“Mark and Bev Tindall” <> wrote in message news:<>…

A net friend wrote ……

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Mark’s quotation contained a paragraph that jumped off the screen for me. Here it is:

We live of course in an age of definitions. There are so many rival messages and so much competition for media space and time that we have to be able to convey instantly what it is that is dis-tinctive about us, or else people will have lost the thread or lost interest. But the trouble with definition is that – by defini-tion – it puts limits on things. When you define you exclude: if you define what you stand for, you simultaneously distance yourself from everything else.

my reply – This paragraph is bang-on. “Definitions” are quick, good for the sound-bite, tailor made for the media age. Thought-closing final declarations make people look confident, appear certain, as if they KNOW. Simultaneously comforting and misleading. Very tough to argue against because of their persuasive appeal. Is it any wonder the philosopher Wittgenstein said, “we must do away with all explanation [definition] and description alone must takes its place.” and in another place, “go the bloody hard way!”

The French philosopher Michel Foucault spent much of his career dwelling on how people get ‘excluded’ by definitions of what is ‘normal’. Working from within Foucault’s tradition Professor M. Philp

(1985) offered this wonderful quote on how the human sciences operate,

but this can apply to other fundamentalist traditions as well: In workplaces, schoolrooms, hospitals and welfare offices; in the family and the community; and in prisons, mental institutions, courtrooms and

tribunals, the human sciences have established their standards of ‘normality’. The normal child, the healthy body, the stable mind…such concepts haunt our ideas about ourselves, and are reproduced and legitimated through the practices of social workers, doctors, policemen and administrators. The human sciences attempt to define normality; and by establishing this normality as a rule of life

for us all, they simultaneously manufacture – for investigation, treatment and surveillance – the vast area of our deviation from this standard.”

My Christian faith is not part of an exclusive (or excluding) ‘club’.

Jesus taught us not to judge (define) others.