Do you ever get the sense that much of the conversation here, perhaps even *conversation*? is a rehearsal of deranged exchange between lunatics who fight over what is, at the base, a fundamental
lack of a sense of what life, the world and 'reality' actually are, and what they are not?
What am I trying to say? That perspectival positions, the *lenses* installed and operative in specific persons, attempt to convince others of what they are absolutely certain they *know* as absolute truth, but yet, in the end, stumble time and again to make coherent, convincing statements, except of course to those who make up the chorus of the already convinced.
Gary writes: I don't think there's anything evident to back rights. Rights are transgressed all the time. Nothing seems to stop it in reality, other than the human will to have them. Courts that still uphold the values of the Enlightenment and now try to ascribe secular bases for them, still rule on things like that. No one knows if anything happens to those who get away with violating the rights of others. As far as anyone can tell, it's a crap shoot. Most of us like the idea of being protected from harm or abuse of others, it has its obvious merits if everyone cooperates, but it doesn't stop abuse from happening.
Immanuel writes: A tidy summary of the world without God, for sure. Good luck with human rights going forward...we're all going to need it.
Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy wrote: Let us look ahead a century: let us suppose that my attempt to assassinate two millennia of antinature and desecration of man were to succeed. That new party of life which would tackle the greatest of all tasks, the attempt to raise humanity higher, including the relentless destruction of everything that was degenerating and parasitical, would again make possible that excess of life on earth from which the Dionysian state, too, would have to awaken again. I promise a tragic age: the highest art in saying Yes to life, tragedy, will be reborn when humanity has weathered the consciousness of the hardest but most necessary wars without suffering from it.
Interesting to focus on the meaning of *the hardest but most necessary wars* and the suggestion that it is possible not to *suffer* the casualty that is inevitable when one's entire perspective is upended, and when one is forced (i.e. has no other choice available) but to reground oneself on a very different metaphysical platform.
The mistake, at least from my own perspective, is to assume -- also with an absolutely declarative tone of certainty -- that the *assassination* that Nietzsche refers to, and the proposal of the death of a god-conception, must necessarily result in an atheist's typical position. The classical atheist often seems to be just as locked into his position as is the classical theist. Is there an alternative?
Here is the problem though: try to imagine the cost of the struggle Immanuel (for example) would have to go through on a personal level if he were to arrive at a point where all that is *phantasy* in the Christian metaphysical dream were to be
realized as such, on that honest inner plane, as being essentially false. Imagine that the structure, the pillars that upheld *belief*, were to fall -- what then? What would happen to the person and to the personality constructed (as I might say) upon a false base? Would it be anything less than an immense personal crisis? How would he get through it? But my real point is how would the Self be re-platformed? and what *metaphysics* would replace the former hallucination?
At least from my perspective (an informal student of the contemporary political and cultural scene and all its upheaval) I am quite aware that there are multitides of people who are deeply caught in the post-Christian struggle -- as if to say it is like a whirlpool that captures people and from which they cannot escape. I do not minimize in any sense this struggle and the *condition* in which people (we) find ourselves.
Upon what can we (now) ground ourselves? It is a rhetorical question because I do not believe there is an easy answer. It is as if, after thousands of years of bold assertion, our own bold assertions have jettisoned us, spat us out, and there we are, all over again, trying to suss out the very World itself: what it is, why it is, what it means, what life means, and what we are to do with ourselves.
That's pretty amusing, if you really know anything about the man. He's pretty far from all of that, you'll find. He appears to me to be very capable, courageous, intelligent and formitable. If I were you, I'd be reluctant to take him on in any open forum...or in the fight ring, for that matter. He's a person with a strong sense of intellectual direction, you'll find.