What is it about the condition of this obviously perishable world that suggests to you it had always to be this way?
My first thought is that I find it strange that you are asking me to engage in this area and also that you genuinely propose that what you are talking about can be taken seriously. But since you seem to want me to attempt an answer, I’ll start with the “what suggests that it has always been this way”. I think the answer is one that is hard to avoid: When people now look out on our cosmos they see cosmic events that have gone on for billions of years. They see galaxies just like our own filled with suns and planets. They can only assume that the same material conditions apply on any other world or planet as they do here. This is confirmed by visits to Mars where, obviously, all the instruments operate in accord with the same laws. Everything predicted about Mars, is as they visualized, because they could rely on the same underlying, operative laws.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.
So one must assume that all manifest worlds (of those “billions and billions” of potential worlds likely to exist) must operate under the same general laws. And if there is life on those planets it stands to reason that life will function there as it does here: and I refer to the predatory nature of life: that creatures must prey on other creatures. And that biological life will be susceptible to death just as it is here. So (one reasons) if there is an intelligent being in some far-flung region of the Cosmos, it will similarly meditate as we meditate on life & death and will confront, as we do, similar *existential problems*.
But you are assuming — this involves taking literally a mythic picture — that just a few shorts years ago our world (Earth) operated under totally different rules and laws. I assume that creatures did not eat other creatures? That nothing decomposed in death? So the lion actually lay with the lamb? Microbes and enzymes did not eat away at the fallen leaves in the forest?
It is a picture of an eternal, non-perishable world. What such a picture corresponds to, interestingly enough, are some of the more developed picture-concepts of, say, the world of Vaikuntha where the Supreme Lord has his ‘eternal abode’:
These Hindu religionists (this is the main area where I have carried out some ‘comparative religious study’ which is why I refer to it) conceived of an extensive array of different ‘planets’ or what they called ‘lokas’. A loka being a distinct plane of existence, a realm in which specific governing laws determine the sort of life that takes place there. All worlds, all lokas, all ‘planets’ other than that of Vaikuntha are perishable, transient worlds (worlds of mutability and change, as out world is), but the realm of God’s internal being and energy (in this case Vishnu) is outside of this perishable mutability. Yet they do conceive of ‘heavenly worlds’ where beings may live for long periods of time in relative comfort and freedom from strife and anxiety. Yet eventually even heaven-realms come to an end, and a soul (jiva) will have to return to a mutable world (until they eventually grow tired on the round of birth and death and realize that getting beyond this is in their better interest).Vaikuntha, also called Vishnuloka, is the abode of Vishnu, the supreme god in Vaishnavite Hinduism and his consort goddess Lakshmi the supreme goddess. Vaikuntha is an abode presided over on high exclusively by him, accompanied always by his feminine partner, consort and goddess Lakshmi.
Similarly, they conceive of hell-realms (which are more or less punishment realms) where life is filled with strife, pain, extreme mutability, violence and psychological terror.
What I suggest is seeing the picture and the diagram offered by the old Christian view as being essentially similar in kind to that of the Vedic (though in fact the Vedas are a later compilation and the metaphysical conceptions of the indigenous of India preceded these notions). And in fact this is more or less what the picture I described as The Great Chain of Being offers. It is not only medieval (ie a concept of Medieval Europe) but an ancient mode of seeing and perceiving this manifest world. Hell-realms, Middle-realms, and Heaven-realms.
Here you seem to revert back to the scientific, materialistic and modern view. I am not sure if one metaphysical system can be enjoined to another, or put another way I am unsure whether the two can exist together and be reconciled one to the other.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.
Here again you revert to the scientific, materialistic view.It will be this disastrous cosmos only until heat death. Then, it will be nothing forever.
Yes, Dionysus is, essentially, the sap of life itself. Literally the *vital energy*. The energy that moves in all creatures. I gather that this is why it was conceived as being something that would always manifest, in one way or another, even if it were suppressed. For this reason (I guess) the invasion of the god Dionysus took place (and is said to have infected women who then danced in madness in mountain meadows and ate raw flesh).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."
So, I think that is only fair to say that Nietzsche was onto something. What he says, let’s put it this way, was not unreal, not a phantasy imposed on the world, but an attempt to see things in more realistic terms. And my impression is that that what he felt he had to confront, and get out from under, or to break the spell of, is a false vision imposed on the world. And obviously, as we all know, he took aim at aspects of the Christian vision. He said that it contained ‘lies’ and ‘misconceptions’. Well, there is no doubt that this is so. And for this reason I would say that a Christian must confront *reality* and actually see it for what it is, and then make decisions about what it means to ‘live as a Christian’ in this real world, the one conceived today.
I have no doubt that a *bad reading* of Nietzsche can utterly destroy a faith-platform (if it is fragile and superficial). But it is not Nietzsche’s views that brought this about! Nietzsche merely saw clearly what was happening and what had already happened, and this was (in my view) the implacability of one metaphysical system displacing a former one.
Now the Death of God thing has to be touched on. I have never encountered anyone who seems to get the irony in it. Nietzsche said ‘God is dead and we killed him’. It is a joke really, an irony. Yes, we killed Jesus of course, but now, in the modern time-frame, we have committed another deicide, but one of greater consequence: we have rendered belief in a supernatural god as pictured in these old, Medieval ways, as impossible. So we killed ‘God’ again. The consequences of this deicide produce nihilism. And nihilism is an agonizing loss of certainty and understanding on which all value and meaning hinge. The issue of *meaning* is crucial. How is it possible that something has meaning? What is meaning? Well, when the former metaphysics was undermined, a great many things were also undermined, and ‘meaning’ — established meaning and also value — was undermined. (And as everyone knows this is where the notion of ‘absurdity’ enters).
But logically, if God existed at any point, there is really no way to murder God. What dies? Conceptions about what God is, or isn’t, and therefore ‘the conceptual order’ that was constructed to explain the world. If there is a death of God (if one follows the logic of the story-line), then just as Jesus Christ rose from the dead, similarly God has no other option but to resurrect. So in this way though we indeed ‘killed God’ through our modern pursuit of truth (investigating the true operations of the world) the real God cannot, by definition, be killed by any human being.
