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( Source ) by Hiram R. Diaz III My last post was inspired by a common defensive retort I've heard Social Justicians make when their "work" is correctly identified as promoting Critical Race Theory. The retort claims that Christians are incorrectly identifying the "work of 'social justice' as promoting Critical Race Theory," and are doing so in order to avoid dealing with the real problem - social injustice, as they perceive it. My goal in that post was to demonstrate that those who promote "social justice" are actually promoting the philosophical concepts and practices of French postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault, as his thinking has been very influential among, albeit somewhat retooled by, Critical Race Theorists. In this post, however, my goal is to address the logical errors inherent to the retort, and refute the idea that Christians are using the issue of "Critical Race Theory" as a red herring, a distraction from the &quo

by Hiram R. Diaz III I Was Once a Young-Adult Postmodernist Since my conversion over a decade ago, I've grown more and more aware of just how much postmodern philosophy has taken root in much of American academia and, sadly, professedly Christian churches. And as I've reflected on this situation, I've grown more and more aware of why God foreordained for me to religiously follow postmodern philosophy when I wasn't a Christian.  I Was a Devoted Postmodernist If you didn't know me during my college days, I'll give you a brief recap of my life at the time. When I woke up in the morning, I would start thinking about what I had fallen asleep reading. Sometimes it was Jacques Derrida; at other times it was Michel Foucault, or Frederic Jameson, or Jean Baudrillard, or Friedrich Nietzsche, or Sigmund Freud, or Jacques Lacan, or Karl Marx. When I left my house to go to my lit theory and philosophy cla

by Hiram R. Diaz III Books and Stuff I took some time off last week and this week to focus on learning how to use a new piece of gear I recently was gifted with, the MPC One . If you aren't aware, I compose instrumental music whenever I get a chance , and have been wanting this machine for, literally, decades. So I've been excited to learn how to use the machine, and have been cranking out instrumentals in my few minutes of spare time every day. In addition to this, I've been reading up on several subjects that I hope to write about soon. This includes academic articles and books covering the subjects of biblical anthropology, biblical epistemology, biblical metaphysics, biblical psychology (i.e. the study of the soul), Foucault's archaeological method , Jean Baudrillard's nihilism , and discourse analysis . Oddly enough, there is a way in which these subjects intersect. However, I won't get into that...yet. Health Stuff Right now, I want to consume as much data

by Hiram R. Diaz III Tying Everything Together The last section of this study focused on Biblical semiotics. What is semiotics? One source defines it this way –  The theory and study of signs and symbols, especially as elements of language or other systems of communication, and comprising semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics.( Source ) In Scripture we see that there are many different symbolic codes, and that these symbolic codes are hierarchically related. Animals and humans have the capacity to employ symbolic codes to communicate with one another and God. However, humans have the capacity to construct new symbolic codes that help facilitate the transmission of meaning from person to person. In the case of infants, we see that their cries communicate a multitude of requests to their mother and father, as well as other caretakers. Infants, in other words, communicate meaning via the only symbolic code they can manipulate with a large degree of variation – the noises they make with th