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.
00:02:28.660And there's a nasty old Jewess that has tons of money saved up.
00:02:35.800And 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.
00:02:47.040That's his logical process, his atheistic process, his utilitarian thinking process.
00:02:56.520And he goes about it, but he finds that that's not the case at all.
00:03:04.320Sort 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.
00:03:15.280And that was a consistent theme through Dostoevsky.
00:03:20.860The necessity of redemption and to confess one's guilt.
00:03:31.520In the short story, it's part of a larger work, but The Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky directly addresses Christianity.
00:03:42.760And 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.
00:03:58.620They probably would have been great friends.
00:03:59.980He argues that Christianity, true Christianity, is very, very terrifying, because it proposes an absolutely radical form of freedom.
00:04:17.740It proposes that you actually have the ability to damn yourself to hell, or to achieve salvation.
00:04:28.720That despite our myriad of human weaknesses, our animal weaknesses, that us humans are nonetheless these incredible creatures with so much agency over ourselves.
00:04:43.440And 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.
00:05:03.520And much like his protagonist in crime and punishment, the Grand Inquisitor, the eponymous Grand Inquisitor, I love that word,
00:05:16.920He 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.
00:05:45.340And instead, grants his followers the permission to sin.
00:05:57.260Very, 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,
00:06:13.220and so I am a better savior than Christ.
00:06:16.680Very, very similar to the young attorney, as I recall, who decided to murder a woman to make the women in his life happy.
00:06:26.400And 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,
00:06:52.140that they were reveling in their slavery, that God is dead because we have killed him, because we, the Europeans, have lost our faith.
00:07:07.820We no longer want to go over, we want to go under, we want to be beasts.
00:07:14.200The two of them were absolutely prophetic in their writing.
00:07:24.680When you read about the Grand Inquisitor, it's impossible not to see the face of George Soros on there.
00:07:33.460George 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?
00:07:51.320Regardless, 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.
00:08:08.080He was an instrumental cog in doing all of this.
00:08:12.460You 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.
00:08:30.920Paying, paying prostitutes, poor prostitutes from Eastern Europe, to go over to Western Europe and to pull their tops off to advocate for feminism.
00:08:40.420You know, if that's not financial exploitation, what is?
00:09:49.280Here 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.
00:10:00.840You 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.
00:10:13.360We are so much more enlightened than those savages from the Renaissance.
00:10:20.020You know, you start to understand why the Spanish Inquisition had to put 1,500 people to death.
00:10:24.800When 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.
00:10:33.160So the death of God, this is not a celebration.
00:10:43.060This is not a pro-atheist, pro-skeptic, now I can do whatever I want sort of a statement.
00:10:51.960It's an indictment of man turning himself into a beast.
00:10:56.540The 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.
00:11:09.260You 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.
00:11:22.000This is what modern libertarian has become, skepticism, atheism.
00:11:26.420These are not philosophically principled individuals.
00:11:30.240They are empty wrecks given over to a reprobate mind who have turned themselves into vile beasts crawling in the mud and reveling in sin.
00:11:52.000And he tried to find heroism outside of God, outside of the church, and he failed, ultimately.
00:12:02.720It 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.
00:12:14.060He was able to defeat Grendel and his mother, but he was not able to defeat the dragon.
00:12:19.420No more than Nietzsche was, but it was a valiant quest nonetheless.
00:12:26.920It was his struggle against the nihilism that was beginning to pervade the European continent.
00:12:33.400And all of us, all of us Christians that do have faith, imperfect though we may be, should be honoring Nietzsche in that quest.
00:12:43.820Because nihilism is very much, very much prevalent in today's world.
00:12:51.620And though Nietzsche might have failed, we can learn from his failures, because he was a man that understood heroism.