“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How
shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest
and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our
knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean
ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to
invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not
become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
An enduring thought (the sole property of truth) or a tired cliché?
***
If Nietzsche did the good service of killing God, has
Humanity forgotten her freedom?
*
The popular story: ‘God has died. In the preceding centuries humanity was fixed
between Heaven and Hell. God, above, was
all that was good and good man his most cherished creature. Satan, below, all that was wrong in the world and man his prized good.’
‘Then came a disruption – the discovery that God had been an
invented, that He did not exist outside of the human imagination.’
‘From this time forward, humanity became disoriented. What right was true, what truth was
right? What role did man play in the
overwhelming expanse of being and time, no longer the sons of God? And even if
God were to be found, where to look in the hundreds of billions of celestial bodies,
each so enormous and yet so infinitely small?’
‘God – the author of all things – proven a piece of theatre;
how will this role play be rewritten?’
This story is titled Modernity.
*
Nietzsche may have gone mad, but he was at least an honest
enough man to inquire what the world would look like if God had been deleted
from its beginnings. Such a question, to
my knowledge, has never else even been attempted.
*
A new breed of atheists know this story, when it is convenient,
and as ever is their wont they offer a helpful formula to solve the problem.
*
God, it is their conviction, does not exist in first principles. He exists only in imagination (as if Luther, Aquinas,
St Paul or Jesus himself spoke nothing of the home of God in the human soul).
God is not killed but disproven by demonstrating the
improbability of His omnipotence and role in the creation of the world, such as
it is.
Religion is, therefore, simply a disproved set of
propositions which explain the way in which the universe came into being.
The task then is to remove God and his authority, and build
a morality from new first principles. A
new universality.
*
But if these first principles are reason and logic, what
ontological priorities can they claim that God cannot?
And if truth (and politics, morality and society) can be
imagined without God, why has it been imagined to look so incredibly similarly
to what society looked like with God – with only the most cosmetic of changes?
*
Is it working from first principles to take the morality
that atheists feel comfortable with, and to arrive at them by means which seek
to circumvent God? By replacing the
authority of God with the assuredness of the ontological?
Can this really by justified (and what is justice but a
reference to Christ?) by the minor addendum to Modernity which comports the dangers of the darkness of history and
compares it with the history of Enlightenment as progress – to comport all the
achievements of science cleanly from religion?
*
And what, of all things, can a man like Dawkins mean when he
speaks of the beauty of the order of nature
*
The meaning is ungratifying, simple and plain. These men lack the courage to face up to
themselves after killing God. They seek
instead to demonstrate that God had never lived, but only the order that was left in his wake. And to do this, the only trick they had left
was to refer to that which can be said to exist outside the imagination.
To live without killing God, they needed to prove that the
imagination has no priority.
They lacked the courage or the resources to reimagine the world.
*
It is for this reason that the great majority of the leading
new atheists are also very conservative men.
For Hitchens, the reasoning above no doubt brought about a great degree
of sadness even as it did transformation.
It is a sad day when the former epitome of a man is brought down to such
a level.
*
It has gotten to the point that converts will take a notion
as imaginary as gender and attempt to define it by touch. What is this but to belittle men and women
both?
*
The problem, therefore, still remains. If we are to revise our understanding based
on things that exist prior to the imagination, what right have we to organise
people by man and woman when the differences between man and man and woman and woman are as great as
their similarities?
And what conclusions can be made that do not relate to the
field of physics without “blushing”, as Plato put it?
Indeed, what notations and measurements can a physicist (or
chemistry) use without so blushing?
*
‘How can being be determined prior to imagination?’ as even
Heidegger knew not to bother to ask. (Or ‘what ontico-ontological priority can
Dasein claim?’ as Heidegger did ask, in hope that inquiry would be possible.)
How can the boundaries of science be determined prior to the imagination?
*
How can touching things mean that, in questions of morality,
one is to stand between two factions as if this stood in for morality?
To harken back to the question of gender – how can the
ability to touch genitals or the womb mean that a reasonable position is that there are men
and women and that men and women’s claims must be ‘weighed’ equally and then
resources and law ‘divided’ by such deliberations?
What pre-ontological priority can the concept of man or
woman really hold?
*
This is just such an embarrassment as Plato spoke of.
Far, far better to read the ways in which humanity has
imagined men and women, and the role of men and women and to ask if, in light
of the first principles of Modernity, such
things should be entirely reimagined.
