Threading a needle with a needle

I probably use the word rhetoric wrong, at least when I am railing against it, and then again it is one of those words that I waver between thinking I’m secretly dumb or at least unsophisticated because I don’t really understand what it means or else that it actually doesn’t mean anything very clear, even more so than other words.  Metaphysical and postmodern are other examples.  Pop Quiz! If you are a strict naturalist are the words metaphysical and supernatural equivalent?

What I find objectionable is the preponderance of what I might characterize as “adversarial discourse” out there in the so-called public dialog.  Specifically, discussion whose sole intent seems to be to attack a point of view and replace it with a supposedly superior one.  Virtually all political punditry, a great deal of proselytizing religious and anti-religious discussion, far too much of all public writing and talking in general are of this character.  It is an objection I feel pretty strongly but whenever I try to work out an alternative things quickly get very, very muddy: am I engaging in exactly what I’m protesting?  You’re doing it wrong, you should do it like this instead.  Or am I advocating a stance that disallows your being against anything?  And can you really be for anything without being implicitly against whatever it is opposed to?

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Is it merely a semantic point to ask whether there is such a thing as an atheist?  If you take the term God as a mere abstraction meaning something like that which is the highest order above all other things, is the God of the strict naturalist physics?  I’m not really charting new territory there, name-brand atheists like Dawkins tend to set out ground rules exempting these sorts of abstract conceptions of God from their philosophies.  What’s my point, then?

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My point is something hazy, and indistinct, that I circle and circle like a bird of appetite, and if that is the case am I destined to miss it, is it simply not my kind of prey?  Should I return instead to the role of the adversary, stake out the errant and set forth to correct them? I can’t shake the conviction that the topic I am so muddling nevertheless has a path to it somewhere through intelligible exposition (as opposed to, say, koans, or whatever this fumble I just coughed up is…)
It is a clumsy bridge, but I still think it is going somewhere.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 19, 2009 at 12:33 AM