Dying At The Right Time
Morgan Rempel wonders whether there is a good time to die.
Come on, the death of Jesus revolves around a very different set of circumstances. If Jesus was in fact “God in human flesh”, the God of Abraham and Moses, and one assumes this God does in fact exist, then everything about His life and death is entirely scripted by God Himself. His timing, His reasons, His consequences. After all, if you were God made flesh and you knew that Heaven awaited you on “the other side” for all of eternity, what then of the pain inflicted on you at the crucifixion?
Socrates, on the other hand, could only fall back on the God that certain philosophers back then thought up in their head. The formal, a priori, realist God that existed only given particular words strung together in a particular order that basically defined Him into existence.
Clearly, if God here was predicated on the “intellectual” assumption that “universals or abstract objects exist objectively and outside of human minds”, than anything goes. If you can think it up, it exists. It’s only a matter then of stumbling out of the cave and naming the objects.
Here, however, one can construe the “death of God” such that Jesus Christ is seen as but a character in a work of fiction…a novel called the Bible. The plot is examined by Nietzsche and found to be wanting in regard to the crucifixion. Otherwise if it is presumed that God does in fact still exist but his “death” revolves around the fact that more and more people have simply stopped believing that He does, for any mere mortal to speculate about Christ having died “too early” is ridiculous. An omniscient and omnipotent God doesn’t make mistakes like that, right?
More to the point for the rest of us is this: did Nietzsche die too early?