Crossing the Threshold series #5

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                                             You Are Here

We now come to our “you are here” star and we find ourselves in what is called the Postmodern World. But what exactly does that mean? You know something is wrong when experts have a hard time defining it. Richard Tarnas says that you can’t really have a postmodern worldview because the postmodern paradigm is fundamentally subversive of all paradigms. Make sense? Or how about this one by Jean-Francois Lyotard postmodern is “incredulity toward metanarratives”, which simply means the Postmodern worldview is that there is no large story, no metanarrative.

So here is a picture definition of postmodernism that may help you understand the world in which you live. Watch the end scenes of James Cameron’s 1997 movie Titanic. After the Titanic sinks fifteen hundred people are left splashing around in the frigid dark waters of the North Atlantic Ocean. They are all desperate to save their own lives by clinging to whatever piece of wreckage they might be able to find. There you have Postmodernism. Remember in this world there is no metanarrative, no large story of God and his plan for saving and redeeming the fallen creation. People are entitled to their own private subjective spiritual beliefs; their own “piece of wreckage”, whatever they think might save them. However those beliefs cannot enter or interfere with the objective reality of the secular world. Hence the world is divided by man into two compartments; the sacred where you may privately believe in whatever god you want to and the secular where science is god and man is king.