While vacationing in Italy, I had the opportunity to flex a couple of neurons. My family is full of devout Catholics, and my youngest aunt Costanza (Costu) has the “gift” of speaking in tongues. That means the hardcore Catholics pray with her, and sometimes that sets her off in a indecipherable tongue-speaking frenzy. My uncle Michael can interpret her, so the message isn’t lost.

Moreover, Costu is also intelligent, having graduated from MST in Rolla. So she wanted to discuss philosophy with me, and she wanted to know what was my “truth.” It was early in the week, and I thought it would be a good idea to get this over with so we all can enjoy our fantastic resort.

As somebody well read in post-modernism, asking the very question “truth” sets off alarms. Such questions like “what is X” are classic questions of philosophy, but after Nietzsche, they no longer have any place in our society - all and any answer has no credibility - but I couldn’t answer like this to my Aunt. So I had to speak in the right language, and speak about the game of philosophy. (more…)

In passing, I made the argument that because an individual’s life project was closed, we no longer have any right to vilify him for his shortcomings - that we should be honoring his contributions of society instead, especially if we (media and public) have been vilifying him the entire time until his death.

Before death, an individual’s life is an open book, a project to be completed. That’s when we have free reign to disparage and criticize for the wrongdoings or failures. After death, the meaning of the individual’s life is complete, a closed book, and finished.

Michael Jackson’s death has closed off all his possibilities, and puts him at the mercy of others - us. As long as he was alive, he could, through his actions, change the meaning of his future, and his past as well. (more…)

There are two forms of knowledge: logos and mythos. From an old post of mine, based on Karen Armstrong’s division of knowledge:

Mythos: “myth”, from greek musteion - to close eyes or mouth. Myth as a mode of Knowledge was rooted in silence and intuitive insight, and gave meaning to life, human existence, but cannot be explained in rational terms. In the premodern world, mythical knowledge was complementary to logos.

Logos: “word” or rational, logical, scientific discourse

Both were essential and complementary ways of arriving at the truth for each had its area of competence. Myth was regarded as primary, for it dealt with the timeless or constant elements of human existence. Myth was about the origins of life, the very foundations of culture and the most essential nature of human mind. However, myth has little to do with practical stuff, or anything other than the meaning of life. If people cannot or do not find significance in their lives, despair is the result. The mythos of a society is the context that makes sense of the daily life, and points at the eternal and universal. Moreover, myth is rooted in unconscious. The various stories of myth, which were not meant to be taken literally, was ancient psychology. All these stories of heroes in the underworld, in labyrinths, and fighting monsters, was the premodern way of dealing with the obscure realm of unconscious, which is completely inaccessible to rational investigation, but had profound effects on experience and behavior. Since myth is absent in modern society we instead developed the science of psychoanalysis to deal with our inner world. (more…)

Typically, a person does not believe that her belief is a belief. If she does come to believe that a belief is a belief, she will recognize it for what it is, a mere belief, and no longer wholeheartedly believe in it. “To believe is to know that one believes, and to know that one believes is no longer to believe… every belief is a belief that falls short, one never wholly believes what one believes.” (Being and Nothingness, p. 69) A person is able to suspend disbelief in a belief because she fails to spell out to herself the fact that a belief is merely a belief. Spelling out the policy of not spelling out undermines the policy. Coming to believe that a belief is merely a belief undermines the belief. If a person comes to believe that a belief is a belief, then she ceases to be convinced by it and loses faith in it, because by its very nature, belief implies doubt.

Wittgenstein realized that the expression ‘I believed’ always means ‘I no longer believe.’ Therefore, ‘I believe’ cannot truly be the present tense of ‘i believed.’ The actual present tense of ‘I believed’ must express the lack of belief. ‘I believe’ doesn’t express lack of belief, although it does express a measure of doubt. If a person said ‘I believe in the existence of God,’ then it is because she is not certain of the existence of God. If God’s existence was certain, it would be as strange to say ‘I believe in the existence of chairs,’ extreme skeptics notwithstanding, the existence of which is certain.

Belief is an attitude that is only relevant when a person is uncertain. She can believe what she doesn’t know for certain. However, she doesn’t also believe what she knows, for certain, even if it’s impossible to disbelieve what she knows for certain. That one cannot disbelieve what one knows does not mean one believes what one knows. One doesn’t believe what one knows, she knows it. ‘I believe’ is redundant when a person is talking of matters about which she is certain.

Not to say that to refrain from any talk of belief is to be certain, but rather, that to talk meaningfully of belief is to reveal uncertainty, even if the use of ‘I believe’ is used to indicate the “unwavering firmness of belief.” (BN, p. 69) Beliefs can be firm, strongly and widely held, frequently expressed, but because they are beliefs they are always uncertain.

For instance, increasing the number of believers in a particular religious doctrine in no way makes the doctrine any more certain. Evangelism, the drive to recruit believers to a doctrine, is a reaction to the uncertainty inherent in religious faith. The evangelist is concerned with the belief of others in order to distract himself from the fact that his own belief is just a belief. If he honestly examined his own belief he would expose it as ‘necessarily uncertain” so he busies himself with the beliefs of others. For him, the beliefs of others is a thing, an objectified belief that is firmly based upon itself, rather than a mere disposition based upon a fragile suspension of disbelief. Consequently, the evangelist is in bad faith towards others because he denies them their freedom by regarding them as believer things incapable of going beyond their “state of convictions.” If someone stopped believing, the evangelist would regard them as corrupted or deluded, for they did not reach a decision on their own free will.

The evangelist champions sincerity regarding beliefs with the aim of reducing others to receptacles of objectified beliefs. Belief is thereby transformed into a public object that the evangelist can then take possession of. Incapable of believing without doubt in his own belief, he gets involved with the apparently certain and objectified beliefs of others by regarding himself as simply another object. The original project of bad faith allows a person to see himself exclusively from the point of view of others. Therefore, religious faith involves a person objectifying her own faith through the objectification of the faith of others. All faith is bad faith in the sense that all faith involves a state of false consciousness in which a person does not believe that her belief is a belief.

Christians are prone to overstatements such as the simple claim that the New Testament is a historical document.

However, this is incorrect, since they are religious works, not historical documents. There is a reason why your public or university library has the Gospels classified as religion, not history. Your public university does not include the Gospels in Ancient History 100 courses.

If the Gospels are historical, then they have to stand up to critical analysis. Once critical analysis is applied, they are anything but reliable history, and i will expand why:

No Gospels or Jesus of Nazareth known in the 1st century
We must distinguish between the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament: the NT epistles of Paul and Revelation and Acts do not contain explicit knowledge of the Gospel events or biographical information of Jesus of Nazareth, for they contain high spiritual formula instead. Now, moving on to the Gospels, since they are what most Christians suppose to be historical.

Gospels Not written by eyewitnesses
It is painfully clear that the Gospel of Mark was not written an eyewitness, because:

• the writer is often ignorant about the geography of the region
• the writer is often ignorant about the customs of the locals
• Papias , circa 130 explains Mark was not an eye-witness
• Clement and Tertullian later agree Mark was not an eye-witness.

The Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Luke both copied large amounts of Gospel of Mark word-for-word, so they can hardly have been eyewitnesses either. They also changed, deleted and added to GMark to suit differing purposes and audiences - showing they did not represent historical events, but religious mythology.

Manuscripts of the Gospels are a century or more late

Christians are quick to claim that the historical writings and the date of the events are very close. This is factually incorrect, because of the paucity of positive evidence. all we have instead are:

• a few WORDS possibly of Gospel of John from early 2nd century
• most of John from circa 200
• several verses of Gospel of Matthew from c.200
• several chapters of synoptics from 3rd century

The earliest substantial manuscripts of the synoptic Gospels date back to two centuries after the alleged events.

Citations of the Gospels are a century or more late
The extrabiblical knowledge of the Gospels or its content does not appear until a full century after the alleged events:

• The first mention of Gospels is not until perhaps circa 130 with Papias.
• the first substantial quotes from the Gospels is not until circa 150 with Justin
• The first numbering of the Four Gospels is not until circa 172 with the Diatessaron.
• the first naming of the Four Gospels is not until circa 185 with Irenaeus

The Gospels became public knowledge in the middle to late 2nd century, which is about a hundred and fifty years after the alleged events. Once approximately 150 years of oral tradition has passed, history is considered immaterial and vacuous, lost among the legendary accretions.

Early Doubts about the Gospels
During the first appearance of the Gospels there are doubts: Trypho, circa 130 seems to doubt Jesus, and Celsus, circa 175 exposes the Gospels as fiction and based on myth.

Later writers also criticized the Gospels as fiction: Porphyry called the evangelists inventors of history and Julian called Jesus spurious and invented.

No Contemporaries

There are no contemporary references to Jesus of Nazareth or the Gospel events. None.

A lack of neutral reports of the events in the Gospels further reduces the Christians’ claim of historicity.

Many differences in Gospel manuscripts

Christians are also very eager to argue that there exists a similarity in content among the gospels. However, the manuscripts do not show exact similarity because, in fact they show excessive variation. There are NO TWO substantial manuscripts of the Gospels which are identical.

It is estimated there are 300,000 variations in the NT manuscripts, 30,000 in Gospel of Mark, even 80 or so in the Lord’s Prayer.

Furthermore, these changes were often driven by arguments over dogma in the early centuries. Bert Ehrman’s classic work The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture shows in detail four examples of how the scriptures were altered by early Christians to argue their points.

To finish, I will list a typical list of modifications of the scriptures. Note that such changes are not just minor things like spelling errors, they show variation of the some of the most fundamental issues of Christian dogma including - the virgin birth, the baptism, the Lord’s Prayer, the trinity, even the resurrection.

Examples of Corruptions to the NT

• Markan appendix - not found in early manuscripts - there are now FOUR differing versions of endings to Mark (the short, plus 3 versions of how it ends)
• Matthew. 6:13 - to this day, there are different versions in various bibles - the early manuscripts show that “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen” is a later addition.
• Luke 3:22 - early witnesses have : ” . . . and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou are my son, this day have I begotten thee”
  later manuscripts have the KJV version : “…Thou art my beloved son; in thee I am well pleased”
• John 9:35 - The KJV has “…son of god”, but the early manuscripts show “..son of man”.
• John’s periscope of the Adulteress - not found in the early witnesses - generally agreed to be a later addition.
• Colossians 1:14 - the phrase “through his blood” is a later addition.
• Acts 9:5-6 - Absent from early manuscripts - a later addition.
• Acts 8:37 - “And Phillip said, if thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God” Absent from early manuscripts - a later addition.
• John 8:59 -“…going through the midst of them, and so passed by” Absent from early manuscripts - a later addition.
• 1 John 5:7 The Trinity formula found here only originated centuries after the events. Bruce Metzger notes : “The passage is absent from every known Greek manuscript except eight, and these contain the passage in what appears to be a translation from a late recension of the Latin Vulgate . . . “

The passage is quoted by none of the Greek fathers, who, had they known it, would most certainly have employed it in the Trinitarian controversies (Sabellian and Arian). Its first appearance in Greek is in a Greek version of the (Latin) Acts of the Lutheran Council in 1215.

On another board, in response to my comments on Buddhism and its superiority over Christianity, a poster asked about my characterization of Christianity as self-deception. Hence, this blog.

The Christian concepts of moral experience (sin, afterlife) are entirely imaginary as well as psychologically pernicious. These categories undervalue human experience, making it much more vile than it really is. Thus, those moral concepts motivate Christians to adopt a paranoid and hostile attitude towards their behavior and that of others. Since they are convinced of their sinfulness, that they are deserving of eternal damnation, Christians are compelled to seek spiritual reassurance that comes a large cost of their own mental health and their relationships of others.

Christians are eager to escape their embodied selves, given their convictions of their own sinfulness. Because they believe they’re sinners and are beholden to an unfulfillable law of perfect love, the Christian is certain s/he is a failure. In order to ameliorate this sense of guilt, s/he look to others in the hopes of finding worse sinners. The moral worldview of Christianity has convicted the advocate that their position is perilous, which drives them to judge others to be sinners in order to gain some “upper hand” over them. Therefore, the moral worldview of Christianity inspires uncharitable judgments of other people, despite paying lip-service to neighborly love.

Such misrepresentation of reality results in dishonesty from the adherents, especially when they judge themselves and others. Moreover, the worldview also encourages a disgust with earthly life for the sake of another reality. Worst of all, the insistence on an absolute conformity to a single standard of human behavior causes further psychological damage to the believer. However, there is no “one-size-fits-all” morality. When the Christian, in the attempt to abolish his or her individual character, fails, his or her feelings of inadequacy is reinforced.

This morality is much older than Christianity and has an inherent structure, and a fundamental disposition called ressentiment, or what John Milton calls an “injured merit,” towards the noble class, and revenge is accomplished by passing judgment. The strong and active traits of the noble are vilified by the herd class, who in turn grant virtue to their own passivity and weakness.

In Christianity, the herd morality blooms magnificently in “bad conscience,” where the soul attacks itself, is a disease, although it also has been the prime motive behind some of the greatest achievements of man. The apparent selflessness is the subjugation of one part of the soul by another, where the selfless man, the self-denier and self-sacrificer feels delight in cruelty.

The combination of both bad conscience and the delight in cruelty (ancient morality) is the source of monotheism. Bad conscience motivates a sense of guilt and indebtedness. In early civilization, the feeling of indebtedness was restricted to one’s own ancestors, and the “powers” of the ancestors increased once the power of the tribe also increased. This escalated to the climax of the supreme and all powerful god. Thus, the notion of the all powerful god also hikes the feeling of guilt to ludicrous heights, so extreme that only God himself could redeem humanity from it.

It should surprise absolutely nobody that I appropriated Nietzsche’s views regarding Buddhism in order to antagonize the Christians on another board. His reasons for judging Buddhism as degenerate because the bourgeoisie, weakened after the death of God, would gravitate towards the inherent nihilism and passivity of Buddhism.

Nietzsche rejected Buddhism, even though its treatment of suffering was superior to the Christian version, calling it a “surrender of life” and an inferior response to human life. The treatment, although sensitive and hygenic, are just as life-denying as the ressentiment of Christianity, for they propose how we should manage the cruelty of the world, while failing to engage or embrace it. Buddhism holds out an illusory promise, merely a comforting fiction, that pacifies the masses because reality is far too harsh. Life’s a bitch, therefore, self-deception ensues in the invention of escape.

Buddhism is pretty much a life-negating philosophy that sought to escape the vicissitudes of life drenched with suffering, a “nihilistic turning away from life, a longing for nothingness or for life’s opposite, for a different sort of ‘being.’” Both God and the Nirvana are symptoms of the same root of sickness - fear and weakness and the inability to see the world as it really is.

Now, is this a fair judgment? Nietzsche’s knowledge of Buddhism was limited to the second hand accounts that described Buddhism as a depressive and nihilistic religion, and failed to account for the many flavors of Buddhism. However, despite all those variants of Buddhism, the very core of Buddhism, life as suffering and the cure of the rejection of suffering and desire, is irreconcilable with the affirmation of life, which is, for Nietzsche, a standard to judge worldviews. Buddhism remains nihilistic because it, in the end, projects a system of values onto the world instead of embracing it.

Some scholars, especially the Japanese thinkers (Nishitani Keiji and Abe Masao) reverse the equation by attributing Nietzsche with decadence and present Buddhism as the cure. Other scholars like Morrison argue that Nietzsche’s characterization of Buddhism as a passive nihilistic religion was incorrect, and that there are actually “ironic affinities” between the religion and Nietzsche.

Lately I have been distinguishing Buddhism from Christianity in my recent readings. Althought, at bottom, both religions are nihilistic and decadent, I have realized Buddhism is a much healthier and more realistic view of life and philosophically superior.

Unlike the Christian, who is always teeter-tottering on a razor edge trying to avoid sin, the Buddhist’s main goal is to just reduce suffering itself. You can see how the Buddhist does not fall in to the same trap of self-deception as the Christian does, and on a philosophical level there is no black and white thinking that polarizes with good and evil, the moral presuppositions. Buddhism has already left them far behind, with the realization that they are all illusons, deceptions. In conclusion, the Buddhist is free, free from resentment and free from the obligation of preaching morality where she or he judge others.

The buddhist succeed in the reduction of suffering by living a passive and non-urgent way life. He or she does not become angry or bitter, resentful, no matter how severe the crimes someone has committed against him or her. With a greater self-discipline the buddhist is better prepared to control his or her desires and avoid exciting his or her senses, whereas the Christian, unfortunately, does the exact opposite by living an ascetic lifestyle that represses the natural desires and engages in prayer that maintains an emotionally charged relationship with his or her God. The Buddhist, by avoiding suffering, is capable of managing a steady peace, experience tranquility, be calm, and express compassion in his lifestyle and character.

What most do not realize is that the Buddhist actually succeeds in the avoidance of suffering, while the Christian cannot and does not at all succeed avoiding sin. Sadly, the Christian is in perpetual need of “redemption” and “forgiveness,” and continually fails to acquire the “grace” of God, the only possible absolution. Conclusion: the Buddhist is entirely capable of attaining his or her goals: an actual peace of mind and a tranquil life today.

Previously posted on alldeaf.com, and the subsequent posts have been modified accordingly…

Here’s a dilemma I’ve been thinking lately, and not only does it prove the incoherence of Christianity, it also demonstrates the internal contradiction within apologetics.

It has to do with God’s pure and holy state that cannot abide the presence of a sinner. He is incapable of forgiving sinners without a meditator, and that is the sacrifice of JC himself, jayzum kerow, alias Jesus Christ. Jesus’ sacrifice was necessary, for otherwise, even one little widdle sin would result the utter annihilation of the sinner in the presence of the Almighty.

But here’s the crux of the problem, and consequently the incoherence as well as the illogic of Christianity.

If God’s presence results in the destruction of the sinner, because of His inability to abide any sin whatsoever, then it makes no difference whether the sinner accepted Christ or not.

The Church teaches us, traditionally, that we have salvation because jesus was crucified on the cross, and his death satisfies God the judge. However, even if Christ’s death fulfilled God’s justice, there isn’t a requirement of personal belief or acceptance of Jesus Christ.

God the judge demanded a price for sin, and the death of Jesus Christ paid for it. The Christian would insist that this price includes our true repentance as well, but if it is up to us to truly repent, then we are the ones who determine our salvation, not God. God cannot force us to submit to salvation, else he overrules and overrides human free will. That is one prong of the dilemma, and there’s another.

Even if the believer “accepts Jesus Christ” in his heart, why doesn’t the presence of God obliterate the sinner? It seems like the only remedy is the sinless nature of Jesus Christ (or the Holy Spirit) “indwells” with the believer and acts as a shield. Yet, this solution is fraught with problems: why doesn’t this affect free will? If Christ’s pure nature is in a person, then the person’s free will is overshadowed and rendered mute. As long Christ is in a person, the person cannot sin because s/he no longer has any sinful nature or even the ability to sin. But this is impossible, for there is no christian who won’t slip up and sin on occasion.

Now, if God cannot abide sin, and Christ is the only way a person can be in God’s presence, how can the Christian sin at all? Furthermore, if the christian does sin, and then dies, what happens to him/her when brought before God?

The concept of God in Christianity is a judge, and must include some sort of sacrifice, but acknowledgment (repentance) is unnecessary.

If God’s nature destroys sin, then Jesus Christ cannot be the bridge between God and the sinner unless his nature indwells fully with the believer. But there is no perfect, sinless Christian.

Incidentally, if God’s presence blots out sin, then the idea of hell becomes absurdly immoral, for God would have to deliberately maintain the sinner alive in order to torment and punish him eternally. In addition, since there is no hope for rehabilitation in hell, the divine punishment is excessively cruel. Neither God nor the sinner benefits, for the sinner cannot repent, and God is no longer infinitely merciful.

Bottom line: if God’s presence erases sin, and the sinner cannot survive in such divine presence unless Jesus Christ’s sinless nature dwells in him, but this “indwelling” will obstruct free will, for the believer will not be able to sin, and this is obviously false.

Traditional Christianity holds that sin is the separation of humans from God, and biblical scripture stipulates that the penalty of sin is death (Romans 6:23). The only reconciliation is the incarnation, the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. There are several models of atonement proposed by Christian theology.

One of them, penal substitution, contends that humans incur a moral debt by sinning, and this debt requires payment. The payment is the separation and the death of the sinner, because the moral debt is enormous, nearly infinite. God chose to send his incarnate Son, free of the blemish of original sin, in order to die and pay for the debt. Only an infinitely perfect being can erase this debt.

If the price of sin has been paid, then our acceptance or refusal is irrelevant, and immaterial. Justice does not depend on anything other than the payment in itself. If someone pays for my parking ticket, then the judge couldn’t care less whether I accept this action or not. The standard of justice has already been met by the blood debt. If Jesus paid off the price of sin, demanded by God, then what else is needed? If you think acceptance and repentance is required, then you are insisting that there are elements every sinner has control, which makes the idea of a sinless sacrifice rather superfluous and redundant. Why or why not?

Earlier, I wrote: …if it is up to us to truly repent, then we are the ones who determine our salvation, not God. That is what the Christian is saying because s/he doen’t think jesus’s death paid for our sins, and that we also have to repent and accept, two additional conditions for salvation.

If a sinner cannot stand before God, because of his divine nature that obliterates sin (penalty of sin is death), then what kind of protection does Jesus Christ have against the corrosive nature of God? The only solution I see is if christ’s perfect and sinless nature is transferred into the believer. This is never the case because all Christians are still sinners, and even the most famous ones lead sinful lives.

If the only way a sinner can be spared before God’s nature is to have Christ’s perfect nature replace his own, then Christ’s nature, which is essentially acceptable to God in every way, overrides the free will of the believer. How can this be? If this was the case, then no Christian could sin, even if he or she wanted to, and the desire, and including the ability, to sin, is the epitome of genuine moral free will – given the story of the Garden of Eden. This brings up a fresh can of worms – could Christ sin if he wanted to? If so, then he wasn’t perfect. If not, then he had no free will. Christ did not have any free will because his will was God’s will, and God, given his perfection, cannot sin. Therefore, to gain Christ’s sinless nature, because that is the only thing to protect the believer from God’s holiness, is to no longer have free will to choose sin either.

A person cannot accept Christ after death, and that means when the Christian is brought before God, the sinful nature no longer exist, because the whole point is to survive God’s nature after death, and the acceptance of Christ is the only thing that can ensure this.

If Christian doctrine is correct, that the Christian is purified after death (purgatory or sanctification). But this means the sinful nature is destroyed. Now, the Christian does not believe he will be destroyed at death because Christ has paid for his sin. But the contradiction isn’t about payment, for it is about God’s perfect nature, which annihilates sin, no matter what. The sins of the Christian may be forgivien in a moral sense, but its experiential nature remains.

If Christ makes the Christian capable of standing in God’s presence after death, then this means He makes the Christian sinless. But what has changed from before death to after death? Why cannot Christ save the Christian from the experiential consequences of his sinful nature now? Because the price of sin is death. Well, if Christ is incapable of sparing the Christian from the experiential consequences of his sinful nature, how will that be the case after death, when the Christian is in god’s presence? The instant the sinner comes into contact with God – he’s history.

Christian doctrine insists that Christ is required as a payment for sin before the holy and just God, and at the same time, also insists that i must accept this payment in order for it to be effective in preventing my damnation. However, these concepts are incompatible, for if salvation is freely acquired by the grace of God through the sacrifice of Christ, then there is nothing, absolutely nothing i can do to positively or negatively affect that grace. If i can, then my response is elevated above God’s sovereignty. Therefore, my acceptance of Christ is irrelevant, if the payment has already been made. However, if my repentance and acceptance is required, then this payment is dependent on my actions, and contradicts the idea that there is nothing i can do to personally satisfy God’s justice. This conclusion is inescapable.

Free will is totally irrelevant - even though i can reject the payment, but my rejection cannot affect the payment itself, which has already been made and accepted by God on the behalf of all sinners. Even though i have the free will to jump off the cliff, the law of gravity will still be in effect. If God’s perfect nature demanded an absolute payment, then that payment is irrevocable under any circumstance whatsoever.

You insist that God is concerned with our response, rather than the payment itself. However, my free will does not have anything to do with the absolute payment, any more than the jumping off a cliff eliminates free will. If you think God is concerned with our response, our personal actions - repentance and acceptance - then Christ is just a symbol with no atoning power.

This short blog is a illustration of the contrast between two impulses: the religious and a very ancient one, the tragic. The religious impulse comes from a long and hard look into the depths of the human element - suffering - and in the process of doing so, a divine force is postulated, inferred, invented, or projected.To be religious is to see with the eyes of faith, which is the facility of seeing in the dark. Faith enables groping around in a pitch black universe. Having such eyes leads to the absence of expectation for evidence, assurance, or justification of any sort.

The discourse of religion is couched within the interpretation of suffering, which is essentially an anthropomorphic response to what is given and removed in suffering. Since suffering is perceived as a moral outrage, the religious attitude is then conceived or generated as a protest against suffering, a defiance against the violation of life. Religion is the posture of defiance, for it speaks in the name of life and defends against those inimical forces that degrade life.

The theologian Johann Baptist Metz claims that religion speaks of the ex memoria passionis - from the memory of suffering (History & society). “Every rebellion against suffering is fed by the subversive power of remembered suffering.”

The most powerful images in Judaism and Christianity are those of liberation and injustice; i.e., the Exodus and the Crucifixion. Nonetheless, once religion began to articulate itself in terms of grace that is granted to a ‘chosen people,’ it degenerates into a factional power and morphs into a force of oppression that no longer has a voice of protest. Once religion dumps the impulse for universal liberation, it is no longer for everyone, and declines into a simplistic division between the believer and the infidel.

On the other hand, the impulse of tragedy presents a dramatically different interpretation. For the tragic, suffering is not a violation but a part of life, a moment in the totality of life, part of the whole. Since suffering belongs to life, protesting suffering is to protest life. Life is already conditioned by suffering, and consequently, enriched by it.The religious impulse springs from suffering, not God, and by protesting against its injustice the religious invokes God. While the tragic impulse does not begin with atheism, for it affirms suffering as part and parcel of life, which in turn eliminates God in order to affirm the justice of suffering.

A selective affirmation of life that excludes suffering is similar to taking a vow that takes life for only better but not worse. Affirmation of life is not selective or partial - it affirms the whole, both the pain and pleasure, the midnight and noon of the day. Life is both overcoming and undergoing, and is a constant fluctuation between both extremes. Therefore, affirmation embraces the whole flux without discrimination or exclusion.The greatest Dionysian response to life is amor fati - the love of one’s fate - which does not hierarchizes life into simplistic opposites of higher and lower aspects, for the affirmation of one marginalizes the other. Life is utterly innocent, and the innocence of becoming entails the innocence of suffering.Religion has divided life into two within a hierarchy that lies between the bearable and the unbearable, the true life and the enemy of life, the guilty and the innocent. Perhaps this is why a wise man once said that the most suffering animal on earth invented for itself - laughter! We have naught else but to laugh at meaninglessness.

Why deicide precedes posthumanism

The significance of the death of God has many aspects, but the most important one is the painful realization that metaphysical foundations have become empty, irrelevant, and consequently, romantic. But it is human weaknesses that keeps those foundations circulating under the pretense of necessity, due to shame, cowardice masquerading as arrogance, and self-indulgent nostalgia.

Even though absolute values have lost their credibility today, we still haven’t come to grips with our murder of God. Moreover, the shift to secularism has eroded away the inertia of metaphysical foundations, yet the bloated and rotting divine corpse remains unacknowledged, the proverbial pink elephant nobody “sees.” Despite the obvious assassination of the divine, we refuse to admit the guilt of deicide. Thus our disavowal, in turn, serves as an artificial respirator that keeps a comatose, brain-dead God alive.

It is possible that sooner or later, we will come clean, collectively, and see past Feuerbach’s insight that man’s psychological illusions are behind the self-projection of his highest attributes. More importantly, we must go further than the all-too-easy replacement of God with Man, which jettisoned the philosophy of theism by introducing humanism in its place, for that is merely another attempt to forget the demise of the Divine.

Nothing profitable will come from the substitute idolatry of humanism, for both humanism and religion are co-dependent. Man is the avatar of God on earth, but Jacques Lacan would say this is replacing Master Signifier with an excremental remainder. Consequently, the death of God in turn is also the death of Man. Both “deaths” of abstractions are best understood as metaphors that signifies the collapse of humanism under the infection of nihilism in modernity.

The “death of God” is a mutation of Christianity, where the crucifixion of Christ signaled the end of the idea of God as a vengeful patriarch. The death of God, in turn, signals the end of man as a created being with a special status in all of Creation and a hotline to the Creator. Our ineradicable need for metaphysics predispose a teleology for existence - which means the alternative, a meaningless universe and a lack of ultimate reason for the existence of the human race, is far too difficult to even conceive, much less cope with.

If man has no preexisting purpose, no divine guarantee, then nor will its disappearance amount to anything either. The invention of God, perhaps, has to do with our hopes of being remembered in an absurdly empty universe. But the death of God is a necessary transition for the maturation of human culture, and the death of Man is absolutely essential for the continued evolution of the species….

When did Man kill God?
I don’t have a definite answer yet, but, right now I am looking at the shift in the many historical conceptions of God, starting with the theology of William of Occam, who lived during the apocalyptic times of the late Middle Ages: people perceived a future where God would rule directly, totally independent from the church or nature. This picture of an omnipotent God who could call good evil and evil good became known as nominalism. Since man is made in the image of God, the chief attribute of man became, in this future, his will. This focus on the will is considered in contemporary culture to be grounded in the insistence that if only the culture had enough desire, any difficulty could be overcome, according to the scholar Michael Allen Gillespie in his book, Nihilism before Nietzsche.

Another possibility is Connor Cunningham’s book, Genealogy of Nihilism, where the radical theologian finds the same roots in William of Occam, but with a different interpretation, he comes up with very different conclusions.

But the belief in God hasn’t died out yet.
The “death of god” does not mean people no longer believe in god at all, but that the God concept of the Middle ages and Enlightenment has lost much of its potency and given ground to different ones that are much weaker copies, ghosts that live on beyond the grave.

For centuries the religious thinkers in Judaism, Islam and Christianity tried to explain that God wasn’t another “being” that just existed like the other phenomena we experience. But due to the theologians’ attraction for philosophy they chose to talk about God as if he was one of the things that exist. They wasted no time in appropriating the new mechanistic science of the 17th century to prove the objective reality of god as if he could be tested and analyzed like any other particular object. This appropriation backfired with Diderot, Holbach, and Laplace when they came to the same conclusion as the extreme mystics - there’s nothing out there. Then the scientists and philosophers started declaring the death of God. The advances in science and technology in the 19th century established an autonomous independence of religion - Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud - with their interpretations of reality that did not have a place for God.

Even the poets articulated this shift of culture: William Blake used terms like “innocence” and “experience” in a dialectical way to show how complicated reality really was. His early poems expressed an apocalyptic sense that God was dead - the vision of the enlightenment of synthesizing truth and the God of Christianity who alienated men and women from their humanity by imposing unnatural laws that oppressed their sexuality, liberty and joy. My interpretation of this divine death is not a scientific observation, nor is it an atheistic statement, nor metaphysical speculation about ultimate reality, but the diagnosis of modern culture. The death of God has two aspects: the death of the particular god of Christianity - even though this God was the major force behind a pathological hatred for the human and the earth, it was a security blanket that safeguarded the human will from theoretical and practical nihilism. The second aspect is the God of the theologians, philosophers, and scientists - that God guaranteed the universe with structure, order purpose - is no longer. Now, this death is actually the call to creativity, to invent new structures and fresh ideals. No more cringing in the corner burdened with fictional guilt. Although the Death of God introduces us to Milan Kundera’s Unbearable lightness of Being, we shouldn’t let something else take the place of the superannuated God and make us feel humble and insignificant. The guilt is fictional, and so is everything else.

What do i mean by “humanism?”
My argument against humanism isn’t addressed to a specific type in the wiki entry, but the general theme of humanism.

The word “man” in the “death of man is functionally a technical term that takes place at the transcendental levels of the biological and historio-cultural conditions that make empirical knowledge possible. “Man” designates the being who centers the disorganized representations of the classical episteme and who also becomes the privileged object of philosophical anthropology. However, the era of “man” as a foundational concept, being privileged in the discourses of human sciences, is nearing its end. But nihilism will be overcome if and only if humanity itself is also overcome as well. Foucault’s comments at the end of that seminal work of neostructuralism, Les Mots et Choses, is a testament to the “death of man” concept:

….as the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared… As the ground of classical thought did at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.

In the book, Foucault’s method of historiography, archaeology analyzes the discontinuities in the Western episteme and describes the emergence of new paradigms, new sciences, and particularly for Foucault, man as the subject of discourse. According to Foucault, the human sciences first emerged when “man” was simultaneously constituted as the transcendental foundation of knowledge and as the primary empirical object of knowledge. Essentially, “man” is both the subject participating in the sciences and is the very object of the sciences. Yet the problem is that this apparently obliquely self-reflective position of man already undermines the objectivity of the human sciences. Furthermore, once the histories of the various aspects of “man” - language, life, labor - are developed, then “man” is no longer the foundation of history. In order to combat this loss, “man” is given a history, yet, consequently, and inadvertently, his aspects themselves also gain histories of their own. This leads Foucault to conclude that the human sciences are bankrupt: not only are these disciplines false, they cannot even be sciences at all. The human sciences lack objectivity due to the subjectivity of man.

Against humanism, Foucault argues that man is neither the transcendental foundation nor the essential object of human knowledge. How does Foucault accomplish this strategic move? By exposing the commitments of the humanist to the ideology of humanism: Humanists are committed to the human individual, subject as consciousness and will, as the originator of action and understanding, and that entails the concepts of freedom and responsibility. Foucault believes this ideology of the philosophy of man to have run its course and is slowly being disposed from the center of culture and modern thought. Antihumanism focuses on the implicit belief in human autonomy - specifically free will and consciousness - and determines it to be illusory. According to the humanist the subject is a free agent who rationally judges its course of action. This sketch is rather naive for it overlooks/marginalizes/disregards the unconscious. Due to the developments in 19th century German philosophy (Freud & Nietzsche), the role of the unconscious has bumped the conscious from the central role of the human mind and become the dominant force of behavior and thinking. If that is the case then the assumption that human actions are consciously determined is invalid. Ergo the autonomy of the human subject is rejected.