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Nietzsche for Dummies
A TV sports report about a local baseball team's failure to win in the play-offs upstate brought to mind the writings of Nietzsche. One of the local boys said, "We wanted to win, but I guess the good Lord had other plans." Another said much the same thing, adding that it just wasn't "God's" will. A light went off in my head. Nietzsche said Christianity was the worst affliction to befall mankind in our entire history on earth. He wrote of the Superman, as much a Taoist Master as a Zoroastrian Godman. Before he apologized for saying it, Ted Turner said that Christianity was for losers. It was a Nietzschean statement. The baseball players are using "God" as a crutch. They were not up to the task, so they blame their deity for losing. Instead of playing harder, they fall back on God's having moved in "His" "mysterious ways." These people are pathetic cripples. That was Nietzsche's principal point.
The Superman does not need "God." If the Superman fails at a task, he takes responsibility for it. If he is "good," it is not because he is trying to please some supernatural entity, some metaphysical mumbo jumbo; it is because he is a moral person who has no need of "God." The Superman is ironically more like a god than anyone who worships "God."
The Superman does not need "God." If the Superman fails at a task, he takes responsibility for it. If he is "good," it is not because he is trying to please some supernatural entity, some metaphysical mumbo jumbo; it is because he is a moral person who has no need of "God." The Superman is ironically more like a god than anyone who worships "God."
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by mthoreau on -
Do you believe that most people have the emotional and moral fortitude to live without god?
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Permalink Reply by James M. Martin on -
Hardly! Take a look around you. It sometimes drives me to distraction that so many people in my country call themselves Christians. It is the ultimate bogus religion: fabricated almost entirely from pagan faiths, born in the blood of the Arian bishops slaughtered because they refused to acknowledge the trinity, and guilty of the most hideous pogroms against Jews, witches, homosexuals, gnostics, and others throughout the history of the Church. Any thinking man reading either the Old Testament or the canonicals eventually comes to the conclusion that the entire Booble is the silliest nonsense that could be fabricated by deranged minds. No, I think more Europeans are capable of living without "God" than we are. But every time one suggests as much (or, indeed, simply that our European brethren are more open-minded and progressive) we get calls to pour French wine into the gutters and to change burger joint menus all over America to offer "Freedom fries." If anyone thinks the average American has the emotional and moral fortitude to live without "God," I point them to the Nielsen ratings for Bill O'Really, the 700 Club, and many other TV programs indicative of the complete failure of such fortitude. Americans worship Death because they fear it and call it God. Fear of death is the ultimate emotional, moral failure.
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Permalink Reply by LeaT on -
Yes, I suffer with you :) I really hope Sweden will continue staying liberal. We too have a Bible Belt, but luckily must nutjubs stay there. A class mate of mine commented on that it's funny to walk around there and have a random conversation, then a Christian walks up and says we will all die in 2012 XD
That's not the typical Swede though. I had a Christian class mate who regularly attended church, but she was a very rational person and scored high on her exams. I had been thinking a bit lately due to another discussion about OT (again), and what she would say about the story about Jephtah, Sodom and Gomorrah. Many atheists argue that the Christian god is a murderer. I think my friend would've just laughed and then agreed, even ridiculing the events themselves into jokes, because that's the way she was. I really wish more Christians were like that. She just believed in god and a possible heaven. I think she may even have ignored hell.
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Permalink Reply by Tarquin St John Sh'gn'sty on -
Perhaps,if God is replaced by a secular object/person of worship.
Eg: Money as measure of human worth. Or political; EG Hitler, Stalin, Mao,Kim, Ho.
Humans can probably live without gods ,but as social beings,I doubt we can live without the notion of something/someone more powerful than ourselves.
Religion and belief in gods are virtually universal and have always varied in form, ritual,theology and moral values. My perception is that we create gods to meet specific needs. When we no longer need gods,religion will die. BUT it will almost certainly be replaced by something else. I guess it would be too much to hope that the something might include consistent rational thought and behaviour as a species.
PS @James: the people who "call themselves Christians "are indeed "real Christians",just as suicide bombers are "real Muslims".The sacred books the three Abrahamic faiths are so contradictory that justification can be found for any life one chooses,from mystic to murderer. In my opinion, just as alcohol reveals the inner person, religion reveals the true nature of the society which invents it and the hearts of its followers. Those things never seem simple.
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Permalink Reply by James M. Martin on
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Good points, Tarquin and very well said. The opening line caught my eye, as I have long been a big believer in euhemerism. As you know, but perhaps some don't, Euhemerus was a pre-Christian (4th century b.c.e.) myth-maker who wrote a story called "The Voyage to Panchaea," in which he claimed (tongue in cheek, one supposes) to have sailed to a lost world called Panchaea, where he found temples, &c., relics of the gods and was informed by an oracle that "all the gods, even Herakles, were mortals once, but by virtue of their special genius, talents, ingenuum, they were immortalized upon their passing." We all now know that Jebus was based on the old solar-resurrection deities (e.g. Mithras, Osiris, Tammuz, Attis et al.), which might actually explain the sightings of Elvis Presley, who was known to leave the stage and "revive" fainting women in his audiences. From fact springs myth, the revival becoming a healing, the healing becoming, e.g. the raising of the dead. As you say, these things take time.
The point I simply wished to make is that, like you say, Jebus will be completely forgotten in a few millenia; that is, IF his worshipers don't actively hasten Booblical prophecy of Armageddon with the resultant Rupture, before man evolves to a higher state. I take it you have read John Lilley's Simulations of God? If not, you might like it. He shows the many forms "God" might take were "He" not the anthropomorphic deity found so commonly in the world's religions today. And, now that I think about it, the fact that so many people generally think of "God" as a "person" (I should imagine a grey-beard ancient) in and of itself suggests we made "Him" and not vice-versa. My own "God" is DNA. It's as good a god as any. - Attachments:
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Permalink Reply by Jordan Morris on -
"Religion and belief in gods are virtually universal and have always varied in form, ritual,theology and moral values. My perception is that we create gods to meet specific needs. When we no longer need gods,religion will die."
The fact that it is man made and in a sense fictional, without facts. This logically doesn't make sense that it can be taken seriously, or to have faith put into a false entity... Its for this reason, of this false belief, that religion should not reveal any nature of society- other than a moral background; Society should not be tricked into a moral structure, but should find it with logic and rational thought, perhaps a bit of acceptance as well...
Its the thought that this all mighty entity as already defined moral and non-moral, wrong and right, that others will not accept other thoughts that contradict their entity! People with different thoughts are exiled out and looked at as evil? For basically have a different opinion on life? Society- as a nation (Perhaps as a world), needs to work together and not focus on individual thoughts and opinions, but on the "inner person" of all people to produce confident moral thought... A Moral thought that is not producing the conflict that religion and most other power produce...
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Permalink Reply by Ralph Dumain on -
I don't buy it. Nietzsche hated Christianity to a large degree because he hated social equality. Such attitudes are not rare in the atheist movement, among libertarians, rednecks, and other misanthropes.
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Permalink Reply by mthoreau on
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Well I don't quite agree with your interpretation of Nietzche, but your dead on in regards to the redneck remark.
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Permalink Reply by Фелч Гроган on -
Ralph: Such attitudes are not rare in the atheist movement, among libertarians, rednecks, and other misanthropes.
As opposed to enlightened, autodidactic Marxist scholars with brains the size of a planet ?
Ralph, justifiably, dismissing Nietzsche:
The question, then, is where is Nietzsche's social theory? There is none. Nietzsche has nothing to offer but a crude biologism, characteristic of the rising social darwinism of the time. For Nietzsche there is only sickness and health; the critique of religion and philosophy is the critique of sickness. Instead of political economy and the means of social organization of material production giving rise to the forms of consciousness, what do we get? The exceptional individual vs. the herd, slave and noble morality, genealogy of morals—for the forms of consciousness. Biologism and breeding for social theory.
Glad you told me. I'll throw all those books out now.
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Permalink Reply by James M. Martin on
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LOL. Funny, funny, felch!
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Permalink Reply by James M. Martin on
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Ejusdem generis, my friend, ejusdem generis. By linking libertarians, rednecks, and "other" misanthropes, you imply that all have something in common, the word "and" being conjunctive; the word, "other," implying that both libertarians and rednecks are misanthropic. Both propositions are demonstrably false. You might win some points by defining your terms. For example, if you mean by "libertarians" the coterie of Republicans who, with Rep. Ron Paul, want government completely detached from our social destiny, taking the slogan, "the best government is the least" to an almost ludicrous extreme, then that is one thing; it is another breed of animal entirely if you intend by your reference those who equate libertarian with libertinage or some form of antinomian behavior, as for example the aghoris in India.
Rednecks are the farthest thing from libertarianism I can imagine, if by "rednecks" you mean shit-kicking cowboy types. They don't seek abolition of government but imposition of a government that institutionalizes country and western music, beer, and pickup trucks. I fail to see what libertarians, rednecks, and misanthropes have in common. Perhaps the finest example of the latter, Jonathan Swift, was a devoutly religious man who nevertheless attacked the foibles and weaknesses of our species with the most trenchant satire in the history of letters. Scratch a misanthrope and you find a lover of man. I do not find, either, the hatred of social equality in Nietzsche that you do. Quite the opposite: he set himself about reorienting all men to the freedom that comes with throwing off the shackles of religious dogma. - Attachments:
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Permalink Reply by Ralph Dumain on
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You need to do your homework viz. Nietzsche. As for my imprecise grouping of three social or political categories, I find the common denominator in their nastiness and hostility to any notion of the common good. By redneck atheists I mean the type of people I used to find in American Atheists, and some today who still think that atheism defines a lifestyle and who inhabit a narrow mental and social universe.
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