Out of My Cold Dead Hands

Tags

fairytales, faith, insanitybytes22, life, literature, narratives, post-modernism, romanticism

I speak of fairytales. You’ll pry my fairytales out of my cold, dead hands. That may sound very strident and it is indeed, but it is born of atheistic thinking, of having been surrounded on all sides and perpetually accused of believing in fairytales. Dump your imaginary Sky Daddy. Be a realist, there is no God.  So in total defiance, IB became quite a romantic, clinging to her “fairytales,” also  known as the bible.

Several discussions have come up all around the concept of post modern thought, subjective truth, moral relativism. Here is one, Wintery Knight asking  CAN A PERSON BE POSTMODERN AND A CHRISTIAN AT THE SAME TIME?

I just want to say something about post-modernism, it is characterized by skepticism, cynicism, distrust of the grand narrative. What is the grand narrative? Well, that is the question indeed.  The grand narrative is actually where you place your eyes, what you believe in pretty much sight unseen. “For we walk by faith and not by sight.”

Christianity itself is a grand narrative. Faith is a tangible thing, it has evidence and substance to it. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” However, it requires one to believe in and to follow a grand narrative.

A grand narrative is the stuff of fairytales, for example,  love conquers all.  Love conquered all on the cross and He is now seated in victory at the right hand of the Father.

The thing is, we are all products of our environment, so we are all touched by post modern thinking. One cannot simply escape the deception by claiming to be a realist, an evidence based thinker, cynically rejecting the grand narrative and slaying romanticism.  In the very process of rejecting post modernism, you’ve actually just become a post modernist. That one will really mess with your head.

Naturally people have different styles of thinking, there is great diversity in how we perceive the world, and this is a very good thing indeed. Recently at Literary Life, we have been discussing Madame Bovary, The Fate of the Romantic. Unchecked romanticism all by itself does indeed have a dark side, and the novel explores some of those themes.

That same concept of rejecting post modernism by slaying romanticism came up again among some religious leaders on the TV, and all in good fun here, but IB indulged in quite a bit of romanticism by having a frolicking debate with the television. A debate by the way, that I won.

Here is what I perceive to be the nature of the problem in the modern world. We no longer believe in fairytales. We are cynical about the grand narrative. We reject many aspects of what could be called traditionalism. In the US, in a country barely 200 years old, we refer to most human wisdom that came before us as the total ignorance of our Bronze Age ancestors. We have evolved, progressed, donja know. We are now reason based, rational, scientific. Vastly superior creatures who can just sneer at things like myths and legends, or wit, whimsy, and woo. Our disease is not romanticism, nor is it fairytales, nor is it the rejection of logic and reason, it is an ailment that springs from pride and putting our faith exclusively in, leaning into our own understanding.

The very moment we place all our trust in our own ability to fully understand the nature of our own existence, well, “believing themselves wise, they became fools.”

“Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”  -Philippians 2:12