Of killing of God... When your father, dead and in Heaven has the distant and powerful qualities of a god without the ability to actually be killed, then killing with philosophy is the next best thing...It was Nietzsche trying to get out of his own particular trick bag, and so was his general attack upon morality... These are the sorts of things children do in order to put themselves apart from their families and be recognized as having distinct identities...Individualism is immorality, and nietzsche never found a better method than the one all children use, of denying family, denying God, denying morality, denying sin... He just never grew out of it, but was trapped in puberty forever...He is like a bug trapped in amber, thanks to his volumes.

That is what Nietzsche meant? That's harder to understand than is killing God.

Do you believe, like Dawkins, in God without God (liberal humanism is morally indistinguishable from Christianity hence can be described as "God without God"). Or do you believe in creating new values, challenging all conventions, proposing radical new moralities - like Nietzsche.

When Nietzsche proclaimed that "God is dead" it was a wish not a statement because who has killed Him? The Christians still believe in God. The Jews still believe in God. The Muslims still believe in God. And, believe-or-not, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince Who Is Now Known As Prince now believes in God! God is not dead.

Nietzsche talked quite a bit about new values, but how different was his ideal from Aristotle's magnanimous man? While the death of God does seem to provide a certain opening, the world we live in and human nature has a certain structure that makes the question of values anything but wide-open. I say this because I don't think new values can be invented. It seems as likely to me as the invention of a new color. The "trans-valuation of all values" is an absurdity. This is not deny that Nietzsche was sometimes a genius. I prefer the Nietzsche who wrote Beyond Good and Evil. The Birth of Tragedy is also good.

I feel that sophisticated and reasonable conceptions of God have existed for centuries. I reject crude conceptions of God and fanatics in general. ,but also the allergy to all things mythological, theological, or speculative. God is one of the more fascinating themes we humans can speak of.

Yes, I agree that he was indeed quite spiritual. Spengler called him a socialist, meaning by that someone who concerned themselves with the ethics of others. Nietzsche can be described also a moralist, one who questioned the value of pity.

I see him as a conflicted spirit, moody and ironic. He tossed off genius with one hand and absurdity with another. He could be lazy, unfair, indulgent. But at his best he is an extension of critical philosophy, questioning the will-to-truth itself.

His Superman reminds me of Christ the Lion, and I refer to Michelangelo's Last Judgment. Christ who came as a lamb and returns as a lion. I reverence Christianity as a body of sublime myth. Hence my contempt for the shallowness of pop-atheism.

Perhaps language does not even reflect reality.

He was reacting violently to what I might call pop-theism, and I feel the Kierkegaards and Nietzsches were inevitable considering what religion was transforming into at that time.

There is no true conception of God...

. God is an infinite; and even if God is only a moral form, God is still an infinite since we cannot hold God in our hands as though an object... There is no verification, no classification...There cannot be a classification of one, and without God as an object, no logic, or reason can be applied to him

In negative theology, it is accepted that the Divine is ineffable, an abstract experience that can only be recognized or remembered-that is, human beings cannot describe in words the essence of the perfect good that is unique to the individual, nor can they define the Divine, in its immense complexity, related to the entire field of reality, and therefore all descriptions if attempted will be ultimately false and conceptualization should be avoided; in effect, it eludes definition by definition:

Perhaps language does not even reflect reality. Certainly, there is no intimate link between a word and thing."

Reconstructo;164112 wrote:

The strange thing is that this thought can only exist within language. That the idea of a world outside language is an abstraction within language. I'm not denying experiences that aren't lingual, but these are language as soon as I think them, or not?

I love Nietzsche's metaphor of the truth as an army of metaphors.

Concepts, and forms are a sort of metaphore... Before we can conceive of any phenomena we must have two of it...This was easy for primitives who conceived of everything spiritually, and with a multitude of Gods... If we say One God, we have robbed ourselves of a class containing like elements that can be considered as idea... There is no concept with a single element, though the Monad comes close... We say existence, but existence is like God, an attempt to classify a single thing that is without class...A concept is science because until a thing can be conceived of no rational comparison can take place between the form and the object... With infinites, which are either not objects or all objects, or objects without end, there can be no rational examination in light of the idea...
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Good point. And I must admit that he could quite subtle sometimes. I think there are many Nietzsches.

I think Nietzsche reacted most violently to the support the church gave to the humane treatement of humanity...It is inevitable with a human God like Jesus suffering a human condition should support the human need for justice...Look at what he said about Paul...He hated the fact that he supported, though lukwarmly, the equality of man, like the church...What he says about the officer in church is telling: Who do they exclude... Do I have that right, as if the idea was to refuse humanity???... Christianity as he knew it was never meant to exclude as our classes and morals do; but this conflicted with his reactionary view of social good as carried by a relative few who were willing to disregard all human feeling even for themselves and push on... He hated democracy... Well; he never knew democracy...
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That, my friend, sounds like a conception of God, something like negative theology....

No conception at all...With concepts, like number, there is a direct coruspondence between the concept and the thing conceived... You can check the one against the other, the object against the form, and the form against the object...With God there is no such thing to check...It is totally subjective.
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I like your ideas on God, Fido. Like I said, negative theology! :detective:

The strange thing is that this thought can only exist within language. That the idea of a world outside language is an abstraction within language. I'm not denying experiences that aren't lingual, but these are language as soon as I think them, or not?

As we keep reminding one another (alas! with little effect) not only is the map not the terrain, it is not even supposed to be the terrain.

Ay, you're right, Reconstructo. I imagine to a large extent language precedes much of our understanding of the world, not all understanding, but I guess a fair amount. As you have rightly pointed out, the whole idea of a world outside language is just another game within language, trapped within the symbolic order in which the 'world' becomes inconceivable outside this system of differences.



Indeed, you're right, Kennethamy, using Korzbski's metaphor, the map is not the terrain, but now the question arises, plunged into the symbolic order, to what extent does the map precede the territory, engenders the territory such as it is?

Not ideas at all; and not negative theology, not theology...It is simple stuff, obvious, in fact.... We have many moral forms which are all meaning and no being... God is a certain meaning to all people, but there is no matter that can be classed as God, that can be examined in detail and about which we can speak rationally, nothing that is... Physical concepts are true concepts... Moral forms are just forms, all meaning, and no being....

It doesn't, unless it is a fantasy map.

The understanding of language as some kind of nomenclature is an extreme form of naive realism, and pretty much incoherent. Accordingly, signs like 'history', 'philosophy', 'mind', 'culture', 'society', 'information', 'masculine', 'good', the complete range of lexical words, belong to some fantasy map, because in no such manner has the map preceded the territory. But I imagine, on reflection, you're not asserting that at all, right? The question remains unanswered, to what extent does the map precede the territory, engenders the territory such as it is?

There were masculine men, and good people before we invented the word if that is what you are denying. And even had we not invented the terms, there they were, anyway.

So accordingly, there were crystalline spheres, humours, effulvia of electricity, phlogiston, caloric, vital force, ether, circular inertia, spontaneous generation, books, feminine, masculine, positive, passive, foreign, gain, buildings, mind, state, nation, idiot, in existence before we coined these words?

To reduce being to only what is physical is some tricky business. I see where you are coming from, but that word choice does leave us with some distressing consequences.

If moral forms have no being, how can they exist in any form?

They do not exist as objects