Posted by
Randal Lee Manning Jr. on Friday, October 27, 2006 11:01:31 PM
I am Randal Lee Manning Jr, a graduate student at Denver Seminary and this is my first blog. My guess is that very few people will actually read this blog. Why would you? I am just a random person with little to zero credibility. I write, not under the delusional hopes that somehow this blog will catch fire and my voice will be heard but rather as stress relief. I can't watch the news, go out into public or watch television anymore without getting pissed off at something or somebody. So this blog will become my punching bag for intellectual, political and religious frustrations.
A broad theme that will be found throughout my blogs is my longing to return to reason. Few may understand what exactly this means and as it is the title of my blog I feel a need to explain. Renowned Christian apologist, Francis Schaeffer wrote a book, published in 1968 entitled Escape From Reason. The book suggests that intellectual thought was shifting from reason or modernity into something different something worse. Well guess what, Francis Schaeffer was right. We now live in a time in history that has in many cases escaped from reason, what's worse is many people are delighted that society has left reason behind.
People who keep up with the shifts of intellectual thought are well aware that there has been a move to escape from reason for some time now. Many times it is described as the shift from modernism to post-modernism. However, post-modernism comes in many forms so it is difficult to describe the entire post-modern movement using just the term post-modernism. Michel Foucalt, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida among others advocate and argue for an extreme form of relativism, Jean Paul-Sarte is a proponent and advocate for existentialism while Herbert Marcuse proposed a kind of mechanistic determinism. As you can see the post-modern movement which each philosopher noted above falls under the banner of, is extremely fragmented. However there is an underlying theme throughout all of post-modern thought and that is that reason and rationality are no longer a valued goals and in many cases reasoning your way to absolute or objective truth is thought of as futile.
Mainstream society is often unaware of the impact intellectual movements have on their worldview(how one views and understands the world) but the above writers were fundamental in shaping the radical new left movement of the 1960's, who in turn influenced politicians such as Nanci Pelosi and almost the entire far left liberal movement that we now see in America today. Now if this type of thinking could be kept on liberal college campuses and in Europe where it belongs I probably wouldn't have any good reason to write about it, but through the years post-modern ideals have been adopted by so many people that they are now a powerful and dangerous political force. Bill O'Reilly has finally identified them for mainstream press and mainstream culture in his new book, Culture Warrior. He coins them secular-progressives in his book.
While there are many problems with the political agenda of the post-modern movement, I will save these for a different blog. My goal here is to establish that throughout my blog and the correspondences to my blog, this type of thinking will be considered unacceptable. This blog will hold that reason and logic are universal values that must be adhered to if argumentation and thought are to progress. The rules of logic will apply to both my posts and hopefully to all comments on my blog, therefore logical fallacies should be checked for and discarded if found. This type of thinking will help to debate every issue with more clarity and to punish the left a group who is very fond of logical fallacies. The goal is to assess arguments for there validity and soundness. Listed below are some fallacies that we should be aware of and that will be monitored in my blog:
1. straw man-fallacies or ad hominem fallacies- Attacking a persons or concepts character instead of the validity of the argument. Ex. Anyone who wants to control the borders is a racist.
2. The law of the excluded middle- Anything is either A or non-A. Throughout this blog it will be held that something can be right or wrong, good or bad or moral or immoral. Ex. Recently Bill O'Reilly was on the view and asked Rosie O'Donell if she wanted us to win in Iraq, she responded by saying that concepts of right or wrong, good or evil, moral or immoral was "antiquated thinking." While our elders may have thought that way it does not mean that something was wrong with it. If Rosie wishes to make that statement she must first qualify it by asserting a coherent relativist philosophy that shows that these concepts are unapplicable to contemporary thought. A task she surely has not completed.
3. I am not the world's greatest logician but there is another thought pattern that I find to be particularly detestable. Unqualified statements are unacceptable. If you or I wish to make a truth assertion it must be a reasonable one that has been previously thought out or widely held. This is kind of a catchall category for liberal cliches. Ex. The Iraq War is for oil. There are many fallacies involved with this statement but it is readily available for any liberal with a radio. First of all the premises are not sound because there are none. To say this, you are simply asserting a conclusion that is widely held among many uneducated college students and liberals but is most often rejected and rightfully so by thinking people of all stripes. Second you are assuming a causal relationship from a correlative relationship. Yes we are at war with Iraq and yes there is oil in Iraq but that does not mean we went to Iraq for oil. In order to make such statements you must first establish them using reason and facts, coherently.
You get the picture here. Logical fallacies have become the language of our generation and the left. People no longer want to debate the validity or facts of arguments. That is why in this blog I wish to change thinking and return to a playground of intellectualism that is governed by rules and objective truth. Therefore I will consistently make the appeal to my generation and to contemporary society; let us not discard the progress of thought because we find the concepts difficult but we should opt for a RETURN TO REASON.