Leo D.M.J. Aurini - March 21, 2017


＂God is Dead!＂ Explaining Nietzsche's Statement

Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
George Soros Dostoevsky Edgar Allan Poe Karl Marx Deus Volt Beowulf Grendel
Questions of Faith [Requested Video] The Mensheviks of #Gamergate

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

109.07

Word count

1,428

Sentence count

87

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

God is dead, and we have killed him. That is the famous line spoken by the eponymous protagonist of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And yet, both atheists and Christians seem to be misinterpreting it. And the Christians are acting as if Nietzsche was some sort of enemy or bugbear of Christianity, the way Karl Marx was. So I decided to do a video to address those misconceptions.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Music 0.99
00:00:29.000 God is dead, and we have killed him.
00:00:35.460 That is the famous line spoken by the eponymous protagonist of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
00:00:44.000 And I've run into it several times over the past few days.
00:00:48.120 Spoken, mentioned, by atheists and Christians alike, both of whom seem to be absolutely misinterpreting it.
00:00:57.340 And the atheists think it's a wonderful declaration that, yay, we have killed God, now we get to do whatever we want. 0.74
00:01:05.300 And the Christians are acting as if Nietzsche was some sort of enemy or bugbear of Christianity the way that Karl Marx was. 0.88
00:01:16.740 So I've decided to do this video to address those misconceptions.
00:01:20.180 And the problem with Nietzsche, the difficulty is that his writing is very complex, very metaphorical.
00:01:32.020 He's trying to draw the reader, draw their eyes towards the fact that Europe had lost its sense of heroism.
00:01:40.940 It had lost the divine spark that made Christianity great, that made Europe great. 0.99
00:01:47.560 He's trying to point towards the ineffable, which isn't there anymore, which is why he said, God is dead and we have killed him.
00:01:57.860 But it's a very subtle sort of approach.
00:02:03.800 An easier way to understand Nietzsche is to consider the works of Dostoevsky.
00:02:09.220 Crime and Punishment is probably his most famous novel.
00:02:17.380 And it involves a young man who is poor, who has a mother and sister to take care of, and a woman he's trying to court.
00:02:25.480 But he can't find work.
00:02:27.160 Russia is falling apart. 0.97
00:02:28.660 And there's a nasty old Jewess that has tons of money saved up. 1.00
00:02:35.800 And so he convinces himself that even though murdering her would be wrong, he can use the gold that he steals from her to benefit his loved ones. 0.98
00:02:47.040 That's his logical process, his atheistic process, his utilitarian thinking process.
00:02:56.520 And he goes about it, but he finds that that's not the case at all.
00:03:04.320 Sort of like Edgar Allan Poe's The Telltale Heart, where the crime itself is still a crime, no matter how rational or useful it seems to be.
00:03:15.280 And that was a consistent theme through Dostoevsky.
00:03:20.860 The necessity of redemption and to confess one's guilt.
00:03:31.520 In the short story, it's part of a larger work, but The Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky directly addresses Christianity.
00:03:42.760 And he argues, he argues that Christianity, in his time in the mid-19th century, because he was a contemporary of Nietzsche, they are actually very similar, though they never met quite tragically.
00:03:58.620 They probably would have been great friends.
00:03:59.980 He argues that Christianity, true Christianity, is very, very terrifying, because it proposes an absolutely radical form of freedom. 0.99
00:04:17.740 It proposes that you actually have the ability to damn yourself to hell, or to achieve salvation.
00:04:28.720 That despite our myriad of human weaknesses, our animal weaknesses, that us humans are nonetheless these incredible creatures with so much agency over ourselves.
00:04:43.440 And in The Grand Inquisitor, he accuses the Church of abandoning that sense of radical freedom, of that absolute sense of right and wrong, that faith in God, and replacing it with faith in man, faith in the material.
00:05:03.520 And much like his protagonist in crime and punishment, the Grand Inquisitor, the eponymous Grand Inquisitor, I love that word,
00:05:16.920 He has taken it upon himself to be the evil one, that he, the Inquisitor, the bishop, he will enslave all of men, because Christ promised radical freedom, Christ demanded radical freedom out of his followers, and the bishop will voluntarily be the evil one that takes away that freedom.
00:05:45.340 And instead, grants his followers the permission to sin.
00:05:57.260 Very, very similar to the crime and punishment protagonist, that, you know, I'm going to create this rational utopia, where I am evil, but everybody else is deliciously sinning underneath me,
00:06:13.220 and so I am a better savior than Christ.
00:06:16.680 Very, very similar to the young attorney, as I recall, who decided to murder a woman to make the women in his life happy.
00:06:26.400 And see, this is what Nietzsche was writing about, that the churches were no longer about this radical freedom, that Europe, the Europeans, had given themselves over to this profligate behavior, 0.79
00:06:52.140 that they were reveling in their slavery, that God is dead because we have killed him, because we, the Europeans, have lost our faith. 0.83
00:07:07.820 We no longer want to go over, we want to go under, we want to be beasts.
00:07:14.200 The two of them were absolutely prophetic in their writing.
00:07:24.680 When you read about the Grand Inquisitor, it's impossible not to see the face of George Soros on there.
00:07:33.460 George Soros, who has just been relentlessly evil throughout his life, from the very beginning, you know, hidden away with a, well, not a German family, which country was he in?
00:07:51.320 Regardless, you know, an ethnic Jew, pretending not to be a Jew, aiding the Nazis as they seized the property of his co-ethnics and shipped them off to labor camps, where the conditions were absolutely brutal. 0.63
00:08:08.080 He was an instrumental cog in doing all of this.
00:08:12.460 You know, and then later in life, proposing all of these tax laws, all of these limitations on how financiers can speculate, and then doing everything in his power to avoid said laws.
00:08:30.920 Paying, paying prostitutes, poor prostitutes from Eastern Europe, to go over to Western Europe and to pull their tops off to advocate for feminism. 1.00
00:08:40.420 You know, if that's not financial exploitation, what is? 0.97
00:08:45.320 He is.
00:08:47.140 He is that Grand Inquisitor.
00:08:51.000 Who embraces evil so that he can hand out sin to all of his followers.
00:08:58.340 You know, he supports Black Lives Matter.
00:09:01.720 Who destroy their own communities.
00:09:04.220 Who engage, who indulge in wrath, in violence.
00:09:11.360 This unmotivated, unguided, untargeted violence that they wreak upon society.
00:09:20.300 He gives them that sin.
00:09:23.800 Knowing how bad it is.
00:09:25.720 He knows perfectly well how bad it is for them.
00:09:28.640 But he thinks he's taking the sins on himself, as if he is some sort of superior to Christ.
00:09:33.720 This is what both those writers were talking about.
00:09:44.100 Nietzsche wasn't celebrating the death of God.
00:09:46.920 He was accusing the European man.
00:09:49.280 Here in Canada right now, we've got the United Church is having a problem with some of their ministers going around saying that they're atheist.
00:10:00.840 You know, this is the same church whose theological colleges endorse different new understandings of God because we are so much superior today than we were 400 years ago.
00:10:13.360 We are so much more enlightened than those savages from the Renaissance. 1.00
00:10:20.020 You know, you start to understand why the Spanish Inquisition had to put 1,500 people to death.
00:10:24.800 When you look at these people running around calling themselves Christians who don't believe in God and think Jesus was just playing practical jokes on people.
00:10:33.160 So the death of God, this is not a celebration.
00:10:43.060 This is not a pro-atheist, pro-skeptic, now I can do whatever I want sort of a statement.
00:10:49.080 It is precisely the opposite.
00:10:51.960 It's an indictment of man turning himself into a beast. 1.00
00:10:56.540 The same way these atheist cultists, these skeptics, these I-fucking-love-science people that can't do basic math, the way these people are nothing but beasts. 0.98
00:11:09.260 You know, they call themselves libertarian because they want to have no limits on their private behavior, but then they want the state, they expect the state to pay for all the messy consequences of their behavior. 0.97
00:11:22.000 This is what modern libertarian has become, skepticism, atheism.
00:11:26.420 These are not philosophically principled individuals.
00:11:30.240 They are empty wrecks given over to a reprobate mind who have turned themselves into vile beasts crawling in the mud and reveling in sin.
00:11:48.020 Nietzsche was a flawed man.
00:11:50.000 He was absolutely a flawed man.
00:11:52.000 And he tried to find heroism outside of God, outside of the church, and he failed, ultimately.
00:12:02.720 It was a very valiant and noble philosophical quest, even if he did fail in the end, as surely as Beowulf failed against the great serpent.
00:12:14.060 He was able to defeat Grendel and his mother, but he was not able to defeat the dragon.
00:12:19.420 No more than Nietzsche was, but it was a valiant quest nonetheless.
00:12:26.920 It was his struggle against the nihilism that was beginning to pervade the European continent.
00:12:33.400 And all of us, all of us Christians that do have faith, imperfect though we may be, should be honoring Nietzsche in that quest.
00:12:43.820 Because nihilism is very much, very much prevalent in today's world.
00:12:51.620 And though Nietzsche might have failed, we can learn from his failures, because he was a man that understood heroism.
00:12:59.940 world.
00:13:02.080 Thank you.
00:13:04.380 Deus.
00:13:04.460 Deus Volt, folks.