites and zealots; death -- we're betting, though we hoped to be wrong -- is no glorious hereafter but the great bugger-all. Without faith, all we have is now, each other and the songs we grew up with, which embody our lives' meaning, our love affairs and losses. What sounded profane to our parents is to us sacred. Pop is our only ceremonial music and, in the years to come, it will provide our unlikely requiems."

In other words, "music is your only friend, until the end."

This is so terribly, terribly, sad, and it speaks volumes about the vacuousness of a postmodern culture that has rejected God. Let the debate begin. Either Christ has a proper place at a funeral, or He has a place nowhere in society or culture.

[Hint: for those of you who didn't grow up in the late sixties or early seventies -- lucky you -- the title of this post is taken from a famous song by The Doors called, "When The Music's Over (Turn Out the Lights)." You can see the relevance.]

Non-Compliance in the Face of Postmodernism Is No Vice

Al Mohler issues a stirring call to the church -- we must never give in to the false god that threatens to overrun our culture, the false god of postmodernism:

"We don't get to choose our times. We don't get to choose our challenges. We didn't choose to live in a post-Christian age. We didn't choose to confront the postmodern mind, but this is where we are, and it is time that we become a post-compliant church. While all is shaking and shaken around us, the one thing that cannot be shaken is the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, and this kingdom is visible in His church.

In a post-Christian age, confronted with the challenge of the postmodern mind, the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ is called to be a post-compliant people. Anything less is just another form of spiritual surrender."

Deconstructionism At the Mall, And Everywhere

Albert Mohler has a good column on the closing of the postmodern mind. Here is a small taste:

"In both its hard and soft forms, deconstructionism has filtered down to the popular culture, even to those who never heard of Jacques Derrida but have been nonetheless infected with this postmodern mentality and this subtle form of subversive relativism and subjectivism. You can hear Derrida in the discourse of adolescents in the mall. You can hear it in the conversation on the nightly news. The closing of the postmodern mind is the opposite of what postmodernism claimed to be its aspiration. Postmodernism claimed that this new postmodern age--with the end of modernity, the demise of scientific objectivity, and the openness to new forms and understandings of truth--would lead to an opening of the mind. But as is always the case, the totalitarian opening of the mind always ends with the radical closing of the mind. There is nothing less tolerant than the modern ethos of tolerance. There is nothing less open than the modern idea of open-mindedness. In the darkening sky and the gathering clouds, we see the haunting closure of this supposedly open mind."