"God is dead."

When Nietzsche said that God was dead, he was not talking of a physical death of God. Rather, he was making an observation that the humans of his time behaved as if God were dead, without fear of divine retribution for even great debaucheries. He felt that the idea of God was no longer capable of acting as a source of human morality. Humans would be no longer capable of believing in God or a divine order because they didn't recognize the concept anymore.

Nietzsche thought that God's death had not yet been recognized by man out of a deep-seated fear or angst. He predicted that once it was widely acknowledged, people would despair, and nihilism would become rampant.

However, the death of God would play a role in humanity's greater development. Once the Christian God, with his arbitrary commands and prohibitions, no longer stood in the way, humanity would have a blank slate. Nietzsche says that once humans turn their eyes away from a supernatural realm, they would focus more on this world and its value. A new morality would develop from this realization. This new stage of human development would be the Übermensch.

Discuss.

"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
- Denis Diderot

if God is dead in idea, then society is still in denial.

Personally I think that instead, new ways of combining spiritual beliefs with a focus on this world and it's value is what is happening in liberal circles of spiritual belief.

Unfortunately on the RW fundie side, new ways of focusing on everything but this world, and using their ideas of God to justify their views is what is happening here.

Overall, the planet has not fared well since the industrial revolution. Industrialized cultures have for the most part looked upon natural resources as something to be plundered and used to further corporate ends.

The ones that seem to be focused on the planet, and this world and it's value, are those that believe that the planet is something to be respected. Whether that is done by atheists, religious people, or anyone else, it is GOOD when it happens

cats.

No, even more difficult than that.

Like a blind person hogtied and stoned herding cats in a tropical storm.

And some of the cats are invisible and some are lame. Some are starving. Some are very territorial. Etc.

It doesn't subtract one iota from the sweeping insight of F. Nietzsche. He remains one of my favorite champions of individual courage.

But a universal, one-size-fits-all construct is not likely to be in place by next weekend.

Nietzsche went on to say that after the death of God was realized, humanity would go through a stage of moral nihilism. However, such behavior is self-destructive, so eventually nihilism would dissapear and be replaced by a new morality, based on the value of this world and its people. Those who learned to practise the new morality would be the Ubermensch.

I love Nietzsche, and have for a long time.

One of my most favorite quotations of all is of Nietzsche's:

"Distrust anyone in whom the impulse to punish is too strong."

And also:

"The surest way to corrupt a young man is to teach him to esteem more highly those who think alike than those who think differently."

The first quote I loved decades before I ever knew about Abu Ghraib, but it seems to apply. And the second is a life's philosophy, or at least it is a sound starting point -- to encourage brave individualism and vision over group-think.

On your points: I agree on all of them and say congratulations for laying them out so soundly. My guess is that your teachers either love you to death or are frightened of you, and in either case, it sounds like you're doin' it right.

the chaplain would probably try to do an excorcism on me. ;)

Thanks for reminding me of the first quote. I've never heard the second before, but you're certainly right in your observations. :hi:

against you and perform an exorcism, a posse of us here at DU will gather and track the chaplain down and beat the crap out of him.

:)

I think people can go various directions.

If one is taught (or figures out) how to love nature, love the world, love others - then that one might get along fine.

Then there are others (like Bush? Cheney?) who seem to figure that without God - one can be an asshole without consequences. What's the difference if you take all that you can get - "ends justify the means" - when there is no ultimate recourse - no ultimate truths to base a life on.


I don't think it makes sense to assume that everyone is going to seek and find the way of peace and justice without a path. Some people are followers and many will follow what seems like the easy path - for them - not what works best for everyone as a whole - or what would make for the best world for the most people.

And there does seem to be a lot of despair - prozac nation.

And there will NEVER be a blank slate. There is always history and expectations.

I have to disagree. This is another thing Nietzsche talked about, saying that all humans have to do is accept that there is a blank slate for there to be one. The baggage of the past only weighs us down because we allow it to.



This is another question that Nietzsche answered. Of course, not all will learn to value this world, and many of those will become nihilists, regarding humans as laws unto themselves. But this behavior is ultimately self-destructive, so nihilism would fade from the scene, and the Ubermensch would be those who have leaned the new morality that goes along with the value of this world.

I think that such behavior is destructive to the rich and powerful - when other people manage to wrest their power from them.

Of course they make themselves targets. And the more outrageous they are - the more of a target they are.

As much as it would be nice to think that there will eventually be an end to the power-grabbing nihilists - I don't see it happening.


I think in small areas -such as isolated islands - places where there was abundance - there have been societies where people were more egalitarian. I have a difficult time imagining that such will really take place on a large scale - esp. without some kind of organizing - at least along the lines of what the Quakers do. I don't know if Nietzsche had that (some kind of organization) in mind or not.

It certainly does seem hard to see any light at the end of the tunnel- at least as far as nihilism is concerned. I think Nietzsche believed the elimination of nihilism was just part of humanity's evolution- similar to Hegel's dialect. I don't know if that's true or not, but it certainly would seem to work better with some orginization.

You're right that it does seem to work better on a smaller scale, at least for right now. In the future? Who knows?

some contemplatives of various sects and traditions who claim that there is such a thing as a blank slate.

I've spoken with people who have ingested ayahuasca and the sense that they induce, or are led toward, a blank state is impossible to miss.

Buddhists I've interviewed in England believe the same thing, and often suggest that the domain of "nothingness" is equivalent to a "blank slate."

And if we really want to slam the foot down on the metaphoric gas pedal, Jesus walked right past the synagoges and temples in town and sought instead the dry, white unmitigated space of the desert. That's a geography of the blank slate, nearabouts.

I might even argue that it's an archetypal condition of human identiy. To seek refuge in, or allow oneself to be defined by, unmitigated space, aural silence, pure essence.

Like in Mongolia - when the communists came in (in the 20s?) and took away the tribal/clan names that had given people their identities for good or ill for centuries. And took religion out of the picture, too, I think. It would be interesting to know more about what all happened with that.

One thing is - it seems if a group is such a blank slate that they don't have the knowledge of what happened before - and they are starting over - they aren't really evolving. Starting over - a group would probably make most of the same mistakes that have always been made - with the same power struggles, etc. And some would probably invent new supernatural explanations.


With the Jesus analogy - it does stand to reason that anyone who wants to lead people/point people in a different direction would tell people to leave all the nonsense behind.

Seems like there are 3 basic options -

- suggest that people abandon most or all of what they have learned. (I guess that would be Nietzsche)

- suggest that people take the best of a previous tradition and abandon the rest. (This is what it seems that Jesus supposedly did with Judaism -also Thomas Jefferson did this with Christianity).

- suggest that people take the best of many traditions and abandon the nonsense. (What Universalists do - and probably many (most) religions have been hybrids).


I think it seems odd that supposedly Sam Harris tells people to abandon religion - yet he supposedly enjoys the Zen meditation - well that's a religious tradition AFAIC. I think people like to look for what has worked for others - and some people like to encourage people to follow their path (generally borrowed from someone else). So I think there are few blank slates - even if as you suggest - Buddhists encourage blankness - I still see it as a method that is learned. It might very well be a useful method - but it's still a method.

The Quakers also practice a group mediation - blankness, essentially - where people sit together - and people rarely speak. It's a very different experience than most church services. It seems more Zen like than Christian (some would see that as a negative, I guess). It attracts people from a variety of backgrounds. I've been to formal Zen meditations - and they were too formal to me. I guess I favor taking what I consider to be the best from various traditions. And I like the way Quakers practice the best (of what I've tried) - as long as I'm not expected to believe anything in particular.

I think I might like the Sufi practices, too, from the sounds of things. Whirling. A different kind of meditation.

Of course sitting by the ocean, by a waterfall, on top of a hill/mountain are always nice meditations too.

A lot of that amounts to various ways to encourage "blankness", stillness, calm.

a still-life painting, where the observer enters the still plane or sphere and becomes not part of any narrative, but part of the silence and stillness of the images or setting.

"Be still, and know that I am God," in that context, is kind of delightful.

'Appreciate very much your probe there into whether the stillness, or blank slate, is accomplished by method, or if the method is a path toward a yet-to-be-created blank slate condition. Something that comes unbidden from a dream state almost always has a narrative of some kind. The stillness/blank slates that contemplatives and mystics describe seems not to. I'd be interested in being a metaphysical fly on the contemplative wall to see what's up with that.

The basis of any kind of thoughtful path, no matter what words we use or what terms it offers, seems to me to hinge on whether we believe Icarus drowned. We're told he got too haughty and careless, flew too close to the sun, which melted the glue in the wings, which disassembled and down he went into the sea never to be heard from again.

I believe he was rescued. All the details true through the actual fall into the sea, where a few villagers out in skiffs for an afternoon saw him falling from the skies and rowed over, rescued him, rowed him back to the village -- this would have been a hyper-agrarian village of many centuries before Homer -- and nursed him to health.

His memory is a blank slate -- it occurs in that narrative absolutely invisible and unknown to us. And because it is myth and not accountable physical reality, it is blank. The absence of identifiable physical elements, occuring beyond our perceptions. A still-life, that is in motion, that we can't see, and therefore is blank.

And is this the phenomenon of Jesus being a palpable presence when two of his disciples are walking together?

Oh well. Who knows? Thank you for the dynamite comment. Very nice to bump into you on DU.

that to many, a concept of God is dead. Personally, I think that humans have evolved over the years in their understanding of Reality; as their understanding changes, their God concept changes. For many, who see God only as "other"-be it a superhero or demanding judge-God is dead because they don't believe that any more. However, if one goes beyond this concept, as I personally know many are doing nowadays, to one of God being all encompassing-God cannot be dead; that would make as much sense as saying atoms and molecules, the laws of science, thoughts, feelings, things discovered and yet to be discovered, don't exist.