Ice the Rational Destroyer

I thought I'd mention that I have worked with users of Ice in Sydney and was a big drug user in my younger years, mainly acid or lSD. Ice differs from these drugs because it does two things. It isolates the rationale of the user which consequently causes the user to look inwards and to look inwards as if there is nobody else around. This results in a partial destruction of the users rational. If you understand the postmodern concept for knowing it has the same logical conclusion as an Ice users dilemma however it takes much longer and is more gradual.

People were made ny God to reason upon antithesis which we could simplify by using the words 'yes' and 'no'. Christianity gave us 'yes' or 'no', two choices providing opposite values but certainty of knowledge. The postmodern concept is 'yes' and 'yes' which is not only different but contrary to how God made us to be. Choice doesn't exist if antithesis is one away with. Here you can see the similarity between the Ice user and our postmodern contemporaries. The Bible say as a person thinks in their heart, so are they. If in our 21st century people think upon a different set of presuppositions where truth is relative to the individual, then technically speaking the human race is dead.

What we are dealing with in the Ice user and the normal postmodern person is a split field of knowledge similar to that of the man from Gadarene who really is the 21st century man as far as reason goes. With Ice more than anything esle this is basically what we are dealing with which is essentially the postmodern context of the area of non-reason.

In my opinion shock treatment cannot work in the postmodern context because the concept of truth in this context is not the same as the Judeo Christian presuppositions but rather contrary to them. When I was a child 45 plus years ago I like most people was raised upon this Judeo Christian consensus because even though the world wasn't Christian, people reasoned upon the Christian presuppositions albeit romantically (modernity). But todays postmodern or rather post-Christian context or framework for approaching truth and knowledge is quite different. Postmodernism is epitomised by its concept of truth where two opposites find a unity in synthesis. In Christian thinking, two opposites provided us with certainty of knowledge because we are presented with two opposite values. For example an 'A' is not an, non-'A'. This is the first move in classical logic. Howver these two opposites are fused into a higher truth called a synthesis and therefore certainty of knowledge is not possible. This is how our 21st century world thinks by default.

What this means is people have no categories to tell them what is with any certainty at all in the postmodern context because truth is realtive to the individual. Prior to the postmodern context people had functioned upon a romantic Christian idea in general as a result of the ideas that came out of the Enlightenment period. The Enlightenment ushered in the humanist framework where people begining from themselves would attempt to answer the deep questions that confronted humanity. After 400 years the modernist realised the finiteness of man, and they gave up the hope of finding answers to the deep questions of being and of personality which only the Bible had answers to.

This lead to the existential philosophers moving humanity toward the area of non-reason in an attempt to answer these deep questions. The modernist had failed to hold onto the uniwueness of man in the area of reason, so the existentialist were going to find them i the area of non-reason and the postmodern context was born.

Modernity died because man is finite and finite things are meaningless without an infinite reference point as Jean Paul Sartre rightly said. The unifying factor between modernity and postmodernity is that they are bothh humanist. The primary difference however is that modernity attempted to function in the area of reason without absolutes although they did function as if absolutes existed but it was merely a romantic association. Postmodernism went to tha area of non-reason where even the idea of absolutes is rejected as absurd. But minus absolute whether it is modernity or postmodernity, humanity has no way of deriving true values from anything for anything.

In light of the postmodern concept for truth where everyone is in the end right in their own eyes, there exist no categories for knowing. To imply that a person is wrong in this context would highlight two things. First the 21st century person lacks categories for knowing anything at all with any certainty at all. Second, you would be considered immoral and out of touch for making a moral judgement in a context where morallity is relative to the individual as if truth. While shock treament will make a person emotion move deeply, the message is not being understood because there is no framework in the 21st century person to understand categories for knowing. If we wonder why things don't improve despite the decades of attempts by genuinely good people to improve living, this in my opinion is the reason. Their can be no communication between modernity and postmodernity because their concepts for knowing and for truth differ. So sin means one thing to the Christian, another thing to the modernist, and something else to the postmodernist. Why because their frameworks for knowing and truth all differ enormously. Francis A Schaeffer begins his book, "The God Who Is There,' said this, "The current chasm between the generations has been bought about almost entirely by a change in the conept of truth." Near the end of the first chapter he says, "So this shift in the basic concept of truth is the biggest issue facing the church in the 20th century." Schaeffer understood the shift from pre-modernity to modernity and finally postmodernism better than most. If it appears the messages don't get through I would sggest this is the reason. I recommend Francis A Schaeffer's "Trilogy" as a great place to begin if one wants to understand what confronts them as far as world views go and the implications of those world views on the whole of society and Christianity as well. If we expect to have meaningful dialogue with out non-Christian conteporaries we had better understand the framework they employ and the questions that will arise out of these frameworks or world views so we know against what spirit we are to resist as opposed to throwing bricks blindly over the walls of our Christian fortresses.

My husband has a smoking addiction,years before he had other drug problems he had a speed addiction, & used ecstasy weekly. Even though we had 3 young kids he was never concerned by ads, doctors or my concerns for his health, in fact the more we tried to make him see the problems these drugs caused the more he took. The only thing that worked for him was a near fatal overdose on ecstasy, it was a wake up call for him. Sadly too many people think they can do whatever they like and most do die, my husband was lucky, we have 7 great kids now and he's been drug free since 1996, but the fags he just can't give away. He personally thinks the anti-drug message needs to be aimed at young kids in primary school, because they never seem to work when you have started the drugs.