My God Can Beat Up Your Godlessness

First of all, a collective thank you for the chorus of medical advoices, everything from herbs & spices to medical intuitives to inclined beds. I've had no time to carefully sift through or coonsider any of it, but I will. Although I am an unreserved advocate of the white man's medicine, I am not at all averse to alternative approaches as an adjunct. As a matter of fact, the vascular physician I consulted with yesterday thought I might even be too drug happy. That is, with my diabetes, I am extremely proactive, and take certain medications before it is even necessary to do so.

But not only did he find absolutely nothing wrong with the sturdy Gagdad vascular system, he was extremely impressed with my diabetic control. He said it would probably be another couple of months before he would see a patient with an A1c in my range (mid 5s). (This is a critical number for diabetics, as it indicates the average blood sugar level during the previous three months. It's very difficult to get A1c under my range without risking dangerous lows.) My goal is to exert strict control until the day they either come out with a pump that mimics the pancreas (which will probably be less than ten years) or perfect beta cell transplants or regeneration.

(Speaking of the latter, just look at the shockingly deceptive way this leftist writer handles this good news for diabetics, taking a gratuitous swipe at President Bush while misleading the reader that this breakthrough with adult stem cells has something to do with embryonic stem cells [now edited out, but still containing a misleading reference to a non-existent "debate" in Washington about adult stem cells]. This is why I despise the left: the agenda always comes first. Truth is of no consequence whatsoever.)

I don't mean to get sidetracked into a post about my various symptoms, but I should have been more specific. It's not the cold resulting from the vasoconstriction that bothers me so much, but I started having the opposite problem alternating with it -- excessive vasodilation in the extremities. Whereas the cold is just cold, the vasodilation is kind of uncomfortable. It's like the capillaries can't decide on a nice middle range. But the doc assured me that it was clinically insignificant and even subtly implied -- or at least I picked it up with my Coon scent -- that Dear Leader was a bit of a hypochondriac.

But as I have written before, Dear Leader does indeed have many mysterious and diverse symptoms that come and go, not all of them unpleasant, including the ability to wake up blogging out of a sound sleep.

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Now, what is the best philosophy? That question popped into my noggin this morning, and it does have direct relevance to what we were discussing yesterday regarding language. For the best philosophy would necessarily encompass the best linguistic theory, if only because any philosophy must be stored and transmitted in the medium of language. Therefore, if your philosophy of language is off, then your entire philosophy will be built on sand.

Put another way, is it possible for human beings to build a philosophy on "solid rock," so to speak? To actually arrive at the "One True Philosophy" that cannot not be true? Yes, I believe so -- and believing so is one of the things that immediately sets one apart from any middlebrow postmodern lie-roasted wackademia nut. Contrary to the caviling Dr. Qi, we have no objection whatsoever to any postmodernist who believes in absolute Truth that may be known by the naturally supernatural intellect. I fully acknowledge my ignorance in this arena, and will be grateful if Dr. Qi can point us in the direction of any such postmodernists.

Speaking of the pretentiously vacuous Dr. Qi, he keeps suggesting that there is something valuable about postmodern philosophy that has eluded Coons, something that would presumably contribute to our wisdom, our happiness and our salvation. But the evasive rascal won't say what it is. Rather, he simply critiques our views, which in itself sounds suspiciously postmodern, since postmodernism is an intensely skeptical and even paranoid enterprise -- after all, it does advocate the "hermeneutics of suspicion" -- that knows only how to question but not build anything meaningful or enduring. If it has built something meaningful -- a timeless religion, a precious institution, an unsurpassable book of wisdom -- I would certainly like to know what it is, for I am no an ideologue -- I take truth where I can find it, and I only advocate "what works" -- i.e., what is spiritually efficacious.

You will notice that the left generally tears down or appropriates but does not build, for the very reason that it is infused with the cynical spirit of postmodernism. For example, instead of attacking a wonderful institution such as the Boy Scouts, why doesn't the left simply invent ther own version of the Boy Scouts, built around leftist principles instead of traditional manly virtues? It is my view -- and I assume the general view of Coons -- that the Boy Scouts is not intended to be a place to scout for boys. But if a leftist wants to have an institution that teaches impressionable young men that homosexuality is a perfectly acceptable lifestyle, then why not form such a group? Why the intolerance toward those of us who believe that adolescent boys -- because of cosmic laws inscribed in nature -- require noble and virtuous heterosexual male role models in order to become proper men? The very notion that "obeying the cosmic law" has something to do with so-called "homophobia" is strict nonsense.

Perhaps Dr. Qi will correct us with some actual examples instead of merely critiquing our view, but it is my opinion that postmodernism, as a general movement, has contributed nothing to human wisdom, happiness, or virtue -- which, along with salvation, are all that really counts in a philosophy. I cannot think of any postmodernist idea that I rely upon to govern my life -- or, if there is such an idea, I am quite certain that it is better expressed in one of the great revelations. But the entire idea of "revelation" is completely unacceptable to postmodernism. Rather, there are no privileged texts, much less timelessly true texts authored or inspired by an ontologically real transcendent source.

I don't care what religion you are, but assuming it is rooted in an orthodox vertical revelation and "extended" in a sound horizontal tradition, it is going to be profoundly true and truly profound in a way that no postmodern philosophy can ever be. Christianity, Judaism, Vedanta, Taoism, even Buddhism -- each of these embodies a core of timeless wisdom that far surpasses anything postmodernism has ever produced. Michel Foucault will not be read in 1,000 years. In fact, I know of no serious person who reads him today, except as a perverse curiosity. Just look at how the man lived -- which we will not get into here, since this is a family blog.

But real wisdom -- wisdom emanating from the religio perennis -- is both horizontally effective and vertically transformative. It also embodies standards and ideals which do not come down to our level, but which we must elevate ourselves to understand and to live. Would anyone suggest that you must elevate yourself in order to live out the "Foucault ideal?" Yes, I suppose some Qi theorist would. Conversely, are there really a great number of pomofessors at elite universities who teach the spiritual truism that virtue is the mark, the seal, and the guarantor of wisdom? Examples, please.

Dilys left us a quote yesterday by David Thompson: "This is the legacy of postmodern thought, as trafficked by many academics of the left -- the ‘freedom’ to blunt the senses and be triumphantly, shamelessly wrong."

Yes, postmodernism is simply a game. Now, I have no objection to games, but the problem with postmodernism is that it has no rules except that there are no rules. For we may only know the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the nonlocal light of their relationship to the Absolute. In other words, there is no meaningful game for humans -- in fact, no game at all -- in the absence of the Absolute. Therefore, the existence of the Absolute -- or O -- is "rule one" in any functioning philosophy. Remove the Absolute, and you have pulled the rug out from under your own wigged-out philosophy -- and that is a hair-raising reality for these bald-faced liars.

This applies not only to postmodernists, but to any philosophy, for, as the Catholic philosopher of science and baseball, Stanley Jaki, points out, you cannot get to second base before you have touched first base. Intellectually larcenous postmodernists are under the illusion that it is possible to "steal second base." They entirely take for granted the fact that it is only because they ungratefully pee in the stream of the Judeo-Christian West that first base has been safely secured by our precious intellectual tradition. They sit out on a limb that they imagine is independent of that religious tradition, but postmodernism is a deeply reactionary and parasitic philosophy that appears as an inevitable but perverse "possibilty" in an intellectually Christianized world.

Now, there is nothing wrong with being a "relativist." It all depends upon that to which one is a relative. The problem with postmodernism is that it is "relative to nothing," which isn't actually relativism, but a bizarre form of absolute nihilism. The relative plane only exists because it is relative to the Absolute. This is an example of another religious truth that "cannot not be." And it is why the First Commandment is the first commandment: I am your God, and you shall have no other gods before me. For if you have any god other than the one God, or any absolute other than the Absolute, your philosophy is ultimately worthless.

Because the relative plane inheres in the light of the Absolute, there exist qualities. Again, given the necessary structure of cosmic existence, qualities, or degrees of being and perfection, cannot not exist. But the qualities are not merely arbitrary, as argued by postmodernists. Rather, qualities only exist because they represent degrees of being on an absolute scale. Is this not obvious? No, it is not obvious. I was never taught this in the 12-odd years I meanderthralled my way through the higher educational establishment. No one told me that absolute truth of necessity exists absolutely, and that the plane of maya represents a vertical scale of intelligible being, in which it is our task -- the task of our life -- to rise up, rung by rung -- but always accompanied by the perfections of virtue. Or if they did, I was absent that day.

Damn, I'm really getting sidetracked, for I had intended to explain why Christianity provides such a vastly superior linguistic theory than any postmodern sophistry. I hope to get to that tomorrow.

Without belief in God, without belief that the truth is real, is in him, all our attempts to "tell the truth" become no more than stories told for human purposes -- to persuade, to comfort, to stake claims, to build power -- but none of them means anything, or, more accurately, means anything else. Behind the images and metaphors of paintings and poems, behind the patterns of music and verse, behind the imagined characters of novels and plays, there is no mysterious depth of meaning, there is nothing. And yet, a child of four knows what a lie is and knows what a story is and knows that they are not the same. --Lucy Beckett