Just a question, Rhian, are you a postmodernist?

Boxgum, don’t get cross, Peter Sellick asked a straightforward question: Is heaven real? I gave a summary of my answer: it is real only in the minds of believers, it is not real in the normal meaning of the word.

It is interesting that among all the postings on this topic so few, or none, have tried to answer Peter’s question directly, including you. What has the satisfaction of your deeper yearnings got to do with the real existence of heaven?

Let us have your concise answer to the question “is heaven real?”, yes or no and why, but before you do, check, if you have not already done so, Google for The Catholic Encyclopedia and The Religion of Islam sites for their understanding of heaven or paradise. And if you eventually go there what more do you expect once your deepest yearnings shave been satisfied?

My hope is that through these repeated discussions people will understand that what goes on in the brain is only a, sometimes distorted, image of the real world, it is not reality itself.

As a child if there was ever something that worried me my mother would always say "Keiran, it is just mind over matter". What a great thought this has played in my life. By refocusing my psychic energy i could develop a coping mechanism to control pain like at the dentist. i.e. sublimate this particular worry by imagining deep green ocean or imagine my own green elysian fields. For myself this would seem to be only a temporary measure until I could rechannel my thoughts back to the material problem. But who knows, we probably sublimate a great deal from our material existence where we are totally unaware and this can become part of the problem too. It is not inconceivable that the valhallas, elysians, heavens, paradises, nirvanas and their associated religious playpens are all part of the same picture ........ a coping, displacement, denial and in all cases a controlling mechanism.

I know that my ninety-year old mother-in-law who refers to me as a heathen, sees heaven as very real indeed because it mostly occupies her thoughts when I meet her on a regular basis. I have as a loving son-in-law been known to say that her concerns about heaven are just mind over matter.

YngNLuvnI,
I don’t think of myself as a postmodernist, though like many people nowadays I’m influenced by postmodernism.

Postmodernism does a good job of challenging western culture’s assumption of its own superiority, questioning our assumed capacity for dispassionate objectivity, and disputing black-and-white distinctions between true and false, fact and fiction. These have been an important corrective of modernist hubris and excess.

But postmodernism has its own problems too. Extreme relativism is self-defeating. The understanding that our views, experiences, circumstances etc influence how we see the world can become a licence to manufacture our realities, and can leads to nihilism. Understanding people as self-interested products of their past and circumstances can lead to an obsession with identify markers which sees people only as defined by the categories they belong to –such as gender, class, race, or sexual orientation.

While a dilute form of postmodernism is now pervasive in mainstream modern culture, its more emphatic and extreme versions never really took hold and now seem to be waning in influence even in non-scientific academia.

The theologian Karl Barth, who Peter admires, was in some ways a precursor of postmodernism in his rejection of modernist definitions of reality and its verification (see Peter’s article http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4567).

I think the modernist-influenced intellectual toolkit of reason and evidence, historical and archaeological inquiry, techniques of biblical criticism such as form criticism etc (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_criticism) are very useful for both theological understanding and promoting faith development – I’m very comfortable in a “modernist” mindset. But I also believe that there will never be a satisfactory “scientific” proof of God, that what we know in faith will always be to some degree allusive or incomplete, mutable, and communicable only through symbol and story. And I suppose that’s a pretty pomo perspective.

Rhian, if I mention that "postmodern" has mutated into a hyperlink to the 360 degrees of an infinite meta-narrative with its global network of moderators and always connected, then we now have a communications medium unlike others that were one to many forms. The internet is communications many to many which I find truly significant.

The Enlightenment we understand as a struggle in the name of reason, against tyranny, superstition and inequity, but at its core was the new communications medium with the printing press. Where once there was but the spoken word, and then the beautifully hand written word, now we had the printed word. Next we had the wire which then goes from the wire to the wireless. Wireless is a one to many dictatorship of the loud voice and hence the modernism of the early twentieth century is reflective of extremes of unreason ......i.e. dictators. It is not surprising that television gave us the lateral but superficial postmodern but the internet is interactive, democratic, many to many, with a deeper realism and our new enlightenment where the word is not with a teddy (god) anymore but with the people.

There is no teddy (god) but our new enlightenment perhaps explains why we are having teddy wars.

Boxgum,

Nine absolutions for a dead Pope. Why so many?