Nietzsche. The anti-Christ

“Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in “another” or “better” life.”

This visceral coming from a man who enjoyed all the educational benefits of a Christian culture.
Shame on him and the legions of pseudo-intellectuals who grovel at his feet. They have shredded the Scriptures, emptied the Cathedrals, stilled the psalms of congregations and sent millions of faithless zombies onto the mass production lines with no song of God to liven their hearts. And now we watch the whole edifice of a once soaring Christian culture come crashing to the ground in a pile of rubble.

It’s glorious, isn’t it?

Thanks for the input. Enlightening. One could not ask for more. A clear expression of apathy.

The churches are far from empty. You can have your soaring Christian culture if you want it. Why rag on those who prefer something else?

You obviously have not been to Europe, the seat of our culture. America is a cultural desert.

What else? Baal? Perhaps you have a more glorious explanation. We will need it as the depression deepens. We have the specter of an entire culture in the process of collapse and its origins go back to Nietzsche and his ilk.

Oh no, my beliefs are an anachronism! Shame on all those who have labored towards putting this infectious disease out of it’s misery!

Pathetic.

Well maybe you should get them aligned with the times. It is plain that I am not talking to anybody with kids and is concerned with their future.

I would, but you see, the content of my beliefs dictate that they are perfect and all encompassing. I think it’s for the best if these beliefs go the way of that dog you took a machete to.

And why does this matter?

I don’t think God exists, but I respect those who do.

Do not fall into the trap of bitterness against atheists. We left because we found the church miserable and stifling. I’ll bet you that millions of young men leave the Catholic church (officially or otherwise) because they’re sick of the pointless guilt. We’re told that God condemns us for the occasional sexual self-release, something that harms no one. More bitterness and condemnation will not make us come back.

I know many very caring, socially and environmentally conscious atheists. Even ones whose parents were also atheist, and have no cultural upbringing in “Christian values”. We believe that we are good people as we are, and when you condemn us we conclude that you are the problem rather than the solution. You will be better off to join hands with us and work towards the common causes we both care about: a healthier planet, a safer neighborhood, a stronger and fairer economy, a more peaceful world.

God no longer has the power to bludgeon people into doing what “he” wants them to do by threatening exile and torture in this world and hellfire in the next. In this age, those who wish to make a difference must appeal not to fear of punishment, but to the better nature of people of all faiths. We have our differences, but we mostly want the same things.

“This is the world we live in. These are the hands we’re given. Use them and let’s start trying to make it a place worth living in.” – Genesis

I know you mean well, but you are just skimming the surface of the huge under-lying malaise that our modern culture is now mired in. The war between science and religion has to end. It is tearing us apart. The misunderstandings on this thread alone are proof of that. We simply cannot base all our values on matter alone. We are gambling with our fate. We cannot find a way forward if we ignore the lessons of the past. Faith In God was and always will be our foundation. If our modern education and religious protest has any purpose it is to rid us of dogmatic religious interpretations. We know the ministers of the Church failed badly. But to throw the baby out with bathwater does nobody any Good.
There is not one atheist writing that can equal the wisdom and beauty of the 23rd Psalm, or any with the depth of knowledge that is hidden between the lines of the world’s great Scriptures. Not a single philosopher of today will be remembered a thousand years from now. But the ancient Scriptures will still be there. We meed to rediscover the strength of our culture. It took 100,000 generations of ancestors to formulate it. We cannot simply start again from scratch.

If you read Nietzsche s writings on Christianity, you can see he had a sophomore’s grasp of the subject. He never saw the underlying power. Jesus was never a God, but he had the message of a God. He said LOVE is what holds the universe together. The Love of God for Man and of man for God is at the center of all human cultures, no matter what name we give it. It always was our center - since the Stone Age and always will be into the Cosmic Age.

You know I agree with much of what you’re saying. I think our religious traditions have a lot to teach us today. But we are throwing out the bathwater of dogmatism and fundamentalism. Whether the baby gets rescued depends greatly on how theists respond to that. If they act like they still run the place, shunning and condemning and excommunicating us, then religion will be destroyed and forgotten, and its good will be lost. There is a better alternative – peace through mutual understanding.

First, theists must understand that a life without God can still be a good, full life, even if it ignores some things you value, or permits some things your theology prohibits. Reasonable people can differ about whether there is a God – the widely available evidence does not point strongly either way, as far as I can see. And good people can differ on whether it’s okay to masturbate, have premarital sex, perform abortions, engage in homosexual behavior, destroy embryos for stem cells, etc. These hot points of contention in American culture are tearing us apart and making us stupid. Because of these issues we elected the worst presidential administration in history, which has done more damage to our country and world than any gay marriage or abortion could ever have done. While we waste our time on these (relatively) small matters, man poisons the earth and eviscerates his fellow man, and hypocritical religious conservatives and fundamentalists turn a blind eye because their theology says they must put embryos and gay sex first.

There is a way out. Two simple principles lay the groundwork for harmony between people of all faiths:

  1. Your worldview is just your worldview; not all other worldviews are reasonable or compatible, but there are more than just your own.
  2. When people choose to live differently based on other reasonable worldviews, they should be allowed to do so, as long as they don’t harm others.

I know not everything will be hunky-dory after people accept these principles, but they are a step closer to making things better. Our religious traditions are also key, once they are stripped of the petty dogmatism that small men have used to corrupt their great messages.

If you accept us for who we are, perhaps the god schism can be mended, and we will all once again hear the soft words of ancient scripture, which are inaudible today because of the dogmatists’ screams and fistfights.

There is one world view that we must all live by. Love our neighbors as we love ourselves. I think we can all agree that of we all stick to that, the world will be a peaceful place.

Now if you think it is okay to abort a fetus simply because you put your girl up the pole and you don’t want to take responsibility for it, and your neighbor sees that as a gross trespass against Nature, how are we to resolve the basic loving principle?. Are you not harming Nature, the fetus and your neighbor? In what way can that be justified as a loving act?

Allow me to interject, if I may be so bold, and if you please…

I feel that the best alternative is engaging in a dialogue between Liberal-protestantism and Conservative-traditionalism.

I strongly-disagree.

You cannot be “good” without “Go(o)d”, definitively-speaking: i.e. God is good.

I do not see that to be true. The “good people” must make a choice on where they stand with regards to such positions.

There is no middle-ground between life-and-death. Sex is the catalyst.

I disagree with all of this.

No issue is more paramount to the future of the human specie than Abortion.

My ex-girlfriend aborted my child-to-be years ago, so I have a little bit to say about such issues…

#1 - Perspectivism is not a logically-coherent rationality. It debases itself and falls apart in the end.
#2 - Moral Relativism is exactly the problem in the world right now. Which single religion will come to dominate the entire world???

Christianity cannot accept any man, woman, or child who does not first kneel down and kiss the feet of their Lord: slavery & bondage.

The problem that I have with Christianity is exactly that. Fine: God can be King. → but I bow to no man, especially a dead Jewish carpenter.

Christianity will fall; Nietzsche was right about that fact alone, if nothing else.

We cannot abide by this rule as long as we are still men in disagreement. The Spirit of Man is domination over each Other. We live and breathe conflict. How can I love my neighbor when I want to kill him and rape his women??? → simply-because I am male. It sounds like all men must then become feminized if the world truly wants “peace”. This also implies that nobody will think-for-themselves. All Individuality & Independence, Freedom, must be brought down to its knees and castrated by those who used to look for this kind of Freedom for strength. There is no such thing as strength-in-weakness, ever.

Personally-speaking, I do not know. All that I can say is that the (Atheist)-Humanism principle has led my spirit very far astray from where I would have liked-to-be. I used to believe in Feminism, as a young man (in a liberal city-state), because I was very young, stupid, and immature. I used to believe that it was okay for a woman to have a “choice” regarding her “own” reproductive “freedom”. The simple fact of the matter, though, is that females have no true “responsibility” when it comes to matters of life-and-death. The can raise children into adults the best; but they have no authority whatsoever outside of this context. That is there biological-genetic-predisposition anyway as ‘females’. Why has there never been a ‘female’ Priest or Pope???

Nobody ever taught me this fact in my life; I learned the lesson the hardest way of them all. Women have a God-given right to their infanticide.

Only males can control their own sexuality. Only males truly-have a “choice” in these matters.

Yes, you are harming her. It cannot be justified.

It’s not, I will concede that. Abortion is a bad thing. I wouldn’t do it. But the question here is whether we should be forcing other people to conform to our personal moral views. It’s that intolerance that is causing us to waste time on the wrong things. The remedy is for theists to understand that, even though abortion is one of the worst offenses in the world for them, according to other reasonable worldviews it is merely one bad thing among many, and sometimes it’s the lesser of two evils. Conversely, atheists need to understand that abortion is a bad thing, it does hurt mother and child and father, and we should work hard to extend full respect for all human life.

The world is overpopulated, and many couples having sex today cannot support a child. The reason we make such enormous demands on our environment, tipping it to the breaking point, is because the industrial revolution allowed us to increase our population enormously. Moralize about sexuality all you want – I may even agree with you on much of it – but we are faced with a serious practical problem here, and telling people to stop having sex won’t help anymore today than it did yesterday. People are not good at controlling their reproduction, especially when there’s a church telling them not to use contraceptives. Abortion gives them a fail-safe when they don’t want to bring a child into the world that they’re not prepared to love.In terms of cognitive development, a fetus at any stage before birth is no more developed than a chimpanzee or other higher mammal. Killing it is wrong, just like killing a chimp is wrong. But we have much bigger problems to worry about.

Now that’s all from a purely secular point of view. From the point of view of some (not all) major religions, every human (but not other animals) gets a soul at the moment of sperm-egg union, and killing it is a mortal offense against almighty God. Certainly abortion is one of the greatest evils from that point of view. But here’s where the principles need to be applied. Not everyone shares that theology or worldview, but (in many-yet-not-all cases) their views are just as reasonable. It’s wrong to force conformity to theology on someone else, if that person has no good reason to believe in it. That’s what true tolerance is. You don’t just abstractly accept that other people can reasonably believe differently than you. You actually have to step into their shoes, see things from their point of view, then let them live their lives in accordance with their reasonable alternative beliefs.

You think that the situation in Europe is Nietzsche’s fault? What a simple take of 19th to 20th century period. Nietzsche is a simple symptom of a general malaise, not the root cause. He put what others were thinking and saying, if bold enough, in poetic style, thus he is the narrator of the tragedy and not it’s author.

I don’t know what (you think) Perspectivism or Moral Relativism are, or whether they describe my position. (You know, I’ve noticed that theists often level these labels at people they don’t agree with, but they are rarely defined clearly. What is this spectre of moral relativism ready to consume the world? Who is a moral relativist or perspectivist?)All I’m saying is that if there are two belief systems A and B which are incompatible, yet both reasonable given their own premises, and if a choice must be made between the two, then people can reasonably differ about whether A or B is true. Theism vs atheism is an example. They’re both reasonable and the evidence doesn’t definitively point either way, so reasonable people can differ.

There is a common core of rationality and morality that binds nearly all peoples of the world, and worldviews which are incompatible with that may be pushed aside if they pose a danger to us. But beyond that common core, people should be tolerant of others’ beliefs because their views are just as reasonable as your own. Theology does not qualify as part of the common core, since different peoples at different times have held endlessly varying and contradictory viewpoints without ever reaching a consensus. So theology should not be used as a tool to bludgeon other people into conformity with some privileged group’s beliefs.

I know that you don’t know. The question is: do you want to know (what I think)?

It is the ideological competition amongst different religions that attempt to expose to one another which ideal is closest to God.

No, reasonable people cannot differ, but they can defer. There is not much of a choice between two polar-opposites.

A moral relativist essentially-is a perspectivist: anybody who states, “You are entitled to your opinion.”, is a perspectivist.

I am not a perspectivist. Thus, you are not entitled to your “opinion”. One of us is right; the other is wrong: competition ensues.

I disagree with the bold highlight. You imply Equality, when no such things exists. Nobody is ever “equal” to one another.

I have no reason to be tolerant of something that offends me deeply. I have no reason to be tolerant of a view that is objectively queer, deprecated, and totally-wrong. I have no reason to allow somebody to slander me, my beliefs, or my positions, when those ideas were mistaken from the common perspective to begin with. In fact, just the opposite occurs!

I have an obligation to argue against you. I have an obligation to point out where, when, and how you are wrong, and especially-why you are wrong. You are obligated to do the same otherwise you slander us both, you and I. If you are a male, then I already-know that you want to be “right” more than anybody, especially-me. Just because you avoid the conflict and cower before the argument does not concede any point!

That is the problem, in our day & age…

There was an interesting article written by Curtis White a while back in Harpers magazine, in which he discusses our individual right to independent belief systems and how 6 billion independent world-views has almost completely scrambled interpersonal the communication to a point where even common family members can no longer tolerate each other. He ends with the following comment:

What’s called for, then, is an enormous project of translation on two fronts. First, the translation that must take place between groups of believers, and second the translation that will transform old-fashioned political and religious ideologies from a state of nature to an ethical system that must defend its values in a modern competing market of values. For example, the recent turn of Christian evangelicals to politics that includes environmentalism {“Creation Care”) has “translated” their beliefs into something that they can now share with mainstream environmentalists, pantheists, ecological scientists, and even outdoors men. For all these groups, the world is, if not something holy, then something that out to be the object of great and abiding care.

So there is hope, via this small example of accommodation, that in the end, if we are to all manage the home planet as a single family estate, we will eventually find commonalty in all subjects.

I disagree with magnet.

What thread is this?