On God and Christianity

I have a Facebook group on the subject of Nietzsche that I've let languish for years now. It has seven members, an eclectic group of people from the four corners of the globe, and this both intrigues and frightens me. I finally got around to making a post on the group, and I decided to put what I wrote down here as well. I will wax philosophical again soon.

Taken out of context the quote lost all meaning over the years, and Nietzsche's original point thus obscured, which is a shame. It's hard to get what Nietzsche said when working with the American concept of God because as far as most Americans are concerned God is a real, physical being residing the a definitely physical Heaven. God is as real as the stranger on the street or the President of the United States, and he cannot die.

Nietzsche, I think viewed God as an idea, one that conveniently explained the mysteries of the world in a comforting fashion in a time of darkness and ignorance. The idea of God held society together through the worst parts of human history and served his purpose. The problem with God in the modern sense arises with the scientific revolution.

With human understanding advanced far beyond the imaginations of ancient peoples, the old concepts of good and evil God represents and Christianity extols lose their usefulness. The modern concept of evolution introduces the idea that humanity is just another animal and like all other lifeforms has two primary purposes in existence: self preservation and propagation of the species.

Under the newer concept of life, what's good is promoting life and expansion of humanity, both in physical presence and in our understanding of the world around us. Evil, in simple therms is anything promoting death and decay, a position of anti-life.

Christianity holds God as good and those against God as evil, but the path to evil is paved with the various sins humanity examples, in particular the seven deadly sins. Looking at the worst sins, those of gluttony, lust, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride it's easy to see these are basic aspects of human nature. Christianity takes human nature as inherently evil, and the inhuman ideal of God as good, which taken together is a philosophy of death and destruction, something to be discarded.

As far as Nietzsche was concerned, Europeans of his day already discarded much of the old Christian moral and ideological system, not truly believing in God. In this way the idea of God died, but nothing replaced it. Nietzsche called this lack of belief nihilism, and the nihilists feel that life has no value. Nietzsche saw this as dangerous and only welcomed the arrival of nihilism as the interim between the necessary clearing away of the old Christian value system allowing for the creation of a new and better system.