Dubious wrote: It's all so very weird! Can it ever be truly and actually known whether there is or ever was a ruling entity called god responsible for everything on earth to the very fringes of the universe itself!
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Jul 30, 2023 6:07 pm
Why not?
It doesn't seem particularly hard to think that if such a thing were so, we would have some reasons to believe it, and plausibley that some people would even have experience with it. It might not be estimable from a skeptical distance, but it might be knowable experientially. We can't estimate if Boston or Chicago exists for sure, if we've never been there ourselves, or know if Taylor Swift is a real person or an AI construct, unless we've met her personally; but if we had been to those cities or met Taylor Swift, we'd be in an entirely different epistemological situation.
Why should this matter be any different from that?
Since existence itself, when meditated on, results in perceptions such as *mind-boggling* or the confronting of an impossible conceptual wall -- "how can any of this exist? and why?" -- it is somewhat impossible that man will not conceive of, and indeed must conceive of, something that originated all things. But as we have so often covered, and in the Christianity thread, it is not longer conceivable to men who have been trained up in our modernity to think of this Divinity
through the picture provided by Christianity. But there is more dimension to the rejection of this Picture, this Model, and that is that it is not simply Christian but
Hebrew. In order to understand this rejection, this resistance, it brings one directly into the problem and the issue of anti-Jewishness.
And at that point, as all know, the issue becomes dangerously non-conversable. Because if one has a position that is, say, anti-Hebrew in the sense of opposing or rejecting the Hebrew Model -- which in fact claims the entire world, indeed the entire Universe, indeed Creation itself -- then you have set forth on a dangerous road, son! Must it be antsemitic? I do not think so and yet so much of the rejection of Hebrew-Christian concepts (and the idea of a Hebrew-Jewish God who is the author of all things) does involve defining bold positions, and the fact is (again as everyone is aware) antisemtisim is *on the rise* and it is on the rise because and through the idea-activism of the Dissident Right.
After all, if the Hebrew-Christian construct is false (a fantasy, a control system, a captivating metaphysical lie) then who are the Jews? What does it mean to be a Jew in a post-Judeo-Christian world? What
function remains to Jewish identity? (I ask these questions as one who grew up in a family with one Jewish parent but thoroughly assimilated except remaining mildly *culturally Jewish*).
It is in at least one sense the *imperiousness* of the Hebrew moral concept that was resisted (by Europe, by people like Nietzsche, by many different thinkers in fact, then and now). If the conversation (here, elsewhere, and in general) has to do with the German National Socialists then there is no doubt that they wished to *rewrite Christianity*. See for example Susannah Heschel (daughter of Abraham Heschel)
The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.
Princeton University Press:
Was Jesus a Nazi? During the Third Reich, German Protestant theologians, motivated by racism and tapping into traditional Christian anti-Semitism, redefined Jesus as an Aryan and Christianity as a religion at war with Judaism. In 1939, these theologians established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. In The Aryan Jesus, Susannah Heschel shows that during the Third Reich, the Institute became the most important propaganda organ of German Protestantism, exerting a widespread influence and producing a nazified Christianity that placed anti-Semitism at its theological center.
Based on years of archival research, The Aryan Jesus examines the membership and activities of this controversial theological organization. With headquarters in Eisenach, the Institute sponsored propaganda conferences throughout the Nazi Reich and published books defaming Judaism, including a dejudaized version of the New Testament and a catechism proclaiming Jesus as the savior of the Aryans. Institute members — professors of theology, bishops, and pastors — viewed their efforts as a vital support for Hitler’s war against the Jews. Heschel looks in particular at Walter Grundmann, the Institute’s director and a professor of the New Testament at the University of Jena. Grundmann and his colleagues formed a community of like-minded Nazi Christians who remained active and continued to support each other in Germany’s postwar years.
I read Heschel's book and I read other books that work a similar angle. And in addition I also read one of the more notorious titles of the 20th century and one widely read in Europe and certainly in Germany (and America I should add) Houston Chamberlain's
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.
In
Foundations Chamberlain tries, with somersaults and all sorts of acrobatics, to find and describe a non-Jewish Jesus. He tries to find that in a Jesus born in Galilee which had lots of non-Jews. He attempts to align the extreme opposition mounted by Jesus against the Hebrew state religious authorities as a sign of his Aryan
being. And by Aryan the meaning is multi-layered. Both to the real Aryan peoples who made up the European stock (and also the Hellenic stock), but there is also in a sense an
Aryan fantasy element or an identity-construct which, as anyone reading Nietzsche would know, becomes necessary when the Christian concept of God has passed away -- as indeed it has in Europe largely (and for everyone who writes on this forum except, it seems, Immanuel Can).
If anything is taken from a Nietzsche reading it is the sense of a furious, intense striving for a sense of personal power, personal identification, recovery of *oneself* and for getting out from under -- how can I put it? -- the Hebrew construct, this overlording Construct. The rebirth of an Aryan identity is, in a sense at least, a continuation of the Protestant Reformation. Once the Protestants threw off the Roman yoke it was inevitable that this began a train of separation from the entire construct. Eventually the entire thing is rejected -- and then you face 'the ghost of what once was', a wall of nothingness, or ---
what?
Therefore, without that construct *the horizon is erased* as Nietzsche put it, and there is no structure anymore in which and through which to live. One either seeks new identifications, new foundations, or one at another pole simply surrenders identity-claims. What happens when a person or a people no longer have an identity? It is a pressing question.
But now let's talk about why.
Why was this necessary to reject and throw off the Hebrew/Christian yoke? I think the answer is rather simple. One can examine Nietzsche's *train of thought* -- and what I really mean is his explosive volcanic eruption of extreme resistance to the *yoke* of Jewish morality which, obviously, had so directly impinged on German culture and directly on Nietzsche as a son of that extremely committed and deeply pious cultural Germanic Christianity.
