Institute for Religious Research Study Guide Challenge

[Loran Blood]

These are all "semantic" problems in that they are based in language and no where else. They are ultimately descriptions we use to describe our experiences in different ways according to our needs to communicate with others.

Well, I think this is fallicious for any number of what I think are very good reasons (not to imply that language does not, to various degrees, condition our perceptions) not the least of which is that the no one has ever experienced the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is a philosophical, conceptual construct, and rises or falls, in that sense, on its logical and conceptual consistency. Postmodern analysis here will do no more than what it accomplishes in all other areas into which it is inserted: confuse and obfuscate the real issues and eliminate the possibility of inductive and deductive critical thought to analize the logical skeleton of its supporting arguments to see if its premises are evidentially connected to its conclusions and if it is conceptually consistent or even intelligible.

When we are communicating scientific observations we speak in a different way and in a different context than when we are speaking of religious belief- one is not more "valid" than the other, just different.

Both, if they are communicated as arguments, are amenable to the scrutiny of critical philosophcal analysis.

So all these nuances of mode, nature, essence, substance, being etc are just different descriptions with no difference in what we experience, which simply confuse the issue.

This is just the old postmodern claim that there all perception and claims to truth are nothing more than artifacts of language usage and that there are no means or justifiable grounds upon which to discern the strength or weakness of any claims to truth and that hence, in its usual spasm of nihilistic triumph, all truth is relative and all truth claims eqaully viable. In a similar vien, there is no way one can claim that Revelle is musically more valuable civilizationally than Madonna, or the philosophy of Nietzsche any less valuable than that of Confucious.

As LDS we can have direct experience of God- we do not experience the Father separately from the Son separately from the Holy Ghost. Yet we who have received personal revelations KNOW through direct experience that there is a Loving Presence who is looking out for us and guiding our lives, and who can give us direct answers to our spiritual questions, and thus confirm that "the church is true"- ie that belief the general theology of Mormonism is the "correct path" that this Loving Presence wants us to pursue and that the scriptures contain the essence of correct teachings. That is the experience- the phenomenology of it all.

I don't, I'm afriad, see how this is relevant to the discussion at hand.

The rest of it is construction and interpretation- and must be recognized as such.

They are assertions of truth. They are truth claims. They are presented as arguments. They are therefore amenable to critique upon the basis of the laws of language with which they are constructed. The task of philosophy is precisely to analyze and think about the construction and interpretation of assertions that such and such is really the state of affairs in the universe. Throwing up one's hands and walking away into postmodern headlong flight from that very task is of no use in preaching the gospel and rasing a warning voice.

But that is the essence why our doctrine is supposed to be somewhat vage, and allows for so much diversity- we are each to be guided by the Lord individiually regarding these matters.

Perhaps you could tell me what is in any way "vague" about these propositions:

The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us.

While the Holy Ghost's particular nature and the relationship of this to his being able to "dwell within us" is not elucidated, how are the fundamental points being made here about the individual identity of the members of the Godhead and their structure, vague?

And that is where we part with what has become tradtional Christianity- the the tradition has been apostate for so long. They have frozen all the living revelations into a codified systematic jargon the violation of which is unacceptable- that is why the Christ we worship is perceived as "different"

In other words, mf, their doctrines are wrong.

Our diversity and our reliance on direct revelation is what makes all the difference. We are a living church. When Nietzsche said "God is dead" he was right. The only problem was that it was THEIR logically impossible and mute "god", who died.

No, he meant ours to. God qua God had to be removed to make way for the will to power. Nietzsche intended to diefy man, and he did. Secular man, self sufficient, growing, expanding, dominating, and living to the full, can have no other gods before him.

Edited February 6, 2012 by Loran Blood

[mfbukowski]

I figured, but when one is criticizing another for sloppy work, it is better not to engage in it even just for fun.

[Loran Blood]

This is just the old postmodern claim that there all perception and claims to truth are nothing more than artifacts of language usage and that there are no means or justifiable grounds upon which to discern the strength or weakness of any claims to truth and that hence, in its usual spasm of nihilistic triumph, all truth is relative and all truth claims eqaully viable.

I should have also added here, equally meaningless.

[Rob Bowman]

Loran,

You wrote:

Not off hand, as I've read a great deal from various Christian apologists, mostly EV, over probably a 30 year period, but do not have those references at hand (or even remember most of them in any detail, to be exact). OK? Its "in my head," as are a number of other things.

Okay. If you want to engage philosophical issues in orthodox Christian theology, though, you might want to read some orthodox Christian philosophers.

In the rest of your post, you in effect argue that none of the differences between modalism and trinitarianism that I mentioned are relevant to your concern. Well, perhaps your concern is not ours. You continue to make the same assertion over and over that you don't find the trinitarian distinctions coherent or meaningfully different from modalist distinctions. Yet you have not explained what is incoherent about them or why it is not meaningfully different to say that the three persons stand in eternal dynamic relationships with one another rather than that they are three different temporal modes of manifestation. You also continue to confuse trinitarianism with modalism, as when you complain, "It equally makes no sense for Jesus to talk to, pray to, and obey the Father if Jesus is actually is the Trinity manifested as a specific instance of it." Indeed, but this isn't what the doctrine of the Trinity says. Jesus is not the Trinity. If you haven't gotten this much clear, then you need to do more serious reading on the subject than you have up to now.

[Loran Blood]

How could we experience if God is modalistic or not?

Then the problem is "semantic".

I would call it "perceptual." It only becomes semantic when we begin to talk about it or argue for or against it. In that case, semantics becomes only one aspect of intellectual critique, logical analysis of the arguments form and structure being the other major nut and bolt of that process.

Once terms are defined, the problem is in the logical skeleton of an argument and whethre or not the evidential connections between various assertions and the conclusions drawn from them are actually present.

[Rob Bowman]

Dave,

You wrote:

You want it point by point rather than verse by verse? You seriously think your six items are six independent points in your favor?

Yup.

You apparently want to complain I am unfair regardless of what I do.

I think you have things turned around. I was ready to drop the issue, but you complained that I was ducking out of the fight. If you insist on a showdown, don't complain if your adversary actually pulls his six-shooter.

You have yet to admit there is any evidence that might call into question your conclusion.

False. I have acknowledged that the characterization of the Lamanites' belief might call my use of the Great Spirit texts into question. However, I have also explained why on balance I think those texts do support my conclusion.

EVERYTHING that I have mentioned you end up interpreting in a different way such that it has no impact on your pre-determined conclusion.

It was not pre-determined. However, yes, everything you have mentioned I interpret differently than you do. If I agreed with your interpretation, I would reach your conclusion, wouldn't I? Will I satisfy you only if I agree with your conclusion?

And you presuppose that they DO consider it possible for the spirit to appear in a physical form. Rob. Who is the one asserting a point to be proven?

No, I provided evidence from the Book of Mormon itself that a spirit can appear in what looks like a physical form.

Your revision of my paragraph is amusing. You wrote:

Wouldn't it be easier to just say that the Book of Mormon never claims God the Father has a physical body?

Easier, yes, but to leave it at that would be fallacious. Wouldn't you come after me if my argument was as superficial as a fallacious appeal to silence?

[Rob Bowman]

Wade,

You wrote:

The biggest problem I have with you interpreting Mosiah 15:1-5 as modalistic is that you evidently ignore the context of the passage.

Now, if only you had pointed to something in the passage that my interpretation misses, you'd have something.

You mistakenly view the passage as an ontological description of the Godhead, It isn't.

No, I didn't view the passage that way, and I don't view it that way.

[mfbukowski]

Well, I think this is fallicious for any number of what I think are very good reasons (not to imply that language does not, to various degrees, condition our perceptions) not the least of which is that the no one has ever experienced the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is a philosophical, conceptual construct, and rises or falls, in that sense, on its logical and conceptual consistency.

Good, so we agree!

Postmodern analysis here will do no more than what it accomplishes in all other areas into which it is inserted: confuse and obfuscate the real issues and eliminate the possibility of inductive and deductive critical thought to analize the logical skeleton of its supporting arguments to see if its premises are evidentially connected to its conclusions and if it is conceptually consistent or even intelligible.

It makes it easier and shows it for what it is- this is precisely what deconstruction does; it doesn't make it harder. The point is, there are no "real" issues here, just poor linguistic arguments. But I don't want to get into poor linguistic arguments with you about it either.

This is just the old postmodern claim that there all perception and claims to truth are nothing more than artifacts of language usage and that there are no means or grounds upon which to discern the strength or weakness of any claims to truth and that hence, in its usual spasm of nihilistic triumph, all truth is relative and all truth claims eqaully viable. In a similar vien, there is no way one can claim that Revelle is musically more valuable civilizationally than Madonna, or the philosophy of Nietzsche any less valuable than that of Confucious.

Yeah, that's fairly close. But of course you have not refuted that.

They are assertions of truth. They are truth claims. They are presented as arguments. They are therefore amenable to critique upon the basis of the laws of language with which they are constructed. The task of philosophy is precisely to analyze and think about the construction and interpretation of assertions that such and such is really the state of affairs in the universe.

Oops. Disagree. Tell me about the "state of affairs in the universe" without using words or describing someone's experience of it. Oops, you can't.

Perhaps you could tell me what is in any way "vague" about these propositions:

Where did I say they were vague?

While the Holy Ghost's particular nature and the relationship of this to his being able to "dwell within us" is not elucidated, how are the fundamental points being made here about the individual identity of the members of the Godhead and their structure, vague?

I don't recall saying they were. I said "modalism" was vague.

In other words, mf, their doctrines are wrong.

You could say that. I would prefer to say their doctrines certainly don't fit with the way I think things work. I suppose it's about the same except yours implies there is only one way to say it. I think there are lots of ways to say it.

No, he meant ours to. God qua God had to be removed to make way for the will to power. Nietzsche intended to diefy man, and he did. Secular man, self sufficient, growing, expanding, dominating, and living to the full, can have no other gods before him.

Look, I am not saying Nietsche was a Mormon or a proto-Mormon or whatever. He would roll over in his grave to hear such a thing. Nevertheless, he was a powerful crtic of the Christianity of his time as he knew it, and he did in fact "intend to deify man" AND make the natural man into a god. There ARE similarities there with Mormonism. As I have said before, when God is seen as a man, it does in fact turn tradtional, sectarian, apostate Christianity on its head, and turns man into a god in embryo.

[mfbukowski]

I should have also added here, equally meaningless.

Gosh, this looks like your personal view of "meaning" to me. Can't get away from that can we?

[Rob Bowman]

LOAP,

Given all of the fine works on Mormonism in general, why would a person spend time reading your entire "study guide" when a limited conversation with the author reveals shoddy workmanship generally?

This is ridiculous. This conversation has revealed that I read LDS scriptures and scholarship far more carefully than anyone who has so far participated in this thread has bothered to read the work they are all criticizing!

Further, have you read the Book of Mormon front to back, Mr. Bowman? How about the Doctrine and Covenants? The JST? The PoGP?

Yes, yes, no, yes. I have read numerous passages in the JST but not quite all of them.

The problem is I'm not being paid by a "research" organization to dissect your work, whereas it seems to me you are examining Mormonism as part of your employment. For 12 bucks an hour (a bargain!) I'll go through your entire document and provide detailed comments which I'd also publish online (and did you even notice that this offer goes against my previous statement that any assistance to you would be wasted, even counter-productive?).

I spent a lot of my own time this weekend answering posts like yours.

Here's a freebie.I went to the first chapter of your "study guide" and found this in the first chapter:

Perhaps the most basic, fundamental truth of the Bible is that there is only one God and that he alone made us.

This is simply not true. I don't understand how a person who claims to be completing doctoral work can make such a plainly inaccurate claim, at the very outset of the "study guide" no less. You want me to spend my time reading through something that--at the very outset--makes an entirely untenable claim, not incidentally, but as the foundation of an entire essay? Your statement implies that the Bible is a single, unified, non-contradictory book speaking univocally. That's just flatly false. It's a view only espoused by certain biblical fundamentalists. Anyone who reads John Day's Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan will quickly be disposed of this notion. Or check out Heiser and Bokovoy's exchange in the old FARMS Review.

Oh, please. The challenge was for you to read the study guide to see if it makes a fair-minded, good-faith effort to understand Mormonism accurately. It is not a challenge to see if you agree with the approach to the Bible that I as an evangelical Christian espouse.

It is true that the Bible occasionally refers to angels or other creatures as "gods." However, the point I was making is that the Bible regards one God as the sole proper object of worship because that one God is our sole creator and sovereign ruler over all things. That is Bible 101. Those other so-called "gods" are not creators and not legitimate objects of worship for the people of God. If you disagree, instead of dropping scholarly names, why don't you cite a few biblical passages in which you find examples of a plurality of gods being credited with creation or honored as proper objects of worship?

[Loran Blood]

Okay. If you want to engage philosophical issues in orthodox Christian theology, though, you might want to read some orthodox Christian philosophers.

How do you know I haven't?

In the rest of your post, you in effect argue that none of the differences between modalism and trinitarianism that I mentioned are relevant to your concern. Well, perhaps your concern is not ours.

My concern is, if I may express it yet again in another way, that the difference between being a "mode" within a single ontologically unifed entity and being a "person" within a single ontologically unified entity, is, for all intents, both meaningless and trivial. Meaningless because the terms and concepts are not defined and, given the nature of the conceptual catagories involved, cannot be defined, and trivial because neither the modal or non-modal perspective makes the slightest difference to the core Christian messege, from a traditional Christian standpoint. I do not mean the questions of whether Christ always existed or came, in some way, from the Father, whether he is subordinate to or equal with the Father, or as to the relative strength of his divinity, but only the ontological question of what a "mode" is relative to the singular entity (the "Trinity") vs. what a "person" is relative to that wholistic entity.

You continue to make the same assertion over and over that you don't find the trinitarian distinctions coherent or meaningfully different from modalist distinctions. Yet you have not explained what is incoherent about them or why it is not meaningfully different to say that the three persons stand in eternal dynamic relationships with one another rather than that they are three different temporal modes of manifestation.

I've now spent a great deal of time and bandwidth doing exactly this. If you do not wish to engage the points and concerns I'm rasing in an intellectually coherent, point by point way, that is your priveledge, but the impression at this point is that you are not engaging them because you are at a loss as to the specific arguments you would need to deploy.

You also continue to confuse trinitarianism with modalism, as when you complain, "It equally makes no sense for Jesus to talk to, pray to, and obey the Father if Jesus is actually is the Trinity manifested as a specific instance of it." Indeed, but this isn't what the doctrine of the Trinity says. Jesus is not the Trinity. If you haven't gotten this much clear, then you need to do more serious reading on the subject than you have up to now.

OK, here's the problem Rob: I'm not confusing Trinitarianism with modalism. Trinitarianism and modalism are confused with respect to and in contrast with each other. That's the point. In other words, plowing through this problem by restating, dogmatically, that Trinitarianism is not modalism isn't going to cut the proverbial mustard, because the conceptual and logical implications of the assertions made in both views, and in your own continually nebulous explication of their core propositions, pose the very problems I'm trying to point out.

Instead of avoding the questions raised here, by repeating over and over again, "Trinitarianism is not modalism etc., etc.," grasp the horns of the dilemmas here. How are these concepts really different and why is it important?

[mfbukowski]

But I don't want to get into poor linguistic arguments with you about it either.

On the other hand, if you have any good ones, I never back away from a good discussion. But I think we just need to agree to disagree.

[Rob Bowman]

Loran,

We seem to have reached an impasse. I see no way to advance our little discussion here. Sorry.

[KevinG]

The challenge was for you to read the study guide to see if it makes a fair-minded, good-faith effort to understand Mormonism accurately. It is not a challenge to see if you agree with the approach to the Bible that I as an evangelical Christian espouse.

...and yet when I watch your videos and read your articles they all insist that the flaw in Mormonism is that it does not conform to your understanding of traditional Christianity and assumes the superiority of your theology.

You may want to cut down on the condescending position that the evangelical position is superior by default. It biases your ability to accurately understand other religions.

[Loran Blood]

Gosh, this looks like your personal view of "meaning" to me. Can't get away from that can we?

If all perspectives, assertions, statements, or truth claims are equally legitimate, then all perspectives, assertions, statements, and truth claims are equally meaningless. This is logically necessary. If all assertions are equally true, all assertions are equally false because the conceptual contrast between truth and falsehood has been erased. If everything is true, nothing is true. Without any basis for comparison and contrast, nothing can be known at all. If it is claimed that any and all assertions regarding why it rains are equally valid, then nothing can and wll ever be known about what causes it to rain.

Postmodern thought of this kind is a logical self negating vortex (like all forms of intellectual relativism) that must express its own truth claims in the very communicative manner it claims renders the concepts expressed within and through all acts of discourse conceptually unreachable as to their actual truth value. You can possibly see the problem in the very language I've just used above. By saying that postmodern thought makes "truth claims," I have just negated the fundamental truth claims of postmodernism...that no truth claims are really possible.

Edited February 6, 2012 by Loran Blood

[Loran Blood]

Loran,

We seem to have reached an impasse. I see no way to advance our little discussion here. Sorry.

No Rob, we haven't.

Sorry to see you retreat from the arena of ideas here. I really wanted you to tangle with these concerns and points in a point-counterpoint, substantive way.

Edited February 6, 2012 by Loran Blood

[Rob Bowman]

DaddyG,

You wrote:

...and yet when I watch your videos and read your articles they all insist that the flaw in Mormonism is that it does not conform to your understanding of traditional Christianity and assumes the superiority of your theology.

You may want to cut down on the condescending position that the evangelical position is superior by default. It biases your ability to accurately understand other religions.

We don't assume that evangelicalism is superior by default. We explain why we think it is so.

We are now more than 360 posts and about three weeks into the challenge as introduced in this thread, and so far not one Mormon shows that he or she is taking it seriously -- unless you count Life on a Plate's offer to critique it for $12 an hour!

[LifeOnaPlate]

This is ridiculous. This conversation has revealed that I read LDS scriptures and scholarship far more carefully than anyone who has so far participated in this thread has bothered to read the work they are all criticizing!

Except that people here are saying that you aren't and don't.

Oh, please. The challenge was for you to read the study guide to see if it makes a fair-minded, good-faith effort to understand Mormonism accurately. It is not a challenge to see if you agree with the approach to the Bible that I as an evangelical Christian espouse.

In other words you're essentially saying, "hey, Mormons, please read my fake scholarship, then critique it according to my own presuppositions, and I'll consider incorporating your suggestions. But if my presuppositions are problematic, please don't take the time to reply, even though my presuppositions are incredibly weak. Granted, analyzing our respective exegetical strategies would shed a lot of light on the reasons we read things so differently, but I'm going to act like that is irrelevant anyway."

So you want people to look through your stuff, show you where you're getting Mormons wrong, without calling any attention to your faulty assumptions by which you are measuring the caricature of Mormonism you're presenting? No wonder you say this ain't scholarship. You ought to make that very plain on your site, too, though, rather than using that as an excuse when the defects in your work are pointed out on a message board.

So I take it you're not willing to spend money on a solid critique of your work, right? You want to solicit advise from pseudonyms online instead. And you call this "research."

It is true that the Bible occasionally refers to angels or other creatures as "gods." However, the point I was making is that the Bible regards one God as the sole proper object of worship because that one God is our sole creator and sovereign ruler over all things. That is Bible 101. Those other so-called "gods" are not creators and not legitimate objects of worship for the people of God. If you disagree, instead of dropping scholarly names, why don't you cite a few biblical passages in which you find examples of a plurality of gods being credited with creation or honored as proper objects of worship?

Why, so you can read the verses through your unsubstantiated presuppositions, like you do the Book of Mormon?

To me, Bible 101 would argue that the Bible itself is the product of various faith-communities and peoples, that it presents differing (and sometimes contradictory) views of God (apart from the dodge that the other "gods" it really does mention don't count because they are claimed to be different from YHWH!), and that different communities employ different strategies in making use of the Bible which require careful attention, among other things. Of course, you're going to have a very hard time incorporating this info in your non-academic, non-scholarly "study guide" on a website where you otherwise pretend to the trappings of scholarship.

[Loran Blood]

...and yet when I watch your videos and read your articles they all insist that the flaw in Mormonism is that it does not conform to your understanding of traditional Christianity and assumes the superiority of your theology.

But as we see above, he really isn't willing to go to the philosophical mat and defend his central metaphysical/religious assertions in depth. He wishes to restate, repeatedly, the fundamental claim, but refrains from jumping into the meat grinder and taking them apart to see what makes them tick.

I'm a bit disappointed, actually, as I though Rob would jump into this full bore. As he well knows, the doctrine of the Trinity is, for LDS (and others), a mass of nonsense. We respect the fact that it is strongly believed, but this does not preclude what the gospel requires of us: to teach the truth and let the chips fall where they may.

Edited February 6, 2012 by Loran Blood

[KevinG]

DaddyG,

You wrote:

We don't assume that evangelicalism is superior by default. We explain why we think it is so.

We are now more than 360 posts and about three weeks into the challenge as introduced in this thread, and so far not one Mormon shows that he or she is taking it seriously -- unless you count Life on a Plate's offer to critique it for $12 an hour!

No you ignore good faith criticisms of your approach. I can trump 1700 years of Christian philosophers with one good living prophet - but you start with the assumption that those philosophers are true and the LDS prophet is false then proceed to assume you can explain Mormonism better than Mormons themselves.

[Loran Blood]

This is ridiculous. This conversation has revealed that I read LDS scriptures and scholarship far more carefully than anyone who has so far participated in this thread has bothered to read the work they are all criticizing!

And yet, it appears that you really haven't thought through the doctrine of the Trinity, a central EV teaching, very much beyond the dogmataic assertion of its "orthodox" nature which for you appears to be quite enough. If however, you wish to criticize other religous systems as illegitimate, you should be prepared to defend your own views in depth.

I think coming here and claiming that most people here have not read and do not understand their own scriptures as much as you do is a bit much.

Edited February 6, 2012 by Loran Blood

[Rob Bowman]

LOAP,

You wrote:

In other words you're essentially saying, "hey, Mormons, please read my fake scholarship....

I've really taken enough of this abuse. If you don't take the challenge seriously, then leave it alone.

So I take it you're not willing to spend money on a solid critique of your work, right? You want to solicit advise from pseudonyms online instead. And you call this "research."

Please, tell me your name, Mr. Scholar, and provide me with your academic credentials and scholarly accomplishments, so that I may know what my $12 would be getting.

I would be extremely happy to have LDS individuals brave enough to use their own names and academically savvy enough to know what they are doing critique my work. There are a few Mormons in this thread who do use their own names, though as far as I know they are not trained in the relevant disciplines. But I'm open to serious criticisms from anyone. But the point of the challenge was not to find proofreaders or nit-pickers who would find fault with minor points of interpretation or raise silly semantic objections like the one about my use of the word corporeal. I was not looking for advice, although I welcome constructive criticism offered in good faith (i.e., offered without denigrating my character, intentions, or academic abilities). The point was simply to invite Mormons who are suspicious of my intentions to read my work and make a fair assessment as to whether I make a good-faith effort to understand Mormon belief accurately (not whether I agree with Mormon beliefs or present all of their arguments and objections completely). I am confident that anyone who approached that challenge honestly and seriously would have to admit that I do make such a good-faith effort. I am also regrettably confident that most of my detractors here will continue to dismiss my work without giving it a fair reading.

[Vance]

We don't assume that evangelicalism is superior by default.

:rofl:

You are killing Bowman!!!

[Rob Bowman]

Loran,

This thread is not about the philosophical coherence of trinitarianism. I responded politely to your question and made an effort to explain the issues to you, but continued hammering on this matter is now a diversion from the topic of the thread.

But as we see above, he really isn't willing to go to the philosophical mat and defend his central metaphysical/religious assertions in depth. He wishes to restate, repeatedly, the fundamental claim, but refrains from jumping into the meat grinder and taking them apart to see what makes them tick.

I'm a bit disappointed, actually, as I though Rob would jump into this full bore. As he well knows, the doctrine of the Trinity is, for LDS (and others), a mass of nonsense. We respect the fact that it is strongly believed, but this does not preclude what the gospel requires of us: to teach the truth and let the chips fall where they may.

[mfbukowski]

If all perspectives, assertions, statements, or truth claims are equally legitimate, then all perspectives, assertions, statements, and truth claims are equally meaningless. This is logically necessary. If all assertions are equally true, all assertions are equally false because the conceptual contrast between truth and falsehood has been erased. If everything is true, nothing is true. Without any basis for comparison and contrast, nothing can be known at all. If it is claimed that any and all assertions regarding why it rains are equally valid, then nothing can and wll ever be known about what causes it to rain.

Postmodern thought of this kind is a logical self negating vortex (like all forms of intellectual relativism) that must express its own truth claims in the very communicative manner it claims renders the concepts expressed within and through all acts of discourse conceptually unreachable as to their actual truth value. You can possibly see the problem in the very language I've just used above. By saying that postmodern thought makes "truth claims," I have just negated the fundamental truth claims of postmodernism...that no truth claims are really possible.

No, you are completely wrong. No one argues this. Pragmatism for example is a different theory than the correspondence theory of truth.

I really don't want to re-hash a hundred years of philosophy to bring you up to speed. "Postmodernism" is not a single philosophy- and doesn't make truth claims in the sense you are using the word-

Epistemically Pragmatism talks about justified beliefs or warranted beliefs which are a kind of proxy for what you would call "truth". The difference is primarily that justified beliefs are based on experience.

To cut straight to the chase, William James for example would say that a religious experience could undergird a "justified" belief. That's pretty much all I am arguing for around here anyway.

No one has ever said that all propositions are "equally legitimate". That is absurd