FREE ESSAY ON DECLINE OF RELIGION IN 20TH CENTURY, NEITZSCHE

DECLINE OF RELIGION IN 20TH CENTURY, NEITZSCHE

In this paper I am supposed to choose an existential or nihilist thinker and apply their
thoughts to the 20th century problems that we identified at the beginning of class. I'm
not going to do this. What I'm going to write about is one of, if not the biggest,
problem mankind has ever created for itself. Christianity. While Christianity was not on
the list of problems that we identified I cannot help but wonder if the man I will
examine and his writings had anything to do with the decline of this outdated monolith.
Of course I'm speaking of none other than Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, born Oct. 15, 1844, was a German philosopher who, together
with, Soren Kierkegaard shares the distinction of being a forerunner of Existentialism.
He studied at the universities of Leipzig and Bonn, receiving his doctorate degree from
the Leipzig in 1869. Because he had already been published, he was offered the chair of
classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland before the doctorate was
officially conferred on him. He left the university in 1879 due to ill health caused by a
short stint in the military, and began concentrating on his writings. My focus will be on
three of his works that show his opinions of the Christian/Slave morality, The Gay
Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Beyond Good and Evil.
Beginning with The Gay Science, first published in 1882, Nietzsche's contempt for
Christianity (as well as other groups notably Germans) came to the forefront. In the
third book Nietzsche's Madman comes looking for God. As men who did not believe laughed
and asked if God had become lost the madman uttered the words that the author is best
known for. "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." The Enlightenment,
which had already begun to question religion laid the groundwork for the madman. Those
men to whom he questions are the "Enlightened" thinkers who felt the grips of religion
begin to loosen. However these men are shaken by the madman's words, showing the grip to
not be completely gone. The madman seeing this throws his lantern to the ground "I have
come to early, my time is not yet." as the light fades from his broken lantern.
And with that fading light I can almost see the darkness of Christian thought creep back
into the picture. Consider the possibility of the madman today. More and more people are
finding their way out of this darkness. Could it be that the lantern's glow is finally
overpowering those long dead father figures of antiquity? While Christianity is far from
gone its steady decline cannot be ignored. Can it be that now, in this age of information
mankind is finally strong enough to throw off the chains that were applied millienuim ago
to our weak minded forefathers? I don't think so. It is an unfortunate fact that even
today human beings are not able to stand tall and face the very real fact that there
could only be life and nothing else. The church's tyrannical grip came about when life
was harsh and short. By convincing these poor souls that heaven awaited if they did their
duties and were pious was an effective tool for keeping the sheep in line. And the
punishment that awaited the unfaithful were so terrible that sin (oddly enough all things
that are enjoyable to those who live life) became an even more effective tool than the
rewards of salvation. In book three, 129 and 130 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes on
the conditions for God as well as the Christian resolve.
The conditions for God.--- "God himself cannot exist without wise people." said Luther
with good reason. But "God can exist even less without unwise people"---that our good
Luther did not say.
A dangerous resolve.--- The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the
world ugly and bad.
Nietzsche was well aware that Christianity's bread and butter has always been weak of
will and uninformed. Though Nietzsche wrote of the death of God he was aware that the
majority of Europe was not prepared to follow him into a Godless world. As he writes in
book five, 347 of The Gay Science of believers and their need to believe.
Believers and their need to believe.--- 
It has been argued that Nietzsche is a social Darwinist. This interpretation is not far
from accurate in the sense that Nietzsche values the beast in humanity. However, it
should be noted that the survival of the fittest is not a Nietzschean law. On the
contrary, he argues that in his own time the strong and the noble were losing the battle
for survival against the weak, who manifest another, more sinister, and opposite will ...
the will to nothingness, or the will to nihilism. Through a re-valuation of noble values,
the weak (specifically the socialists--the inheritors and proponents of the
Christian/slave morality) have created a world in which the strong and noble are seen to
be evil, whereas from Nietzsche's perspective these evil qualities are valuable in
themselves, in that they serve the enhancement of the species as a whole:
Hardness, forcefulness, slavery, danger in the alley and the heart, life in hiding,
stoicism, the art of experiment and devilry of every kind, that everything evil,
terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey and
serpents, serves the enhancement of the species man as much as its opposite does. Indeed,
we do not even say enough when we say only that much. BGE 44 
Evidently, Nietzsche believes that these evil acts serve the betterment of the species
even more that acts of altruism, kindness, and love--about all of which Nietzsche is
generally suspicious. For Nietzsche the truth of the matter is that in its essence, life
wants to dominate; it matters not what. It does not want to be controlled, channeled,
contained, or negated as, he argues, the slave morality and its proponents would have it.
His description of the origin of what he calls the higher cultures illustrates this
point:
Truth is hard. Let us admit to ourselves, without trying to be considerate, how every
higher culture on earth has so far begun. Human beings whose nature was still natural,
barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey who were still in possession
of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, hurled themselves upon weaker, more
civilized, more peaceful races, perhaps traders or cattle raisers, or upon mellow old
cultures whose last vitality was even then flaring up in splendid fireworks of spirit and
corruption. In the beginning the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their
predominance did not lie mainly in physical strength but in strength of the soul--they
were more whole human beings (which also means, at every level, more whole beasts). BGE
257 
Interestingly enough, physical strength, here, is not the principal attribute that
Nietzsche values. Rather, it is strength of the soul, the kind of strength that comes
from a lack of guilt about one's being, a wholehearted embrace of life in all its
fecundity and wantonness, a will to dominate (as opposed to the force necessary to
dominate), and a will to action that Nietzsche values. Life unrestrained by a
life-negating slave morality is the key for Nietzsche.