Postmodernism - what the ... ?

My good friend Andrew was asking in a comment a few posts down:

You use the term 'postmodern' to describe what seems to me to be a descent by society into something resembling humanism, and that a 'postmodern' church is one that's quite liberal, allowing 'equal rights' (eg, allowing women and homosexuals to take positions of leadership, etc) to become the orthodoxy. ...can you confirm if that's what you mean?

Yes, kind of.

There's a good article on Wikipedia which covers postmodernism in a bit of depth, and which has given me a bit more understanding. It wasn't even really a philosophy to begin with, and has been around for a long time too.

The issues I take with PoMo thinking is that it is treated sloppily, just as modern thinking has been, and is used by the masses to justify people doing whatever the hell they want really. It is usually presented as a blend of 2 or 3 of the 4 PoMo world views: postmodern-ironist, which sees truth as socially constructed, and the neo-romantic in which truth is found either through attaining harmony with nature and/or spiritual exploration of the inner self with a bit of the social-traditional in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western civilisation.

So my perception of the way it's treated is that it says: "there are no absolutes, and everything is relative to where I stand, how I feel and what I think. There is no absolute good or evil, rules are made by society to suit societies and as society changes so does what is right and wrong. It is good to do traditional things because they have a long and satisfying history, and I can enjoy being part of that story while I do them even though they belong to a drastically different culture. It is important to be at peace with the Earth, and if we could consume a bit less that would be nice as long as I can keep doing what I want."

Cynical? Possibly, but this is the conclusions I've drawn from talking with people (both Christians and non-christians) with a PoMo viewpoint. I'm not meaning to throw stones at anyone BTW. But you can see from that why it is just another form of thinking that sets itself up against truth and righteousness.

I understand why people would find it attractive and even quite reasonable. And it is a reasonable reaction to a crude understanding of modern thinking, which suggests that everything is knowable and all things may be explained in time through science and logical thinking. Naturally a lot of people have been disappointed because there's a lot of stuff that no-one understands (or possibly can't understand) in the way our created, fallen world works, so this viewpoint rather comes off the rails and lets us down. And to bring it closer to home, banks and stock markets fail, people still die of cancer and no-one knows whether breast or bottle feeding a baby is best.

Comments welcome - I'll ignore any I can't understand/answer. ;-)