Nietzsche & the New Testament Part 1: Setting the Stage
Part 2 here: http://youtu.be/pyiw_n6bxso
No Ma'am's been a huge influence on my thoughts: http://no-maam.blogspot.com/2006/01/feminization-of-christianity.html
Some additional information on Sumerian beliefs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Mesopotamian_religion#Historical_study
My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/
My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini
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I Feel You by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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This video is brought to you by Mr. Davis, who asks that I contrast Nietzsche's philosophy, specifically from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, to the New Testament.
And this is an excellent, excellent question because Nietzsche is one of the most misunderstood philosophers of all time.
Many of his adherents think that all of his talk about God is dead, there is no morality, and become an Übermensch, means that they can do whatever they want.
They can stomp upon the weak, they can ignore rules, whereas his detractors criticize those people for being nothing but hedonists who wind up dead in a gutter with a needle sticking out of their arm.
The great irony about all of this is that both sides are interpreting Nietzsche as a nihilist when the whole point of his philosophy was to combat the nihilism that he saw engulfing Western civilization at the time.
And remember folks, history, philosophy, it moved slowly.
Nietzsche was only a couple weeks ago in historical terms, and the nihilism that he saw engulfing civilization, well, look out the window.
It's everywhere now.
Now to do this video justice, it's going to have to be a two-parter.
I need to set the stage initially talking about the history of theology, of moral development, of philosophical development that's been happening over the millennia.
And to kick that off, we're going to go back to the beginnings of recorded history.
We're going back to 4000 BC to the Sumerian religion, and we're going to start by looking at them.
Now, the Sumerians.
Interpreting the Sumerians, interpreting the paganism that the Bible talks about, that existed back then, can be a bit challenging to the modern mind.
See, when I say paganism, most Westerners would think of Kernunos or Odin or Apollo, or maybe the gods from Dungeons and Dragons, all of which are patriarchal religions with very distinct roles for everything.
You know what Apollo is, you know what Odin stands for, and you know where to find Kernunos.
And the D ⁇ D gods, they have charts listing exactly what they do, what their pantheon, etc.
Sumerian religion was nothing like that at all.
And one of the challenges in investigating it, in the anthropology, the archaeology of looking at it, is that it changed year to year.
You see, the Sumerian religion was treated the way that we treat our fairy tales.
Sumerian religion did not have distinct creation myths.
It did not have nailed down gods and goddesses, each with their own role, each with part of the creation story.
This is how the universe began, this is how it's going to end.
Rather, it was treated like poetry.
It was an art form writing these mythos, and they would rewrite them generation to generation, year to year.
It was faddish.
Was solipsistic and, in fact the, the abyss, the nihilism that Nietzscheks about.
This is what existed at the time, each of these gods and goddesses.
They would exist with a certain dominant traits that happen in the story, but those traits could change.
You weren't required to follow the story the same way each time, much the way that Disney reinterprets the Little Mermaid, And nobody's angry about that.
You know, it didn't destroy the original.
You want to go read the Hans Christian Anderson book, it's still there.
Disney didn't destroy that.
They just did their version of it.
Same way that Shakespeare rewrote, he rewrote historical events, but he wrote them into a narrative with a morality at the end, and nobody's angry at him for misrepresenting history.
We understand that it's just a story.
And that's fine with stories.
But the Sumerians did this with their very fundamentals of creation.
Creation would vary from day to day.
It was whatever you felt like it being.
And fundamentally, all of these gods and goddesses, they were always paired up.
It was a god pursuing his goddess and doing whatever she wanted to do.
It was the modern solipsism of rewriting your history, of rewriting what happened to serve the narcissistic self, to serve the ego.
And the result of all of this was bloodshed.
Keep in mind, the fundamental fact of human nature is blood and cannibalism.
We need somebody to pay for all the stuff that went wrong.
We're imperfect beings and we need to blame somebody.
And so with ancient Sumeria, because it was entirely subjective, it was, well, who paid for it?
Slaves paid for it.
Children paid for it.
Massive orgies and licentiousness followed up with murder and blood.
If you want a modern corollary to what was going on back then is the celebrity culture.
Because again, we have descended into that solipsistic abyss, and we no longer have religion.
We no longer have a god or a raison d'être.
Our societies are empty, consumerist, black holes.
And so who do we worship?
We worship celebrities.
We take Britney Spears, we raise her up, make her the summer queen, and celebrate her as the perfect version of femininity of humanity.
And then, when her fans have had their fill, they rip her down and they eat her alive.
So we've managed to make it a little bit less bloody nowadays with the mass media, but this is what's going on in ancient Sumeria.
In response to this, in response to this solipsistic, hey, whatever you feel like goes, this bloody, pointless nonsense that was retarding the growth of civilization, you start getting religions like Judaism.
Judaism rejected the solipsistic female principle and embraced the masculine principle of this is the law.
And that's what the Jews are.
They are the people of the law who follow the rules of the book.
They're not very good people, and they know that.
And so instead of second-guessing all of the rules, they just follow the rules.
You know, there's one Jewish rabbi I read that he was opining that the reason the Jews are so successful in contemporary society is because they follow the rules, is because they do their duty.
They know that they're terrible people, and their salvation is just following the rules without thinking about it, which does lead to success.
Now, obviously, they're also a very intelligent people, and that helps things, but they are very disciplined.
Even the worst amongst them are growing up in a culture of extreme discipline, of social expectations.
And so, when people look at the Old Testament and they see this wrathful, this vengeful God, and that's because this is the context that this is coming out of is this solipsistic, hedonistic, abyss-dwelling, whatever you feel like.
Oh, you got pregnant, we'll just murder the baby, you know, sacrifice it to Moloch.
You know, that's that's uh, you know, that's African gods, but the same thing.
Do whatever you feel like, don't take responsibility for anything.
And so, the Jewish religion, the Old Testament, is all about taking responsibility.
You did wrong.
No, you don't get to blame Britney Spears.
You don't get to blame somebody else eye for an eye.
You accept the punishment.
And you can see this.
You know what?
Look at Moses.
Moses goes up Mount Zion and he has his acid trip and he comes back down with the Ten Commandments.
And what does he find?
These Jewish people, he just saved from Egyptian slavery.
What are they doing?
They're running around, they're getting drunk, and they're swapping wives, and they're worshiping golden calves, which is the worship of an idol as a metaphor for the worship of the self.
It's instead of, see, that God is going to hold you accountable.
You know, that God, he doesn't give a shit about how you feel.
He just wants you to do the right thing.
But the golden calf tells you whatever you want.
You know, the golden calf is like the astrology.
You know, how many people out there read an astrological horoscope?
How many of them go to an astrologer and get kicked in the ass and said, you did wrong, you need to fix it?
No, no.
Astrology is all about patting yourself on the back and feeling good about yourself.
Same thing with the golden calf.
So he comes down with these 10 commands.
And there you go.
There you go.
He leaves for a few days and they're already back to their old habits.
So he has to smash the Ten Commandments on the ground, goes back up the mountain, and gets a second set.
And the second set, they're not about being a good person.
They're just about following the basic rules that you need for civilization.
It's idiot level.
It's training wheels.
So the Old Testament, yes, it is a wrathful God because people are being bloody idiots.
Like, look, you people are so stupid, you know, you need training wheels on this bike.
So that's the Old Testament.
Very, very disciplined, legalistic.
Next, we get to Christianity.
We get to the magic of forgiveness.
Now, here's the thing.
If you follow the rules, you know, people like to say nowadays, eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind.
Well, no, it will leave the whole world with only one eye, which is not very efficient.
But having only one eye is better than the massive bloodbaths and orgies that were happening prior to that.
It was a step forward.
But even then, back in Jewish times, The thing about evil is, and this is the quote from Star Trek, it's faster, it's easier, but it's not more powerful.
Evil spreads faster than good.
You know, in one day, you can do more evil than you can make up for in your entire lifetime.
And so even with the Jews, even following the law, they still needed a release valve for all of this evil.
And that was the scapegoat.
You know, every so often the sins of the community, the bad blood, would just build up to the point that we need to sacrifice a goat.
You know, put all the sins on it, send it out to the wilderness to die.
Christianity goes the next step further, that humans demand this sacrifice.
Somebody needs to pay because we're all bad people.
And ultimately, the only being that could pay that massive debt is God himself.
And so Jesus comes to earth, he bleeds, he dies, we cannibalize him because that's the only way that, that's the only thing that balances out the equation between good and evil.
But see, along with this comes the miracle of forgiveness, the magic, the spark of all of this.
For example, the adulteress.
You know, he who is without sin casts the first stone.
Now, when Jesus encounters the adulteress, and all the men in the village are upset, he does not say she doesn't deserve to be stoned to death.
She does.
You know, we all deserve to be punished for our sins.
We're all bad people that have screwed people over, that have been unkind, that have been cruel, and we all deserve the punishment.
But see, this is going to the next level.
It's the forgiveness, the idea that by this woman accepting the fact that she needs to be punished, by embracing the need for punishment, we can actually forego the punishment and move forward.
That we can be better than just following the rules.
Now, this doesn't mean that we throw the rules out.
It means that if you know what you're doing, you don't need the training wheels.
If you're actually skilled at riding a bicycle, the training wheels are never going to hit the ground.
Now, you're still obeying the training wheels.
You're still following down that straight and narrow, and you're not tipping over.
But you don't need the training wheels anymore.
You don't need the law because you now understand the purpose behind the law, the idea behind the law.
The Jews, for instance, they still follow the law strictly.
Take pork and shellfish.
There's very good reasons why if you're living in, you know, 3,000 years ago, that you should not be eating pork and shellfish.
It's very dangerous, etc.
Nowadays, with modern refrigeration, that doesn't really make sense anymore.
And so this is where Jesus says, don't worry about what you're putting in your body.
Worry about what you're putting in your mind.
Because in your mind, if you are thinking, if you are being responsible, if you are riding that bike and keeping it balanced, you don't need to have a bunch of blind rules telling you what to do because you are going to follow the spirit of those rules.
Now, the dangerous part of this is that the undisciplined Christian, the modern Christian in the abyss, hears that, oh, I don't have to follow the rules.
That means I can just lay my bike at the side of the road and I'm fine.
I'm saved.
Well, no, that's not what it means.
It's a very much a higher wisdom sort of a thing.
It's a very dangerous philosophy to push on people because it's so easily misunderstood.
The simple fact is most people are absolute idiots and you need to start by telling them basic rules.
You know, when you have kids, you raise them to give them basic rules.
Just do this.
You know, make your bed, brush your teeth.
You know, you need to give them the basic rules before, you need to give them training wheels before they can do that amazing magic of riding a bicycle.
And really, just think about that metaphor, the bicycle.
The idea that you can ride down the road on two thin little wheels and actually steer yourself.
Counter-steering on a motorcycle.
When you're at a high enough speed, you actually turn in the opposite direction that you want to go in.
How ridiculously insane is that?
And that's that spark of divine magic that you get.
Now, Christianity, we can't finish there, however.
You know, that was Christianity.
That was the Catholic Church.
We need to consider the Protestant Reformation, because this is where things begin falling apart.
Now, Martin Luther, he had valid criticisms of the Church.
The Catholic Church of the time, in fact, for the past couple hundred years before that, ever since the Black Death, had been incredibly corrupt, embarrassingly corrupt.
And so Martin Luther's complaints were absolutely valid.
The problem is, I mean, you look at Martin Luther.
Very kind man, very good man.
That's a face of somebody with a very, very decent sort of a person.
But he's also no scholar.
He's no theologian.
To put it cruelly, he's got the brain span of a bricklayer.
And so this whole Protestant Reformation wound up with the likes of Calvin creating his monstrosity, of the Puritans with their obsessive sex cult, with Europe just put into this religious warfare for centuries that we finally decided to stop killing one another over religion, but we are still suffering from this greatly.
It was a major blow to our understanding of ourselves, of the universe, of metaphysics and everything.
And what it boils down to is a philosophical difference.
The difference between Platonic philosophy and Aristotelian philosophy.
Now, Platonic philosophy.
Plato.
Amazing, brilliant, principled man, but also a little bit of a fool.
You see, logic, logic is wonderful.
It is an excellent tool, but it doesn't get you anywhere on its own.
By itself, without impetus, without that divine spark, without that soul, that higher meaning, it's just a machine sitting at the side of the road, not doing anything.
And similarly, as one of my philosopher friends likes to put it, reason is a whore.
She'll give anyone a ride.
And while Plato did an amazing job breaking down, actually thinking rationally, logically, you know, creating this philosophy of disciplined thought, not solipsism, but disciplined thought.
He also completely, he missed the forest for the trees.
You know, logic will be completely blind to the thing that's right in front of its face.
And a perfect example of this is that Plato used logic to figure out how many teeth women have in their mouth.
And he was completely wrong.
He never bothered to actually look in a woman's mouth to confirm that he was logically, that he had his logical proof and that's all he needed.
You know, logic, pure logic, can often lead you down the road to folly.
And there's two more things, two big things that really show you the flaw with Plato's philosophy.
The first is his attitude about rhetoric.
Now, by Plato's philosophy, rhetoric is nothing but propaganda.
It is nothing but political machinations of scam artists, and so it's completely beneath his contempt.
It's not even worth considering in his philosophy because it's nothing but scam artistry.
The other big flaw is that Plato argued that literature, that stories should only exist if they serve the Republic, if they serve the society.
That every story needs to have a moral lesson in it, and there should be no stories aside from those with moral lessons.
Basically, Aesop's fables are the only sort of storytelling that's allowed in Plato's Utopia.
Completely logically sound, of course, but this should be, this shouldn't sit well with you.
Most people you hear that, it's like, well, there's something wrong with all of that.
And this is where we get to Aristotle.
Aristotle's philosophy understood that there was this divine spark behind everything, that you needed the human soul to tell the car which way to go.
That logic itself is not going to give you a purpose, it's not going to give you a meaning.
But that understanding these ephemeral things, like beauty, like strategy, like morality, that there are these pinnacles up there, that we can't quite see them.
We can't quite say exactly what they are.
We can't put them into words, but they're definitely there.
Some examples of this.
The big one is rhetoric.
Aristotle did a whole book on that.
But what it boils down to is that rhetoric is art, and art deserves to exist for its own sake.
Art doesn't need to justify itself.
Art exists because it's beautiful.
And so good rhetoric, good rhetoric would of course be informed with true facts and good logic.
It would not be specious manipulation.
And Lord knows there is a lot of specious manipulation, a lot of propaganda out there.
But bad art doesn't take away from good art.
Aristotle would say, like, yeah, yeah, some of those politicians are scam artists.
Some of them, though, are people that are genuinely trying to do good for their society, and they're basing it upon true facts and accurate logic.
Rhetoric is merely the product of the two, where you take this machine and you take these ideas and you put it on the road.
You take your logic and you try and change society for the better.
Music.
Let's consider music for a second.
Now, it goes without saying that there's a lot of garbage music out there.
But the fact that we can say there's garbage music, that tells us something.
Compare, for example.
You know, we could go classical.
Let's not even use classical music, which is amazing and beautiful and profound.
Let's look at classic rock.
Classic rock required a lot of talent, a lot of innovation.
It was beautiful.
It's wonderful.
Or jazz, if you prefer.
Or so many mediums have created this beautiful thing.
And then you've got modern pop auto-tune garbage, where it's almost constructed by a computer.
Now, according to the Platonic philosophy, these things are absolutely equal.
They're just BS to waste your time.
They are wallpaper.
They're just noise.
There's nothing inherent to it.
Aristotle would say, no, this one, this is informed by musical theory, by a lot of practice, a lot of study, a lot of understanding.
And it's art.
It's beautiful.
This is cynically constructed to appeal to a mass audience, and it's driven by propaganda, by marketing.
This is garbage, this is beautiful.
And there is a difference there.
With the Protestant Reformation, what happened is that we took this Aristotelian philosophy, which, you know, applied to the church, applied to Christianity.
Aristotelian is about that spark, that divine bit that you can't quite touch.
You can't see it.
You can't put it into words.
You can't nail down why it is that Beethoven's great and Rebecca Black is terrible.
Aren't they just both music?
Don't they both have meter and rhyme, etc.
But there's that divine spark, that right and wrong, that beauty, that we can always try and understand it better, but we'll never truly know it.
And so with the New Testament, all of these miraculous things, the ability to be forgiven and to move forward with these things, you need that higher understanding, that metaphysical understanding of them.
With the Protestant Reformation, what happened is we went back to crude platonic thought.
And so as a result, as a result, all these higher complex mysteries got crammed down into base reality, into base logic.
And so now you get people trying to legislate public morality.
You know, it's like, well, the Bible says that we need to be better people.
You know, and the Catholics understood it's a progress.
Good lord, the Catholic Church used to run brothels.
Okay, because yeah, ideally, perfect world.
People will stop going to brothels and they'll all go out of business.
In the real world, that's not going to happen anytime soon.
You know, people have a lot of, lot of trouble controlling their lust.
It's one of our highest drives.
So the Catholic Church said, well, okay, if we're going to have to deal with this, let's at least make sure it's not that destructive.
Protestants, meanwhile, the Platonic philosophy, oh, well, sex outside of marriage is bad, and so we will punish anybody that does it.
And so they start trying to force the utopia onto the populace.
They try and take the kingdom of heaven, which is this metaphysical concept beyond any of our understanding, and they try and put it into the real world.
And what you get is a monstrosity.
You wind up with two extremes happening at the same time.
On the one hand, everybody is very self-righteous and pretentious, and life is controlled and regulated.
But all of the insanity comes out on the other side.
So, yeah, you have these very strict, oh, they're so morally correct, these cultures, except there's so much bad stuff going on behind closed doors, behind manipulation by the priests, this obsession with sex.
Instead of allowing it to get out, it now goes deeper and becomes more violent, more nasty.
Again, leading to the bloody wars that Europe suffered.
And we see this still in the modern day.
You know, because when you try and put down these higher truths into base material reality, you wind up with just absolute nonsense.
And we can see that presently with atheist cult.
Now, when I talk about atheist cult, I'm not talking about deism or rational skepticism or anything like that.
Because these atheist cult people, they've gone completely off the deep end.
They are complete nonsense nowadays.
And the best example of that is Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Let me play you a clip from an interview that he was in.
Don't worry about balance.
Philosophy was my major, and I remember...
That can really mess you up.
It really does mess you up because it's when it starts crossing over with math and science and you're solving, you know, if you have to solve an argument using math, you know, P's and Q's and whatnot.
And then, but the idea that the philosophy of science and math, of like, well, why is a yard a yard?
And what makes this this, you know, is, I always felt like maybe there was a little too much question asking in philosophy because at a certain point it's just futile.
Like, well, I don't know.
I don't know why this is a table.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And my concern there is that the philosopher believes they are actually asking deep questions about nature.
And to the scientist, it's, what are you doing?
Why are you wasting your time?
Well, why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?
Well, I think a healthy balance of both is good.
A healthy balance of both.
Well, I'm still even worried about a healthy balance.
Yeah, if you are distracted by your questions so that you cannot move forward, you're not being a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world.
And so the scientist knows when the question, what is the sound of one hand clapping, is a pointless delay in your progress.
And it's this.
Yep.
Yep, that's it.
Cool.
This is this episode.
What are you done?
Can't you hear it?
It's right here.
It's on this.
It's on this.
And they say, well, how do you define clapping?
And then all of a sudden it devolves into a discussion of the definitions of words.
And I'd rather keep the conversation about ideas.
And when you do that, and you don't derail yourself on questions that you think are important because philosophy class tells you this, but the scientist says, look, I got all this world of unknown out there.
I'm moving on.
I'm leaving you behind.
And you can't even cross the street because you're distracted by what you are sure are deep questions you've asked of yourself.
I don't have the time for that.
Tyson, in many ways, reminds me of Martin Luther.
He's obviously a very kind and conscientious man.
He's fairly intelligent as well.
And yet he is so blind to the forest, he only sees the trees, that he just delves into complete nonsense.
He doesn't even realize that his rejection of philosophy is a complete rejection of the scientific method as a whole.
So if you look at his show Cosmos, 95% of the stuff they talk about on that show is pure speculation.
It is, yeah, maybe it's an interesting game.
It's science fiction.
And he doesn't even know that.
He does not understand the difference between what you can know is actually true and what you're speculating is true.
He doesn't understand that there are demonstrable higher truths like beauty, like morality.
He lives in this simplistic world of pure mechanics.
And like Plato, he has logicked himself into believing things that are absolutely absurd.
And he is utterly, utterly blind to it.
You know, this platonic shift of society has created, yeah, the scienticians, the atheist cult on the one hand, these absolute fools that think they can nail everything down with their logic and constantly go off kilter and start believing the most ridiculous of concepts.
And on the other hand, we get the extreme spiritualists, these solipsists again, the astrology, the New Age nonsense, whatever you believe, man.
We've got these two groups.
You know, one is spiritually autistic and the other one is materially ignorant.
And we are declining into that abyss.
So this is what Nietzsche was looking at.
This decline of our philosophy, of our understanding of the metaphysical world, of the abyss that we are all falling into, and too blind to see any of it.
And so when you see Nietzsche rejecting the church, he's angry at this church, which has become purely mechanistic.
It's an opiate to make sure you keep going to work.
It's an excuse to call yourself a self-righteous person, even though you've done no self-development.
It enables people to fall into, to become these broken, mechanistic automatons, as opposed to growing and overcoming and moving forward, which is the whole purpose of the New Testament in the first place.
The idea that we can go over and overcome sin through forgiveness and become better for it.
This is what Nietzsche was writing about.
This is what he was trying to prevent.
And yet, in our modern, mechanistic, solipsistic ignorance, we've put him, we've completely misunderstood him and made him part of the problem.
All right, so that's the first part.
In the next video, we're going to look a little bit closer.
Now that we've got the context of this philosophical decline, this base, mechanistic, simplistic, and lazy philosophy that dominates nowadays, we're going to look at what Nietzsche actually said, at what Zarathustra actually said, and see how that compares to the original conception of the New Testament.
