RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Those Words: The Death of God

June 19, 2021 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

14:39

Those Words: The Death of God

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	The idea of the death of God was used before Nietzsche, but Nietzsche obviously used it most infamously.
	And he used it in a way that expressed a kind of trauma.
	I mean, he introduced it in The Gay Science, not Zarathustra, but it's a madman with a lantern.
	And he is...
	Announcing the death of God and declaring that we killed him.
	And you can take that lantern as a symbol, obviously, of enlightenment or what have you.
	But it is a madman, after all, and it's a kind of trauma of, can we actually survive this thing?
	Can we, as a civilization, We really live past the fact that that whole kind of bargain, that debt relationship that we have where we are born in sin and we are sinners, and thus we must repent and put our faith in Jesus Christ and He will redeem us.
	And so we get out of that.
	That's that kind of internal logic.
	And when you start to question the reality of that, It just kind of becomes like, well, what do we do with this thing now?
	And, you know, I mean, there was a lot of, lots of criticism of that.
	There's this kind of like, God isn't dead, but God is not dead, but Nietzsche is.
	There's also the kind of, a little bit deeper, but kind of expresses similar sentiment.
	It's like, God is dead.
	He died on the cross.
	He rose again.
	That's really the whole point.
	And that was made by Chesterton and others.
	And I was reminded of Hegel.
	I mean, Hegel's an interesting person.
	Hegel also talked about the death of God.
	Hegel's an interesting character in the sense that he would often misread scripture and use it as a metaphor in a way that actually went contrary to The clear intent of the scripture, but kind of was successful as a metaphor, as expressing how we should think about this.
	And for instance, his reading of, this is from lectures and religion, but his reading of the Garden of Eden saga is that the fall is kind of a good thing in a way.
	It's a loss of innocence.
	And we are kicked out of this beautiful garden where we're vegetarians and all-loving, but then we kind of recognize our own nakedness.
	We gain self-consciousness and in some ways are ashamed of ourselves.
	But on another level, we grow up, so to speak, and we move on.
	And it's a metaphor for like leaving the bosom of your mother or leaving childhood or leaving extended adolescence and kind of growing up and in some ways recognizing your sinful nature as kind of being self-aware.
	Not just being in a way like one of the animals, but being a human who is self-aware and in some ways ashamed of himself.
	And I don't think that that is intended by the authors of the Bible, or Moses, I guess, who wrote it.
	But I don't think they intended that at all.
	But I do think that it's an interesting metaphor, and it expresses kind of Hegel's mature philosophy, you know, which he kind of thinks through, through biblical.
	And, you know, when you think about, like, the death of God in the sense of Jesus Christ, you have the All-Father who is omnipotent and all-knowing.
	And then you have this spectacular failure at redeeming the world.
	And that is the Son.
	The son of the father who comes down to the world as a Messiah.
	And the Messiah is depicted variously in the Old Testament.
	In some ways, he's a war chief.
	In other ways, he's a pacifist.
	There's a famous passage from Isaiah of the child walking with the lion and the wolf lying down at the lamb or whatever kind of livestock imagery was used.
	It was an image of a...
	Kind of heaven on earth, a redemption of mankind, and whether that would be a messiah in the sense of a leader for the Jewish people, or whether that would be someone who, in some ways, redeemed the world and ended suffering and strife for all.
	Kind of depended on, you could say, the mood of the author.
	But that...
	Like, God is dead.
	The sun is dead.
	The sun sets.
	And he did not actually redeem the world.
	The world killed him.
	And what happens after that is the kind of third aspect of the Trinity, which is that the Holy Spirit enters your heart.
	And so we've kind of passed from...
	The Father God, the all-knowing, all-powerful being, to a Son who would redeem the world, to a Holy Spirit.
	And that is something that enters your heart.
	And you could think of that as the Spirit of the Messiah.
	And again, whether you imagine that as a warlord for the Jews, it's almost like this right-wing and left-wing Judaism.
	Whether you imagine that as a leader of the Jewish people or as a global communist, effectively, kind of depends on you.
	But it's a spirit in your heart.
	Like God failed.
	The son of God failed.
	God is dead.
	But now we have that spirit within us.
	I think this kind of reminded me of this critique of Jordan Peterson.
	Or a critique that Jordan Peterson made.
	I guess I really am taking pains to defend Jordan Peterson.
	As you all know, I kind of weirdly don't hate him, even though pretty much all criticisms of him are valid.
	But this notion that...
	I mean, one of his attacks on atheism is that you actually aren't an atheist.
	You've attacked Christianity on scientific grounds, factual grounds, maybe.
	But you yourself are coming in the wake of that mythic system.
	And this is clearly true.
	I mean, like Richard Dawkins talks about the origins of morality and he gives a rather stark Darwinian picture, but then he's like, well, but none of that actually matters now.
	I mean, I might be a product of evolution, but...
	I'm a good liberal.
	I oppose the Gulf War.
	Of course you can be a liberal and not be a Christian.
	Why are you even saying this?
	It's like he doesn't want to confront the real issue, which is that can you have that morality absent the mythic structure?
	For a Christian, it's not a mythic structure.
	Myths and the Testaments have little...
	They have something in common, but they're starkly different.
	But Richard Dawkins is riding in that wake of Christianity.
	I mean, he is a cultural Christian, yet he wants to undermine the...
	The kind of mythic structure, or you could say reality, of the Christian message.
	So his heart has been touched by the Christian spirit.
	He believes in that Messiah at the end of the day, the child who will walk with the lion.
	He is a Christian.
	He is messianic.
	But he is in some ways similar to Nietzsche's conception of the last man, which is kind of like, well, God is dead, but who cares?
	Who cares?
	God's dead?
	What does that matter?
	This was traumatic for most Europeans, including Nisha.
	But for the last man, it's just like, who cares?
	We're all Christians anyway.
	Why do we need to believe in this thing?
	Why do we need to go to church?
	Why do we need to believe in the reality and the mythos of Jesus Christ, a Savior who died on the cross?
	I think that, like, in some ways, Zizek and Peterson are kind of saying very similar things.
	Like, Zizek wants to redeem the Holy Spirit.
	I mean, Zizek is an atheist, but he is a Christian.
	He wants to redeem the Holy Spirit, and to the point where there actually is hope.
	And we can ultimately achieve that messianic vision of Isaiah.
	In the real world, but we kind of wreck after our recognition that God is dead.
	And I think kind of the tendency of a lot of conservative Christians is to basically say, like, I don't need a new savior.
	I don't need a Lenin or a Marx or a Hitler or a George Floyd.
	Or MLK or whomever.
	I've already got my Savior.
	They're fascinated with Jesus Christ.
	They are like Catholics who, at their Mass, want to constantly, endlessly sacrifice Jesus Christ, which is what Catholics believe, that Jesus Christ's body and blood are in the bread and wine.
	They are eating and drinking this human sacrifice, and they are doing it over and over again every Sunday.
	I mean, it is shocking when you think about it.
	They want to just keep reliving that.
	Well, actually, that failed.
	Jesus Christ failed.
	He was not the Messiah in the sense that he was imagined.
	And after that failure, you have to accept the Holy Spirit, the third aspect of the Trinity.
	You have to accept the Holy Spirit in your heart.
	And grow into a true Christian who recognizes that the sun set and is not coming back, and that we now need to be possessed by this togetherness, this messianic vision, and bring that into the world.
	The conservative Christian response is to endlessly sacrifice Jesus every Sunday, and just dwell on his failure, and just reenact it, and in fact, eat him.
	Whereas a truer Christian wants to bring that into the world through the Holy Spirit.
	I think we need to kind of recognize that aspect, like all aspects of the death of God.
	First off, there's the last man aspect, which I think is easy to recognize, which is that...
	For contemporary Americans, none of this matters.
	Like, this grand trauma that went on for 200 years of the decline of Christianity and the introspection and the unending historical and scientific criticism of the Gospels and everything.
	Like, they just don't care.
	They're just kind of in the wake of Christianity, just kind of surfing the wake.
	And not recognizing that it's going to end.
	And I think we also kind of need to understand something in a way deeper about the left, in the sense that the left that actually has an animating spirit to it, that it is animated by a Holy Spirit.
	It is animated by something.
	It is trying to achieve a heaven on earth.
	And that is actually what gives it power.
	Now, obviously, my general project and the project of Mark and so on is to, in a way, reject the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
	That we can't just ride in its wake.
	We can recognize certain grandeur and benefits of Christianity.
	We're a reasonable people, but this isn't going to hold.
	We can't just ride in this wake and be cultural Christian, basically atheist.
	We obviously don't want to engage in the kind of eternal masturbation of Catholicism, of endlessly sacrificing Jesus and eating him.
	That is grotesque.
	But we also...
	What we are trying to do is overthrowing the Father, overthrowing the Son, and offering a new animating spirit to reality.
	Something that will, much like the Holy Spirit, touch people's hearts.
	And that sounds saccharine, perhaps, but I mean that very seriously.

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