Postmodernism and Satan’s Mind, Part 2

“Satan before the Lord” by Corrado Giaquinto (c. 1750), Vatican Museums, Source Web Gallery of Art (PD)

We continue our examination of postmodernism, with a focus on how its tenets reflect Satan’s contempt for mankind [1][2].

The adversary despises mankind.  About that there should be no doubt.

Rejection of Humanism
A. The Lie

“Values that emphasize the creativity, autonomy, and priority of human beings are misplaced.  There is no universal humanity since every culture constitutes its own reality.  Groups must empower themselves to assert their own values and to take their place with other planetary species [3A].”

-8 Tenets of Postmodernism

B. Satan’s Reason for the Lie

“Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury.  And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied.  The more claims on life, therefore, that [they]… make, the more often [they] will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered.”

-CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

C. The Truth

“So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Gen. 1: 27).

Satan – morning star, son of the dawn, as Isaiah called him – considers himself vastly superior to us.  In intellect, beauty, and power, he certainly is.

But God is more powerful than the adversary by far (1 John 4: 3-4).

Evidently, it offended Satan’s pride that God would create mankind in His own image, and actually deign to love us.  Satan continually strives to distort that image (and distance us from God) through sexual perversion and other means.

But God is capable of seeing our hearts.

Satan views the incomparable love God has for us as His Achilles’ heel, a way for the adversary to cause God pain.  Satan prowls the earth, seeking out reasons to accuse of us of failing God as, indeed, we so often do.

But we have an Advocate before the throne in the Person of Jesus Christ (1 John 2: 1).

The sense of grievance and entitlement Satan fosters among us is a way for him to cause dissension.  Dissatisfied, envious, sure that life is a zero sum game, we jockey with one another for position – as if God’s blessings were inadequate to our needs.

The lie that we are simply an insignificant species – like so many insects – clouds our understanding of who we are in Christ.

Readers laboring under the assumption that this lie is harmless may not be aware that scientists have already cultivated human stem cells in a monkey embryo, in effect, creating a human-ape hybrid [4][5].  The mind reels.

What Satan wants us to forget is that we are capable of making moral choices, and that our eternal destiny depends on those choices.

Power Reductionism
A. The Lie

“All institutions, human relationships, moral values, and human creations are expressions and masks of the primal will to power [3B].”

-8 Tenets of Postmodernism

B. Satan’s Reason for the Lie

“Even in human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one’s fellow, to make his whole intellectual and emotional life merely an extension of one’s own — to hate one’s hatreds and resent one’s grievances and indulge one’s egotism through him as well as through oneself.”

-CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

C. The Truth

“…‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’   This is the first and great commandment.  And the second is like it:  ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Matt. 22: 37-39).

If there was ever an illustration of psychological projection, this is it.  Satan inadvertently betrays his own motivation here.  It is he who has a primal will to power.

To the extent that urge is reflected in mankind, it is the result of sin.  We are to love our neighbors as ourselves.

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[1]  Wikipedia, Postmodernism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism.

[2]  Britannica, “Postmodernism”, https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy.

[3A and 3B]  Quizlet, “8 Tenets of Postmodernism”, https://quizlet.com/6266751/8-tenets-of-postmodernism-flash-cards/.

[4]  Nature, “First monkey-human embryos reignite debate over hybrid animals” by Nidhi Subbaraman, 4/15/21, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01001-2.

[5]  Discovery Channel, TV & Show Schedule, “Almost Human:  Rise of the Apes”, 8/3/22 9:04PM, https://www.discovery.com/shows/tv-schedule.

Part 3 in this series will be posted next week.

READERS CAN FIND MY VIEWS ON ABUSE AND ABUSE-RELATED ISSUES AT ANNA WALDHERR A Voice Reclaimed, Surviving Child Abuse  https://www.avoicereclaimed.com