Here in the year 2016 Anno Domini, atheism claims a growing number of adherents among westerners. Most of those drawn to non-belief seem to be – like rebellious teenagers – pursuing merely their own self-gratification, determined to be accountable to no one, creating their own morality – or immorality.
But do these contemporary atheists have the intellectual honesty (or capacity?) to fully appreciate the place to where that faith in nothing takes them? Where exactly did it take one of the world’s most famous atheists?
Dr. Benjamin Wiker offers, for Lenten reflection, a look at the life of Friedrich Nietzsche, the guy who in 1882 famously declared “God is dead.” Born in 1844…
… the son of a Lutheran pastor, Friedrich Nietzsche hated Christianity with a passion that could only come from understanding what it really demanded. The problem with Christianity is that it posited a God Who, instead of lording it over humanity in august tyranny, became a man in utter obscurity. The incarnate God did not radiate power like a despot, but embraced humility like a slave. This God chose to reveal His love, not His power, and hence to manifest goodness, not greatness. When Jesus bid his followers to take up their crosses, it was likewise so that they become good not great.
But Nietzsche wasn’t looking for good; he wanted great. He wanted, through a Will to Power, to become his own god.
Nietzsche desired greatness more than anything. Indeed, greatness was so much better than goodness, that the truly great should never hesitate to go “beyond” notions of good and evil. “Beyond Good and Evil” was, in fact, the title of one of his most famous books.
Taken further and further, his desire for greatness led to ever darker places ~
To go far beyond and above the crowd; to squeeze the life from oneself and others for the sake of producing a great political state, great art, great literature; to be as pitiless as Pharaoh in using human slaves to build one’s glorious tomb—that was life. If this demanded cruelty, then let it be magnificent cruelty. “Almost everything we call ‘higher culture'” declared Nietzsche, “is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound: this is my proposition.”
As Jacques Maritain has rightly remarked, “atheism cannot be lived.” The good we aspire to, the natural object of the human will, is goodness itself, not the fulfillment of our ego. Atheism ties a person in knots. It rejects the pure goodness that is the true object of the will and replaces it with an illusory good. Being one’s own god is not heroic. It is foolish and self-destructive.
Source: Architects of the Culture of Death ~ De Marco & Wiker
As the life of Nietzsche painfully illustrated ~
By the time he was forty years old, he started signing his letters “The Anti-Christ,” soon thereafter penning a book by the same name. Within a year after writing The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche started losing his powerful mind. The last decade of his life was spent in the darkest corners of madness, deteriorating in every way…
Nietzsche’s was as Wiker states, an “honest” atheism which, taken to its inevitable conclusion, leads to despair and self-destruction. Realizing that, and examining the life of this true UNbeliever, can awaken us to the hope of the Christian gospel.
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Related:
A Monumental Misrepresentation
Deceit of the Godless
