Lecture notes from my 2004 presentation during seminars with Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault at the University of British Columbia's graduate college, Department of Religious Studies and Ancient Near-Eastern Studies and the Vancouver School of Theology. This was part of a series of research lectures leading up to my final work now available as The Ethics of Understanding God (2005).

NB: In the fifteen years since finishing my opus, there has been a populist appropriation of many of the terms within the fields of philosophy, theology and semiotics. It should be understood that this misuse of these terms and the concomitant critique from the "Intellectual Dark Web" proponents like my fellow Canadian Jordan Peterson and others do not hold any weight when considered within these actual fields of study which are not understood or in any way accurately represented by the IDW exponents -- none of whom have more than the most cursory education in the fields of my research. While their critiques of the populist appropriations of these terms and theories certainly are valid foils to the abuse of these complex terms by the radical undergraduate movements burgeoned by laws such as Bill C-23 and the absurd treatment of Weinstein at Evergreen College, they fail to represent the actual role that such ideas and terms fulfill within the spheres of these disciplines.

In other words: If a bunch of students are indoctrinated by liberal-Marxist professors to appropriate "postmodern" or "postructural" without any actual understanding of these technical terms and simplify their meaning, critique of this is valid. Likewise, if popular authors and lay-scholars conflate the discipline of semiotics, especially as it has finally developed under Umberto Eco out of Saussure and Peirce's work, with the aforementioned terms, that does not change the fact that the appropriated terms have nothing at all to do with the how they are actually used in their respective fields. To redefine a term, then critique that term, and think therefore that the fields these terms are drawn from are therefore grasped is simply absurd anti-intellectualism and a failure of critical thinking in its most basic use. The IDW critique is valid against those who students and professors who misuse terms in fields they have either little knowledge or abusively to promote a political and/or ideological agenda -- such argumentation goes against the very reason why scholarship exists.