Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Fri Nov 12, 2021 6:21 pm
Was there a natural, biological world? I mean nature: forests, ecosystems, jungles, animals that feed on other animals and on plant-life? I mean, was it the same world as the one that now exists?
Torah says "Yes."
And it says that such a world was "very good."
I cannot take the idea of the Fall except as a metaphor.
"Cannot"?
Why not? What is it about the condition of this obviously perishable world that suggests to you it had always to be this way?
So, it would appear that *the world* that we live in will not magically change back into some other proposed sort of world
Not "magically," no. And never by human effort, either.
But if we even for a second accept the possiblity that God could exist, then we are faced with this question: "Why couldn't the Creator of all things recreate the terms of engagement on this planet?"
Prima facie, I see no reason why we would suppose any such thing would be anything other than expected.
The world that we now live in, here on this planet and in the Cosmos that we see and know, can only continue on for millions and millions of years.
We know it will not. We can observe its rate of both natural and man-made decline. We know this world will end, and on a cosmic scale, not it a very long time. And we know that the inevitable ending for a cosmos that exists only on the current terms is a thing called "heat death," which means the state of totally equal distribution of particles in the universe....and that there, in that state, it shall rest eternally, with no possibility of any dynamic ever happening again. We can see it happening now, through the laws of entropy, which are surely our most firmly scientifically-established and observable laws.
So unless we believe some "other kind of force" can interrupt this trajectory, it's inevitable, inescapable, and terminal.
This is why both Nietzsche and the secular Existentialists (not Kierkegaard, of course) had this terrible note of tragedy in everything they wrote. Their assumption was that it was all ultimately futile and doomed, and any putative "nobility" could only be squeezed out briefly, "between womb and tomb," though shaking one's fist at the order of the universe.
However, all their talk of "tragedy" and "nobility" and "heroism" is really puffery and nonsense; nothing makes such a gesture actually "noble." It's just "futile"; and that's quite a different concept, of course.
So in that sense if the world is *sinful* because of the conditions and the circumstances, it will remain sinful.
By itself? It's on its way to the End.
It is as it is now, and it will be like that, essentially, forever.
It will be this disastrous cosmos only until heat death. Then, it will be nothing forever.
Nietzsche, in my opinion, confronted the stark reality of what life in this plane of manifestation actually entails.
I agree.
If we accept Nietzsche's first and most famous postulate, "God is dead," then much (but not all, of course) of what he said does, indeed follow. He was a rather courageous wicked man. Unlike today's delicate Atheists, he faced up to many of the serious consequences of their worldview, to a degree that apparently, many of them lack the wit, courage or honesty to do.
But where Nietzsche went wrong was at the start. After that, he was pretty much consistent. So people who accept his first postulate on faith often have little ability to see anything wrong with his subsequent reasoning. It puzzles them that Theists do not "see the common sense" of Nietzsche, so to speak. But their folly is that they never want to interrogate his first bad assumption.
I do not think it is that that drove him crazy (they say it was syphilis), but it likely added tremendous psychic pressure.
It is really appropriate that he chose "the madman" for his spokesman. Ultimately, his creed is one that is fit for madmen, and one that drives the thinking sane mad.
How we live in this world, how we live in relation to a world such as ours, is then the question that must be confronted, and each will do this on a personal level.
Quite so.
It starts at the personal level. However, we cannot change the fact that we are part of larger systems -- nations, states -- that can only exist in the real world. And to exist in that real world necessitates playing by the real rules that operate. And we all know that these are, essentially, brutal. States combat states. Economies vie against other economies. We all want *prosperity* but we often do not realize that to have such prosperity we must give our assent to the machinations of entities (corporations, states, nations) that must compete in the brutal world (of reality).
Now you're onto why the Left -- the Socialists, Communists, Nazis and other such collectivists -- inevitably become so unscrupulous and brutal. Once we start believing that "if it's to be, it's up to me," then we quickly realize that "me" is too small to do anything. So we start to look to the collectives and masses, in the hope that they will supply the power the "me" lacks.
Nietzsche said everything was about "the will to power." That was, he said, the "life force," the thing that is at the root of all living beings. But if that's the case, then we are truly "beyond good and evil," as Nietzsche said, and seizing power is the only "good" we know. We all have to become brave, bad men (and for Nietzsche, only "men" could ever be strong and bad enough...women got "the whip," he said). We had to become ubermensch, and as his later disciple put it, be "imperious, relentless and cruel."
It is distressing and really rather horrifying.
Yes, it surely would be.
He was doubling down on a disastrous dead-end, in that regard, positing a world of no morals to get away from having to account for evil.
This is not right. No morals? No, that can't be right.
It is. Have you read his famous book,
Beyond Good and Evil? That's exactly what he thinks he's proposing. (I have it right here, on my shelf, if you want proof of what he said therein.)
Because I *see* the exact world that Nietzsche revealed, I believe in its full dimensions, and yet I can make conscious moral choices,
That's because Nietzsche was wrong. This is not the way the world
has to be; it's just the way the world is
at present.
The more that we mediate on *reality*, and I suggest the more that we subtract from our perceptual impositions our imposed idealism, the more we face, realistically, the real facts of our own case.
Well, by "meditating on reality," we can figure out more and more about how things are; but no amount of meditation on present circumstances will tell us how things
were, or how things
can be.
What's underwriting your rather despairing summary, at the moment, is an assumption called "uniformitarianism." That's "the belief that things must always have been and continue in the exact state in which they are currently -- uniformly."
However, that's not a rational claim. It's merely presumptive. "Uniformitarianism" is a faith claim: it runs, "I don't see things any other way now, so there can't be any other way." That's obviously not rationally grounded: nothing proves to us that that is the case.
Stop pretending you know someone elses mind by presupposing what they are thinking, assuming and believing....as that action will only be your own assumption, belief and supposition. 
