One of the critical moments for me, one of those \u201cwoke\u201d moments, facilitating my journey out of funda-gelicalism (FG), was realizing how modern FG was.\u00a0 It was the opposite side of the same coin of modernity with all its either\/or<\/em> concrete dichotomies.<\/p>\n I began to realize that the young-earth-creationist arguing with the atheist\/philosophical naturalist, were really the same person in more ways than either would care to admit.\u00a0 They were just opposite sides of the same coin.\u00a0 They came to different conclusions but they both started from the same place.\u00a0 And that place, was a supposed view from nowhere.\u00a0 Better, it was a \u201creading\u201d from nowhere, or, a reading as if one were reading a dictionary or encyclopedia in a dispassionate, neutral, manner.<\/p>\n If I am reading the same dictionary or encyclopedia entry as a person in Boston, or Kenya, who I am, or who the person in Boston is, or the person in Kenya, does not matter.\u00a0 We are reading the same entry.\u00a0 Therefore (we imagined), we are impartial and our \u201creading\u201d is from nowhere.\u00a0 It\u2019s not from my location (more about location below), Boston\u2019s, or Kenya\u2019s.<\/p>\n Implicit in the ethos of modernity is the notion of unrelated, distinct, objects bound purely by the laws of physics and nothing more.\u00a0 Relatedly, then, we are impartial observers with a pure gaze.\u00a0 We map, we categorize, we cut up the world into discrete objects, (like conducting an autopsy) we then are able to control.\u00a0 If I can name you, locate you, map you, and categorize you, I can control you.\u00a0 Control may be the operating logic of modernity.\u00a0 But my location (understood as geography, culture, family, education, language, life experience, etc.) is supposedly unimportant or neutral.<\/p>\n In a way, we encyclopedia(ize<\/em>) the world.\u00a0 We place the book on our shelf and look up whatever information we need; we read the information, put the book back, and think we \u201cknow\u201d or have knowledge of that area.\u00a0 We \u201cmaster\u201d subjects (objects) this way.\u00a0 We do this online too.\u00a0 We \u201cWikipedia(ize<\/em>)\u201d the world.<\/p>\n We begin to \u201cread\u201d the world this way, which includes people, everything.\u00a0 And we delude ourselves into thinking this gaze, this reading, is impartial\u2014that we are just consuming \u201cfacts\u201d from nowhere.\u00a0 There is nothing in our way, there is nothing that obstructs our view, it is a direct, one-to-one correspondence between my gaze and the object.<\/p>\n What this does however is condition us to \u201cread\u201d in only one way: Literally<\/em>.\u00a0 There is only surface and no depth (just the facts\u2026).\u00a0 More importantly, it is a reduction.\u00a0 Everything is reduced to its physical properties\u2014because such is only what we can \u201csee,\u201d which in this case means what we can map, locate, weigh, measure, name, and categorize.<\/p>\n