Martin Luther once said, “Be a sinner, and sin boldly.” To Lutheran ears this seems infuriatingly controversial. How could the champion of Ephesians 2:8 say such an anti-gospel statement? It is quite simple actually. This statement appears so out of character for Luther because it is only part of his whole statement. After he declares this seeming heresy, he goes on to discuss how we as Christians should “rejoice in Christ even more boldly.” He was describing how the power of grace supersedes even the most blatant of sins. However, when the opening sentence is taken out of context it completely skews Luther’s point. Friedrich Nietzsche could easily relate to this situation. Known by many as the “nihilistic” philosopher, Nietzsche actually …show more content…
First and foremost, Paul hits Nietzsche with a knockout blow, by writing to Romans that “the requirements of the law are written on their hearts.” The concept of morality was not created by humans, it was placed by God himself in the conscience of any person who has ever lived. We cannot simply throw off all law and morality, because God has made it a permanent part of our being. Nietzsche sees morality as a curtailer of humanity when truthfully morality is the very force that keeps the human race from falling off the bridge of existence. Without laws and social constructs, the entire planet would be mass chaos and unlike what Nietzsche, the disciple of Dionysus believes, there would be no possible solution to that chaos without a standard of morality and social construct. We are completely sinful human beings who are incapable of doing anything right. As Paul writes, “There is no one righteous, not even one.” Without Jesus, humanity would be a complete and utter lost cause, doomed to nothing but death and eternal hardship. From a humanistic standpoint, the argument could be made that Nietzsche holds a much higher regard for mankind than Christianity does. Because of his strong beliefs against the idea of God, this Lutheran pastor’s son continued his moral philosophy by pointing out all the shortcomings of the Christian belief …show more content…
When Nietzsche declared “God is dead”, he was referring to Western society’s heavy inclination toward religion, specifically Christianity as the moral guide for the masses, not the actual death of God. I am convicted to include the entire paragraph of where this three-word bombshell is found in order for the reader to see a better view of it in
However, Nietzsche’s idea of the powerful forcing their will on common people resonates with me. It is something we see in our modern society, wealthy people seem to have a higher influence over the average American. Examples of powerful people controlling others are found in politics, economy, media, and religion. Common people are lead to think in certain ways that the powerful need them to. Nietzsche said that people will only be equal as long as they are equal in force and talent, people who have a higher social group are more influential in decisions because average people look to them for information. The thing I do not agree with Nietzsche on his view as Christianity as a weakness because religion is a main cause of people’s decision
Fridreich Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science "God is dead....And we have killed him," (99, Existentialist Philosophy) referr...
God may well be dead but Nietzsche’s assessment of the pitfalls of our new arbiter of value provides a staunch critique against which we must measure our morality. The question though remains as to whether we can ever accept a plurality of values within a given polity, whilst it may solve the philosophical problem of linking categories such as ‘Truth’ and ‘Purity’ can any aggregation of humans ever produce an agreement that is anything but slavish or self interested or vain or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or an act of despair or each individually? God may well be dead but Nietzsche is right when he says that his shadow remains over us and, for the moment, there seems no way we can cast our own light on that shadow and overcome his legacy.
The consequences for the death of god are far reaching and and many in Nietzsche's work. Christianity sparked the death of God as most of us know him through the actions of Martin Luther. Luther's desire to give the common man the ability to understand and read the bible brought a end to the churches monopoly on morality and brought the "divine" to the common man making the common man "divine".
Friedrich Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense represents a deconstruction of the modern epistemological project. Instead of seeking for truth, he suggests that the ultimate truth is that we have to live without such truth, and without a sense of longing for that truth. This revolutionary work of his is divided into two main sections. The first part deals with the question on what is truth? Here he discusses the implication of language to our acquisition of knowledge. The second part deals with the dual nature of man, i.e. the rational and the intuitive. He establishes that neither rational nor intuitive man is ever successful in their pursuit of knowledge due to our illusion of truth. Therefore, Nietzsche concludes that all we can claim to know are interpretations of truth and not truth itself.
But he objects to the values of the New Testament that shouldn't be linked to the Old Testament. They demote power. He sees religion as intensely nihilistic - it's all about denying life and being negative. Nietzsche feels that the New Testament is also like that. We have to go beyond this.
Where Kant’s system is based on a set of principles or duties, Nietzsche’s system is based on virtue. Nietzsche is critical of Christianity in general and its evaluation of morality. In the reevaluation of values, he shows how the characteristics of morality in Christianity are more prohibitive of living virtuously than those of Ancient Greece, which include strength, confidence, sexuality, and creativity. In Christianity, those values are pity, shame, asexuality, and humility. The set of values of Ancient Greece is considered Master Morality and the values of deontology is considered to be Slave Morality. Master morality is a step in the right direction for morality but still not the
The Merriam – Webster Dictionary defines existentialism as a chiefly 20th century philosophical movement embracing diverse doctrines but centering on analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad (Merriam, 2011). In other words, an existentialist believes that our natures are the natures we make for ourselves, the meaning of our existence is that we just exist and there may or may not be a meaning for the existence, and we have to individually decide what is right or wrong and good or bad for ourselves. No one can answer any of those things for us. A good example of existentialism is Woody Allen’s movie, Deconstructing Harry. A man is haunted by his past and his past has followed him into the present. He is a wreck not because of the things that happened to him, but because of the choices he made. He is consumed by regret and insecurity and he tries to find blame in his situation with someone other than himself, however he cannot (Barnes, 2011). Throughout the rest of this paper I will be discussing two of the most prominent existentialists, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
When reading Nietzsche, we can pick up from him that he was very educated often better than most philosophers. Or so he thought. Although he had a very poor outlook on his culture and everyday society, he had very strong opinions when it came to humans and their actions. He made strong assumptions whether people agreed with him or not. An assumption such as, he believed most philosophers and researchers were not as educated as he was, which we pick up in his writings. Nietzsche’s main goal in his essays are to educate those on morality. First, Nietzsche believed that specific words and human actions have evolved over time to things they were never intended to become. Nietzsche
What is morality? There are many different views on what morality really is, but the one I find to be closest to the truth is Nietzsche’s view. Nietzsche completely reevaluated all of the values tied to morality and concluded that there is little true value in this world. Morality has always seemed to be complex and always been kept in a very limited “box”. Nietzsche goes beyond the normal limits and out of the “box” morality has been kept in. Nietzsche believed that there is no truth, just beliefs. Morality is just another belief. All beliefs are just interpretations or ways of looking at the world. Everything is a perspective. How I might view morality or what I might consider to be moral may be and probably will be very different from how someone else’s views. Nietzsche does not think we truly understand morality or the history of it. This is primarily where he believes other philosophers have gone wrong when trying to understand and describe what morality is. Nietzsche says, “As is the hallowed custom with philosophers, the thinking of all them is by nature unhistorical…” (Nietzsche, 25). Nietzsche believed that historically there were two types of morality: slave morality and master morality. Nietzsche says that, “It was out of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for values…” (Nietzsche, 26). How we view morality now along with many other things has changed over the course of time. Nietzsche calls this conceptual transformation. Nietzsche says, “Thus one also imagined that punishment was devised for punishment. But purposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function…” (Nie...
Owing to this, not only Nietzsche’s critics, but his admirers, including some members of the Nazi party, have ignored his critical insistence on sublimation, and construed his conception of the ‘will to power’ and his opposition to Christianity in terms of wantonness and brutality. Furthermore, Nietzsche in his style of writing is more poetic than philosophical. Owing to this, Richard Rorty comments on the argumentative systematic philosophers such as Nietzsche, that whatever else he (Nietzsche) may be, he is not a philosopher. This implies that his work is more of a literature than philosophy, and so, one may be tempted to just regard Nietzsche as an author of literature or
Nietzsche?s most famous statement is, without a doubt, that ?God is dead? (GS 108/125, Z P 2, etc.). Through many years of being quoted, contemporary society seems to have lost the significance of such a profound statement. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this statement is that ?we have killed him - you and I. All of us are his murderers? (GS 125). It is important to remember that Nietzsche did not believe this to be a literal event. Instead, he explains ?that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable? (GS 343). Such disbelief has begun to cast morality, indeed mankind?s meaning, into doubt. Without God, how can universal moral truths be justified? Where is the meaning of man?
In his book, The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche famously states that God is dead. Passages 108 (New battles), 125 (The madman), 153 (Homo poeta) and 343 (How to understand our cheerfulness) all deal with a particular aspect of this assertion. Passage 108 states that God is dead, but that it may be a long time before we acknowledge this. Passage 125 reiterates that God is dead and then goes on to say that we have killed him. Passage 153 shows homo poeta taking culpable responsibility for the death of God.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s, “God is dead” idea is not exactly what is sounds, or appears to be at first. Although it may seem to be a very “antichrist”, or a “anti religious” statement it actually pertains to the dependency our society has on religion, and “how the idea of God has lost it’s full creative force, its full power”(5). The main argument that Friedrich Nietzsche has with this idea is that ...
Next in theology, the philosophy of god, Nietzsche is famous for saying that God is dead. Nietzsche uses the title Twilight of the Idols to suggest that the time of decline has the hollow idols that the world believes in. He believes that the previous ideas of God and religion are not true and that people need to get rid of them. In my view, Nietzsche was anti-god because he believed that Church was the anti-life. He believed that “the practice of the Church is hostile to life” (Twilight, Maxims and Arrows, 52).