You could call that kind of person a rebel or an existentialist just as easily. I think you are right, it is hard to understand what a life that believes in nothing, literally nothing, would even consist of. Thanks for the follow! I suppose you have to ask what kind of life is worth living.
You use the word "survival" several times, which connotes a biological impulse to exist, an instinctual desire to be. I would think that most, if not all, world religions would say that this isn't enough, that some greater purpose gives meaning to our lives beyond mere existence. A faith in a divine being has been replaced with a faith in oneself. I really appreciate the challenge of Nietzsche, and I believe he should be more widely read by Christians.
But I don't fully understand his deep scorn for religious faith, as if it is the very thing that makes us sub-human. I think that everyone has faith in something or someone - Nature, God, Yahweh, Allah, Self - and you have to make a specific and deliberate choice to believe and put your faith there. For me, that isn't weakness, but courage. Nietzsche has already decided what kind of life is worth living, and so anything that runs counter to that is by definition "nihilistic" - amounting to nothing.
I think his critique in The Antichrist against weak, mealy-mouthed Christians that use their religion as a crutch is a good challenge. I think that many Christians do use their "faith" to evade the difficult places of life, remain in their weakness, and never learn to think for themselves. But this doesn't represent all Christians, or even Christianity as it was meant to be from my own view.
I think that nihilism is really the giving up on life's potential, when mere existence is the ultimate goal. Some may find glory in that, or maybe peace or understanding of one's place in this world. However, I think this view falls far short of what Life is really about. Some of the issues you raise will be addressed in later posts on The Meaning of Life. But it might take a while! For instance, a biological impulse to exist, I will argue, does not exist!
All we have is our values. There's no "will to live". There's not even a biological survival instinct. So, in a way, "faith" as you put it is all we have. I believe faith in gods causes harm, whereas the other kinds of faith you mentioned don't as much.
Also, it's possible to lack faith in gods, but I don't know if it's possible to lack faith in the self, or something deep like that. Just to mention one of the harms that I believe belief in gods - or specifically Christianity - causes: I believe it's possible right now, with adequate funding, to discover scientific immortality. However, for people who already believe in immortality, that would be a waste of resources.
So, people are dying, in what could be described as a mass genocide, because people literally don't take death literally! So we have this paradox where you sit down with someone and try to convince them for hours that scientific immortality is desirable, and he just doesn't see why he should care: and that's the same person who believes in a religion that has immortality as one of its cornerstones, and it's one of the main reasons he believes, and finds comfort in, his religion.
To put all that differently, and more broadly: The hopes behind Christianity are valid. Who wouldn't want a perfect, just, all-good God, punishing the wicked, rewarding the good, etc.? But, if you believe such a being already exists, you're less likely to do everything you can to make the world a better place why would you? So Nietzsche similarly, I think, saw Christianity as a kind of "deep sleep", or laziness, or a fake satisfaction of human desires, like Marx's "opiate of the masses". This post has been upvoted from the communal account, minnowsupport , by Alexander Alexis from the Minnow Support Project.
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Nietzsche vs Christianity: Are Christians Nihilists? The Meaning of Life Series, 5. It takes only two people, Ophelia, who tries to educate her, and Eva, who befriends her, to make a profound difference in a formerly terrible life. Why does he let things be so? I think that the point of using Christianity so heavily in the novel was to point out the hypocrisy in slavery.
I really liked your observation about Stowe using religion to represent goodness, in juxtaposition to slavery which she associated with godlessness. I would add to this idea that she also uses religion to make slaves appear more civilized and ready to enter free society. Clearly not. Many who do not believe in God are as horrified when confronted with such human depravity as any believer.
Nor can we say that all atheists are certainly knowing advocates of nihilism. Whether or not they accept the divine origins of the Natural Law, they are as capable as believers in accessing its knowledge and following its teachings.
Neither can believers claim that they are immune from falling under the influence of propaganda the State wields when they try to whip up a society to attack another. Your go-to source for all the best Black Friday deals: tech, toys, fashion, mattresses, beauty, wellness, travel and more. The holiday, which is a big deal elsewhere, is becoming a thing here, too. If you're in the market for a new option this cold-weather season, we've rounded up four fashionable finds that will be sure to up your cool factor, while keeping out the cold.
Sign up to receive the daily top stories from the National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of NP Posted will soon be in your inbox. We encountered an issue signing you up. Here's The Nihilist Creed :. I have no heroes. I have no faith. I bow before no one. I am a nihilist. Death to God. Death to government.
Death to ideology. Death to money. Death to love. Death to morality. Beyond right and left, beyond right and wrong: nihilism. Do you see? That kind of thinking is just the logical consequence of naturalism.
Lewis, someone we've already studied in this series, puts it this way:. Our convictions are simply a fact of us, like the color of our hair. If naturalism is true, then we have no reason to trust our conviction that nature is uniform.
You know, it's interesting that Charles Darwin himself saw this problem. What if even our understanding of the inexorable sequence of evolutionary process is just a figment of our imagination? You see, the nihilist takes that and throws it in the naturalist's face. Have you noticed a pattern here? An idolatry is set up; another idolatry comes along and sees the holes in the first idolatry; another idolatry comes along and sees the holes in the new idolatry…and so we go on.
But Nihilism is real. And those of you who have college students, they will face some Nihilism somewhere in the course of their training, whether from their co-students or from their professors.
Nihilism has had a pervasive effect. It was a favorite philosophy of the 60a and 70s. And those of you who are educated in 60s and 70s probably ran into some of the new nihilists. And they are now very high-ranking in the educational system—in the universities and in the various aspects of educational administration in society today. One former nihilist, J.
Budziszewski 5 , has written about his Nihilism and his transformation from it, and I think it's very instructive. I think this may help you as you talk to your young people who face this kind of thing in the classroom. And here were his two fundamental points in his lecture: First, that we human beings just make up the difference between good and evil. There is no difference between good and evil, we just make it up. That was his first big point. His second big point was that we are not responsible for what we do, anyway.
And in his lecture he laid out a ten-year plan for rebuilding all of ethical and political theory around those two propositions. Now my friends, the scary thing is, they hired him. And he had tenure before he was converted. Now, don't think that this isn't happening at your favorite state university. It is. It's everywhere. Well, there were quite a few. And as I got further and further from God, I also got further and further from common sense about a lot of other things, including moral law and personal responsibility.
Now he says, secondly , that first reason led him to a second reason for his Nihilism. And that was he had committed certain sins of which he did not want to repent. In fact, he makes a very telling comment.
I was a nihilist looking for an excuse to be a nihilist. It's a funny thing about human beings: not many of us doubt God's existence and then start sinning. Most of us sin and then start doubting God's existence. Moral depravity leads to intellectual corruption and spiritual vacuity. And so when someone is having a moral crisis, it is often expressed in intellectual terms. Paul Johnson's book on modern philosophers, E. I was raised by Christian parents, but I'd heard it all through school, that even the most basic ideas about good and evil are different in every society.
They may disagree about which actions are most courageous, but none of them rank cowardice as a virtue. And then my college social science teachers were equally determined to teach me the difference between what they called facts and values.
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