I posted this entry on my other weblog, existential chaos, but thought it would also be appropriate here with all of the dialogues, debates and pronouncements being made today not only in the U.S. but across the world. A lot seems to be hinging and hanging on spirituality and religion that is happening in the world but, as in the previous post, it is a redundancy as people entrench themselves in their redoubts.
"The Church is precisely that against which Jesus preached and against what he taught his disciples to fight".
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 168
"Christianity is still possible at any time. It is not tied to any of the impudent dogmas that have adorned themselves with its name: it requires neither the doctrine of a personal God, nor that of sin, nor that of immortality, nor that of redemption, nor that of faith; it has absolutely no need of metaphysics, and even less of asceticism, even less of a Christian "natural science". Christianity is a way of life, not a system of beliefs. It tells us how to act, not what we ought to believe."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 212
"For this is how religions tend to die: the mythic premises of a religion are systematized, beneath the stern and intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, into a fixed sum of historical events; one begins nervously defending the veracity of myths, at the same time resisting their continuing life and growth. The feeling for myths dies and is replaced by religious claims to foundations in history."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872, 10
"Tales of My death have been greatly exaggerated" as God might say... Yet the essential nature of Nietzsche's critique here remains sound. We do indeed see myths taken too seriously, we see 'religion' perverted into a form of 'control-freakery' with no freedom of belief, of thought, of possible progress, a denial even of knowledge and science itself. This strangulation of religious thought, this total rejection of evolution or change in any form, destroys free-will, that supposed 'special' gift of God to humans. It thus rejects God in itself, whilst pretending otherwise. Thus it wasn't Nietzsche who killed God, but the fundamentalists, who rejected (and still do) the beauty of His creation - the world-in-itself. It is if we have presented to us a 'mystery play', which is repeated, endlessly, without the slightest variation or emotion by the most wooden of actors - who could possibly love that ? If God has no real followers, then He must, inevitably, wither away...
CALResCo Complexity Writings, "The Will to Power" by Chris Lucas
...1872, ...1901, ...or 2005?
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