Tal,
Sorry for not alerting you first- I post as Sevenofniine on the Z board. So that was me slowly going insance....
and actually, Ben is a really good guy. I like what I know of him, personally. It's just that he's burdening himself with an impossible task - trying to reconcile postmodernism with the authoritative truth claims of Mormonism. They just aren't compatible. He agreed with that at the beginning of the thread, and then spent pages trying to prove that isn't a problem.
As far as knowledge of any supernatural being is concerned, I could be called a quasi-postmodernist. Although I lack belief in anything supernatural, including a godbeing, my first and foremost stance on the matter is that even if one existed, it is not possible for human beings to "know" anything reliable about that being. (including its existence, once naturalist possibilities are factored into the equation). So when I'm being careful I refer to myself as an "agnostic atheist".
I also agree that in attempting to understand any statement made by individuals from a culture foreign to our own, it is crucial to understand that background culture. I also agree that there are natural limitations to how much any person can truly understand a foreign culture without having being raised in it.
But postmodernism takes these common-sense ideas and runs amuck with them. I tried to explain that to Ben with talking about the utility of Newtonian physics, while we realize that Newtonian physics is not an entirely reliable model. It breaks down at the macro or micro level. But in practical terms, for daily life, it works just fine to give us reliable enough information to maneuver in our world.
I have the same opinion about human communications. Sure, unless we inhabit the other person's mind and have lived his/her life, we don't have a certain guarantee that we understand any communication he/she offers. But communication, with the caveat of background cultural information, is reliable enough for us to maneuver through our world. Postmodernism takes a reality and makes it so extreme that it creates unnecessary issues.
So I'm not entirely critical of the kernel of common sense behind postmodernism. I'm critical of using it as a model to navigate through life just as I would be critical of someone insisting Newtonian physics is useless.
See...it seems like no point of logic we might ever raise, no item of evidence we might ever produce, no carefully crafted rational argument we might ever make, could ever make a whit of difference to the dogmatic believer in magic, to the madman, to the hopelessly (and willfully?) deluded.
I call these type of people True Believers, in the Eric Hoffer sense of the word. (not in the casual sense of "TBM" we exmos like to throw around). True Believers are absolutely impenetrable. Hoffer speculates that is due to the complete enmeshment of any feelings of self worth with the belief system. I have some great Hoffer quotes but seem to have lost my file (I'm "organizing" and finally putting all my floppy discs on flash drives and now can't find some files...arg). If I come up with them later, I'll share them.
Zion's board has an interesting history. Years ago the Tanners had a message board on their site and LDS believers starting posting defenses of the faith on the board in response to critics. I wasn't there and never saw the board so I don't know exactly what happened, but the believers on ZLMB state that the moderating was intolerably biased towards the EV, and the LDS were unfairly censured and/or banned. So a few of the LDS left that board and created a board, ZLMB, that was designed expressly to allow both sides to have input. The moderating was dedicated to being unbiased as much as humanly possible. Both believers and nonbelievers were invited to be moderators. (I was a moderator at one point, for example.) For a couple of years, the board was very lively and had interesting dialogues between believer and nonbeliever (you can see threads in the archives.) Initially, most of the nonbeliever critics were EVs from the Tanner board. However, over time, secular critics such as myself found our way to the board, and the ratio within nonbelievers shifted to secularists. In addition, the number of critics grew. Through all of this, however, the moderators did their best to simply enforce clearly stated rules without regard to belief or lack thereof.
However, eventually believers became very dissatisfied with the board. The board was now "overrun" by secular critics and LDS felt attacked. Despite the best attempts at nonbiased moderation, LDS fled the board in large numbers, fleeing to the FAIR boar. One of its founders was a very disgruntled former ZLMB poster, a believer, who had been chastised several times by moderators and openly rebelled against the moderating climate - this poster, Juliann, openly courted believers on Z to leave Z for FAIR, where they would be more protected. Although some believers resisted this and felt insulted by the insinuation that believers need "protection" more than the even handed application of clear rules, the vast majority fled Z and now post on FAIR.
The FAIR moderators are very much like the Tanner moderators in that they are openly biased to one viewpoint. Their goal is not open dialogue, but controlled dialogue. There are no clearly stated rules, but moderators simply rule by their sense of the situation. Moderators are, as far as I know, exclusively LDS and are extremely biased against critics. Large numbers of critics were recently banned in the "November purge" - some were very innocuous posters, but were critics. Some critics remain, and we will see if the moderating becomes less biased as MAD, but I doubt it.
So the final irony is that FAIR became the Tanner board, in the end - the very place that ZLMB was designed to counter. It's funny in that way that only real life can be.
Z is now pretty dead. The only reason I posted my postmodern thread there was to give Juliann and Ben an opportunity to respond to my criticisms on a board that is not largely inhabited by critics, like this one. Juliann refused to post there, but instead posted an inane, largely irrelevant commentary on the FAIR (now MAD) board. She did not address any point of substance.
Anyway, that's Z's history. Until very recently even the moderators fled Z, but a few have returned and seem to want to restore Z to its former glory. It won't happen, because most believers prefer the protection biased moderating will give them.
But hey, it's hard to blame them. They are handicapped by having to defend what is very nearly indefensible. Kind of like how Young Earthers would need a protected moderating climate to debate geologists. ;)