I was going to call this “The End of Atheism,” just to tease everyone, but I was afraid the joke would be too subtle. By entelechy I mean what Aristotle meant, which is given in the Oxford English Dictionary as follows:
1. In Aristotle’s use: The realization or complete expression of some function; the condition in which a potentiality has become an actuality.
The entelechy of something is therefore the perfection of it, the final expression of its true nature.
I don’t think much of the uproar over “The New Atheists” because I see them as more ignorant and less honest than the old atheists. Lacking the cultural basis of the old atheists and an honest acceptance of radical secular humanism, the New Atheist leaders will quickly burn out and the low-IQ acolytes will revert to pantheism, due to their natural propensity for superstition and idolatry:
Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, has described Pantheism as “sexed-up atheism.” [World Pantheism]
In other words, atheists are just repressed pantheists. I have previously expressed my belief that there are three natural default states for anti-Christians who are also anti-religious:
- Radical secular humanism: “Man is the measure of all things. I am my own god and I can do whatever I want. Might makes right. PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWERS … Itty-bitty living space!”
- Deism: “Something created the universe and all of life, giving it order and maybe even purpose. However, it doesn’t talk to me or listen to me and it doesn’t care what I do or what happens to me. I don’t know what it was and I don’t really want to know, because I’m satisfied just contemplating what was created.”
- Pantheism: “The universe is self-created, self-ordering, and self-sustaining. Everything is cyclical and recurring; there is no first cause or final end. Humans come from nature and their souls return to the universal soul after death. Everything in nature has consciousness and everything is sacred.”
Radical secular humanism is usually considered to have its ultimate modern expression in Nietzsche’s writings, which is appropriate since he eventually went insane. Variant forms can be found among fascists, secular Nazis, Randian Objectivists, communist intellectuals, moralistic sociopaths, and atheist existentialists. In the past, Objectivists have shown up here and whined about being lumped in with Nazis; but despite the fact that they may quibble about the use of state power and who gets to be the Supreme Leader, they still agree on worshipping their own awesome selves.
I associate Deism with Tom Paine, Voltaire, John Davison, the Intelligent Design movement, the motto “In God We Trust,” politically acceptable civic religion, 19th-century Unitarians, lapsed Catholics, and a lot of almost-Christians who really hate being around judgmental pseudo-Christian WASP Republicans. Deism is for rationalists who love physical order or social order but not moral accountability; for materialists who don’t like quantum physics and string theory; and for “Pascal’s Wager” losers who don’t like Christians but are afraid to be called atheists.
Pantheism is the modern, socially acceptable form of heathenism. It encompasses New Age Spirituality, panpsychism, Green Nazis, neo-paganism, Unitarian-Universalism, shamanism, Hinduism, popular communism, Gaia-worship, Native American religion, and philosophical naturalism. It is anarcho-primitivist, irrationalist, collectivist, and morally incoherent. The numbing effect of pantheism among the general populace results in the degradation of technological ability and scientific inquiry, accompanied by the idolization of gadgets and the scientific priesthood. Furthermore, a pantheistic society devalues the individual and institutionalizes caste tyranny.
The radical secular humanists are relatively unpopular now in the USA. All their glorious eugenics plans have been disowned by their ungrateful intellectual stepchildren, and their twentieth-century projects are generally disparaged as anomalies of a perverse age.
For some reason, scientific atheists and conservative Christians seem to think that most Deists are Christians and all Christians are Deists; most of the arguing about atheism and religion involves Deist arguments. Sometimes they say “theist,” but if you don’t know who your god is, you don’t know what he wants from you, you don’t think he cares what you do or think, and you’ve never talked to him—you are a Deist. And if you don’t know or care about Jesus, you are not a Christian. Why should I care if my worldly rulers argue over whether to promote Deism as the state religion? The Christian obsession with the atheist/Deist debate is tiresome and irrelevant.
Scientific atheists and conservative Christians seem to be most resistant to the idea of atheists ultimately becoming pantheists. They just can’t believe that most so-called atheists are not smart enough or strong-willed enough to become Nietzschean alpha males, that most “freethinkers” just want to dissolve their egos into puddles of superstitious idolatry. Yet, World Pantheism is standing there with open arms, awaiting the crowds of low-church atheists yearning for anonymous Unity:
Are you sceptical about a “God” other than Nature and the wider Universe?
Yet do you feel an emotional need for a recognition of something greater than your own self or than the human race? …
Pantheism is older than Buddhism or Christianity, and may already count hundreds of millions among its members. Most Taoists are pantheists, along with many Chinese, Japanese and Western Buddhists, deep ecologists, pagans, animists, followers of many native religions, and many Unitarian Universalists. The central philosophical scriptures of Hinduism are pantheistic. Many atheists and humanists may be naturalistic pantheists without realizing it.
Scientific or natural pantheism is a modern form of pantheism that deeply reveres the universe and nature and joyfully accepts and embraces life, the body and earth, but does not believe in any supernatural deities, entities or powers.
When some moron chooses to disable his intellect and his will in awe of the sacred cosmos, as revealed to him by a science reporter who is cribbing from a press release, that has nothing to do with the depredations of Darwin or Dawkins. Stop blaming those second-rate theologians for the adulterous irrationalism and lurching zombie mobbing of the typical “Friends of A.”
Everyone who wants to avoid accountability for their sadistic tendencies and victimization complex points to some big villain who personifies all of their own sinfulness, someone who put the “bad ideas” in their head and made them want to hurt other people, or someone who convinced them that slavery was a good thing. This denial of personal sin is sickening. If someone is vicious, immature, addicted, egotistical, malicious, thieving, hypocritical, and adulterous, it isn’t the fault of Darwin or Nietzsche or anyone else in the world; it is their own fault for seeking salvation in the world and for rejecting God’s grace, so that God has handed them over to suffer in their depravity.
As Nietzsche wrote:
Was there ever an author that lent themselves more to an intended misunderstanding by their readers than Friedrich Nietzsche?
In fairness to Freddie, I tried to refer to him indirectly, in terms of how he was interpreted. In fact, when I composed the term “Nietzschean alpha male,” I was thinking of The Nietzscheans, not any particular reference to Freddie’s writings. A charitable understanding of Freddie was that he just wanted to help folks be all they could be, kind of like a drill sergeant.
As to whether we can say that the misunderstanding of Freddie was intended by him or by his readers, I think the answer is yes, we can. Let us go back to the English Gutenberg.org text that you quoted from. In entry #42, Freddie writes,
Oh, yeah–there’s a reason why Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger all get mentioned together; it’s because they are all deliberately obscure. Nevertheless, it is valid to speak of “Nietzschean” ideas–like “Darwinian” ideas or “Christian” ideas–that may have only a tenuous connection with their namesake, but which can be attributed to their latter-day enthusiasts.
In the case of Freddie, I do not relent on my contention that he was a radical secular humanist, of a type that is unpalatable to the liberal atheist girlie-men of today, whom Freddie would have described thus:
So, what is the New Atheist meme from the point of view of Freddie? A nothing-burger. And so we, too, should regard any atheism which can’t deal honestly with real humanity.
[...] 2009 by Dave Well, I have considered the deeper meaning of the Freddie N. quote provided by the Omnipresent Pal. Here is my loose translation from the German: 27. [...]
Ha!
This… wasn’t exactly what I was getting at.
If you want to refer to how Fred has been misinterpreted, then I suppose that’s different, and I withdraw my criticism.
However, you’ve still missed what it is about Fred that makes him so… tricky.
Considering Beyond Good and Evil as a whole… Not sure if you’ve read it. If you haven’t, you really should. It’s a brilliantly constructed book.
It would be easy to give a superficial reading of Beyond Good and Evil. It’s tricky. He spends a section at the beginning of the book criticizing the THE BELIEF IN ANTITHESES OF VALUES*. However, at the end of that very same book, he spends a great deal of time constructing an antithesis of value between master morality (the Nietzschean alpha males described above)**.
At first glance, the structure of the book appears to refute itself. Fred even points this out towards the end^. What are we to make of this?
That the novel is poor and self-contradictory, perhaps? Well… Maybe. But then consider another of Nietzsche’s works that exhibits the same pattern, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.
http://faculty.uml.edu/enelson/truth&lies.htm
Fred seems to like these patterns. Is he really so… clumsy? If not, what is he getting at?
The biggest influence Nietzsche has had over me has not been to shape my opinions to a novel set of facts. No, definitely not. Fred contradicts himself far too often for me to make the frequent (and insulting) mistake of taking him at his word!
It could even be argued that to agree with Nietzsche would be an even greater insult to Nietzsche then to disagree with him, or even condemn him!
Nietzsche’s real talent lay in the beautifully complex and interrelated sculptures he would meld^^ – the art of perspective was his domain. He isn’t persuasive in the sense that he can convince people that his views are correct. As we can see, his views are rarely consistent enough for that. Instead, he’s persuasive in the sense that, in reading his works, it is almost impossible not to come to look at things in a different way. He presents new ways of seeing.
So to compare something Nietzsche said as if it somehow invalidates the approach of the ‘New Atheists’ is to entirely miss the point of Nietzsche. Nietzsche wasn’t about truth, praise, or even condemnation.
It’s always struck me as very curious, how so many theists of various stripes always jump to invoke Nietzsche against the ‘New Atheists’. To invoke Nietzsche against anything requires a certain… literal mindedness, a certain blindness to the intricacy, an inability to read between the lines.
Do atheists share these traits? Surely, they do. I don’t mean to single out theists for any special condemnation on this count – Nietzsche is forgivably tricky.
But it is still curious to me… It requires a superficial mind to invoke Nietzsche against anything. But at the same time, a superficial mind should find in Nietzsche’s works a far greater weight of condemnation against theism than atheism.
So I’m confused as to why so many theists seem to think of Nietzsche as some kind of ally in the most recent culture-clash between believers and atheists? To call him an ally of either side would, of course, be a mistake. But for the theists to claim him for one of their own…
Outside of desperation, I completely fail to understand what would motivate a theist to claim Nietzsche as an ally in the first place.
Bloody typos. My kingdom for an edit function.
… he spends a great deal of time constructing an antithesis of value between master morality (the Nietzschean alpha males described above)** and slave morality.
I can change it if you like. I am no dogmatist with regard to the authority of your “authentic” text!
Is Freddie really being used by theists against atheists? How delicious. I really thought it was original to see Vox do it, and I can’t imagine any other Christian publicly quoting Freddie approvingly.
I read “Beyond Good and Evil” over and over when I was a teenager, wearing it out like a favorite cassette tape. I believe it came after reading Bertrand Russell and John Stuart Mill, when I thought that liberal atheism was cool. Then I read “Beyond Good and Evil,” and I came to the conclusion that political liberalism was for squids. Really, there was no difference in my mind between reading this book and listening to an album by Aerosmith or Sammy Hagar. I imagined writing heavy metal music to that poem that is included at the end of the Kaufmann edition.
Was that because I agreed with Freddie on everything? Hardly. However, while reading him I became convinced that it was hypocritical to be an atheist just to have an excuse to beat up on religious hypocrites. I acquired a vision of “hard atheism,” in which I make the choices, I execute the rational plan, and I accept all the glory. I looked down on all those people whining about how bad the world is, how tough it is to submit to authority, how mean the Christian God is, crying “boo hoo hoo, oh Saint Marx please please save us from the The White Hetero Patriarchy.” [barfing sound]
So, that’s the source of my first atheist entelechy, based on my own thought process as an atheist. And, as I am partly educated from the postmodernist perspective, I have no scruples about plucking out some of Freddie’s disconnected aphorisms to suit my own purposes. To accept Freddie as an authoritative support for any particular point of view requires a certain inability to read the actual text, and that is exactly what I expect from the typical netizen. Not from you, of course, sir; you are enough of a gentleman to quote your sources directly.
I’m not quite certain, though, why you address me as though I were a Hegelian. You see, I don’t believe that antitheses represent mutually opposed essences. Any set of antitheses comprise a dynamic equilibrium, in which the movements of the parts are directed by the same forces. What they have in common is interdependency, a center of gravity, and dynamic equivalence. Because people love such balanced systems, they tend to create them and then constantly readjust them to maintain equilibrium. It is all quite synthetic and idealistic, like an ecological fairy tale about perfectly conserved species and eternally uniform weather patterns.