Firstly, I’m not a student of Nietzsche. Secondly, I see the distinction you make but in the end value what you call “undiciplined expressions of cultural anarchy” as a thousand times more beautiful than the ones you hold in high esteem. Everything about them is beautiful from their construction to their efficiency.
Taste, friend, is learned. That said, I still don’t see what centuries of slavery for the purpose of one man having a good time in his rebirth is at all tasty. I don’t see the passion. Maybe you can speak of concretely and teach me something, because honestly, I’m not seeing it.
Efficiency in what? If you mean providing space for people, indeed, the pyramids aren’t fit for that. By this standard, any given project building is vastly superior to whichever temple or monument I might admire.
Rather, it is bred - and ajusted a little over a lifetime, if that. It runs much deeper than thought-patterns.
You keep specifically referring to the pyramids. I have a hard time believing the bulk of the theories historics come up with to explain the use of those structures. Not because I don’t think they are plausible stories, I used to believe them, but because the methods with which the structures were built, especially the larger and more intricately constructed ones, have aparently not been explained yet. What we have serving as explanations for their existence is based on puzzlement, guesses, assumptions, and wild interpretations of a few scattered pieces of poetry.
If you don’t see the passion that went into them on first glance, you probably you never will. Passion, like taste and unlike an opinion, is not something one can be indoctrinated with through the intellect.
Finally: one must first have a vision, then it can be realized. Characteristic of a worker-bee or ant is that it has no vision, no capacity for creative thought. This type of human is, if it is healthy, happy to work on something greater than itself.
I do not recall denying that the 20th century gave birth to people of vision.
I will deny, however, that the bulk of architecture and art of the 20th century had been visionary. There have been technological accomplishment beyond anything that has ever happened in known history, and my argument for religion certainly is not one against science. As I mentioned, the older pyramids are as yet mystieries to science. On another note, Einstein, our scientific paradigms instigator, was, in fact, religious:
“The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God”
“I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest are details”
You say that as if there is a standard other than your own with which to measure vision. What can’t be denied here is that culture, life-span, knowledge, and overall prosperity has always increased in proportion to religion decreasing. But even if there is an objective standard for which to measure vision and it turns out that religion directly causes tasty architecture, is it really worth it considering the influence it has on everything else? I, off course, would say no. I’ll take modern free secularist culture with mediocre architecture over culture religiosity with architecture that has taste any time.
A much more plausible way of explaing the tendencies of the human psyched is that when prosperity increases, less people feel inclined to pray. So it’s the other way around, if you ask me. But this detail aside, you are speaking only of Christianity here. You forget that the prosperity of the Niledelta was great, as was that of Ahtens, 500BC - a polis very much occupied with religion. So, yes, what you assert can be denied easily.
You’re thinking very much in terms of black and white, yes and no. Why not have both? As Einstein demonstrates, when the mind is sound, religion and free thought do not interfere with each other - to the contrary.
But they do. Science operates under a deterministic paradigm, and as such does not allow for a soul, free will, or any sort of moral system other than relativist. Besides, if one were to hold all ideas to the scientific standard before holding them dear, i.e. believe in them, I don’t see that they could hold dear any claim made thus far by any religion that immediately comes to mind - God or otherwise. It is an either/or dichotomy as far as I’m concerned or can thus far see.
