impleri

Some of you may know that i’ve been playing around at a Christian fundamentalist’s blog/forum for the past year or so. i first joined to post comments on the author’s critique of Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy (or was it The Last Word, and the Word After That?). i had seem some blatant twisting of McLaren, so i posted some responses to that. Well, after a month-long discussion on the book and the critique, i remained around to post on some random topics, particularly ones dealing with the Emerging Church Movement or postmodern philosophy. i stayed around primarily as a balance to the conservative, Reformed theology fundamentalist perspective that was so rampant.
Over the last four (maybe five) months, one member of the forum claiming a seminary PhD in Biblical Interpretation began posting regular blog entries on the ECM and postmodernism. Originally, the posts were simply “postmodernism is bad because it’s new” but slowly evolved to “postmodernism is bad because i don’t like my (mis)interpretation of it…and modernism is bad as well.” This person likes to group all postmoderns together in one big group with the relativists and then claim “See! I told you they were bad!” Of course, i was around, so i began to comment on every single post pointing out his discrepancies and, ultimately, became ignored because the author was convinced he was right.
Well, today i got a message from the site owner asking me to go elsewhere because i’m a nuisance. i find it funny that because i disagree with some of them on some issues, i am the nuisance. Yet, i have repeatedly remained as civilised as possible while presenting my case so that i wouldn’t be an ignorant naysayer like some of the other members there. The site admin threatened to ban me because of a recent discussion on profanity. My basic premise was that there was no Biblical proof that words like “s***”, “f***”, and “b******” were inherently wrong/evil/sinful. i went on to suggest that the only possible way to get that conclusion is to first appeal to a particular English-speaking community that finds those words as such (in short, those particluar words are wrong/evil/sinful because the community defines them as such) and not by some “transcendent Biblical mandate.” i furthered my point by suggesting that some of the language in that very discussion could be considered profane (such as “freak” and “idiot”) and, additionally, that any appeal to the Biblical guidelines for what counts as acceptable would be flawed as none of those people spoke English. It would be like running to Germany and telling them that the word “schiesse” (English “s***”) is wrong because the English equivalent is bad. As a point-of-fact, the German schiesse is about as acceptable in Germany as “crap” is in English (maybe slightly less, but the Germans i’ve known say that it’s not as taboo as it is in America), and that some acceptable English words are unacceptable over there because it is “profanity” there.
One last “fun” note was when discussing postmodernism, i referenced Nietzsche (bad move in a fundamentalist board, FYI). i was returned with the general misinterpretation that Nietzsche wanted to kill God, yadda yadda. i corrected them slightly by giving the context of that phrase in Nietzsche and then also the historical context of it first being used in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. So, i’m about to be banned simply because i disagreed. My reply to the site admin was simply “discussing something with people who already agree with you is never beneficial to increasing understanding.”