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March 21, 2017 - Davis Aurini
13:00
"God is Dead!" Explaining Nietzsche's Statement

Many people seem to think Nietzsche was celebrating the death of God. Far from it - he was indicting the Church for abandoning Him. My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Download in MP3 Format: http://www.youtubeconvert.cc/ Request a video here: http://www.staresattheworld.com/aurinis-insight/ Support my In Depth Analysis series through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DMJAurini

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God is dead and we have killed him.
That is the famous line spoken by the eponymous protagonist of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
And I've run into it several times over the past few days.
Spoken, mentioned by atheists and Christians alike, both of whom seem to be absolutely misinterpreting it.
The atheists think it's a wonderful declaration that, yay, we have killed God, now we get to do whatever we want.
And the Christians are acting as if Nietzsche was some sort of enemy or bugbear of Christianity the way that Karl Marx was.
So I've decided to do this video to address those misconceptions.
And the problem with Nietzsche, the difficulty is that his writing is very complex, very metaphorical.
He's trying to draw the reader, draw their eyes towards the fact that Europe had lost its sense of heroism.
It had lost the divine spark that made Christianity great, that made Europe great.
He's trying to point towards the ineffable, which isn't there anymore, which is why he said God is dead and we have killed him.
But it's a very subtle sort of approach.
An easier way to understand Nietzsche is to consider the works of Dostoevsky.
Crime and Punishment is probably his most famous novel, and involves a young man who is poor, who has a mother and sister to take care of, and a woman he's trying to court, but he can't find work, Russia is falling apart, and there's a nasty old Jewess that has tons of money saved up.
And so he convinces himself that even though murdering her would be wrong, he can use the gold that he steals from her to benefit his loved ones.
That's his logical process, his atheistic process, his utilitarian thinking process.
And he goes about it, but he finds that that's not the case at all.
Sort of like Edgar Allan Poe's The Telltale Heart, where the crime itself is still a crime, no matter how rational or useful it seemed to be.
And that was a consistent theme through Dostoevsky, the necessity of redemption and to confess one's guilt.
In the short story, it's part of a larger work, but The Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky directly addresses Christianity.
And he argues that Christianity, in his time in the mid-19th century, because he was a contemporary of Nietzsche, they were actually very similar, though they never met quite tragically.
They probably would have been great friends.
He argues that Christianity, Christianity is true Christianity, is very, very terrifying because it proposes an absolutely radical form of freedom.
It proposes that you actually have the ability to damn yourself to hell or to achieve salvation.
That despite our myriad of human weaknesses, our animal weaknesses, that us humans are nonetheless these incredible creatures with so much agency over ourselves.
And in the Grand Inquisitor, he accuses the church of abandoning that sense of radical freedom, of that absolute sense of right and wrong, that faith in God, and replacing it with faith in man, faith in the material.
And much like his protagonist in Crime and Punishment, the Grand Inquisitor, the eponymous Grand Inquisitor, I love that word, he has taken it upon himself to be the evil one.
That he, the Inquisitor, the bishop, he will enslave all of men because Christ promised radical freedom.
Christ demanded radical freedom out of his followers.
And the bishop will voluntarily be the evil one that takes away that freedom and instead grants his followers the permission to sin.
Very, very similar to the crime and punishment protagonist, that, you know, I'm going to create this rational utopia where I am evil, but everybody else is deliciously sinning underneath me, and so I am a better savior than Christ.
Very, very similar to the young attorney, as I recall, who decided to murder a woman to make the women in his life happy.
And see, this is what Nietzsche was writing about.
That the churches were no longer about this radical freedom.
That Europe, the Europeans, had given themselves over to this profligate behavior.
That they were reveling in their slavery.
That God is dead because we have killed him, because we, the Europeans, have lost our faith.
We no longer want to go over.
We want to go under.
want to be beasts.
The two of them were absolutely prophetic in their writing.
When you read about the Grand Inquisitor, it's impossible not to see the face of George Soros on there.
George Soros, who has just been relentlessly evil throughout his life, from the very beginning, hidden away with a, not a German family, which country was he in?
Regardless.
You know, an ethnic Jew pretending not to be a Jew, aiding the Nazis as they seized the property of his co-ethnics and shipped them off to labor camps where the conditions were absolutely brutal.
He was an instrumental cog in doing all of this.
You know, then later in life, proposing all of these tax laws, all of these limitations on how financiers can speculate, and then doing everything in his power to avoid said laws.
Paying, paying prostitutes, poor prostitutes from Eastern Europe, to go over to Western Europe and to pull their tops off to advocate for feminism.
You know, if that's not financial exploitation, what is?
He is.
He is that grand inquisitor who embraces evil so that he can hand out sin to all of his followers.
You know, he supports Black Lives Matter, who destroy their own communities, who engage, who indulge in wrath, in violence, this unmotivated, unguided, untargeted violence that they wreak upon society.
He gives them that sin, knowing how bad it is.
He knows perfectly well how bad it is for them.
but he thinks he's taking the sins on himself, as if he is some sort of superior to Christ.
This is what both those writers were talking about.
Nietzsche wasn't celebrating the death of God.
He was accusing the European man.
Here in Canada right now, we've got the United Church is having a problem with some of their ministers going around saying that they're atheist.
You know, this is the same church whose theological colleges endorse different new understandings of God because we are so much superior today than we were 400 years ago.
We are so much more enlightened than those savages from the Renaissance.
You know, you start to understand why the Spanish Inquisition had to put 1,500 people to death when you look at these people running around calling themselves Christians who don't believe in God and think Jesus was just playing practical jokes on people.
So the death of God, this is not a celebration.
This is not a pro-atheist, pro-skeptic, now I can do whatever I want sort of a statement.
It is precisely the opposite.
It's an indictment of man turning himself into a beast.
The same way these atheist cultists, these skeptics, these I fucking love science people that can't do basic math, the way these people are nothing but beasts.
You know, they call themselves libertarian because they want to have no limits on their private behavior, but then they want the state.
They expect the state to pay for all the messy consequences of their behavior.
This is what modern libertarian has become, skepticism, atheism.
These are not philosophically principled individuals.
They are empty wrecks given over to a reprobate mind who have turned themselves into vile beasts, crawling in the mud and reveling in sin.
Nietzsche was a flawed man.
He was absolutely a flawed man.
And he tried to find heroism outside of God, outside of the church, and he failed ultimately.
It was a very valiant and noble philosophical quest, even if he did fail in the end, as surely as Beowulf failed against the great serpent.
He was able to defeat Grendel and his mother, but he was not able to defeat the dragon.
No more than Nietzsche was.
But it was a valiant quest nonetheless.
It was his struggle against the nihilism that was beginning to pervade the European continent.
And all of us, all of us Christians that do have faith, imperfect though we may be, should be honoring Nietzsche in that quest.
Because nihilism is very much, very much prevalent in today's world.
And though Nietzsche might have failed, we can learn from his failures because he was a man that understood heroism.
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