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Discussion 16 to Talk Back 86
Indignant Obfuscation

by: Rob Lockett

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Dear Will and Jorge, I don’t know that a discussion is possible since we cannot agree upon the meaning of words. I find the whole posture ludicrous and a means of the most indignant obfuscation.

I want to share a few quotes with you so that you at least understand where I stand and why I am utterly unimpressed with such an argument. The first two are vacuous… at least the last one is brutally honest.

The reason is simply that these gentlemen (if that is applicable) use words to tell us what they mean.

"I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar."

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

"To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing... [However] by refusing to assign a secret, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases--reason, science, law.

(1967 Roland Barthes / The Death of Author 147)

"I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever."

(1937 Aldous Huxley / 'Ends and Means')

So you boys do what you want... just don’t couch it in’ terms’ that expound the illusion that our debate is a legitimate discourse.

After-all… your terms don’t have any meaning.

To purposely deny meaning, is not the same as not having any meaning.

Yours is a dangerous game.

If you do not allow God to take responsibility for your life and your sin, then you will have to take the responsibility for it yourself. Being God and bearing the sin of the world is not pretty.

Don’t do it…

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