wFCWtqPEDAY.txt

Speaker 1:          00:00          And I want to read you something that nature wrote. It's perhaps the most famous thing he ever said, although it's almost entirely taken out of context and misquoted, and if not, ms dot quartered, at least misunderstood because nature was one of these strange people who was capable of living 50 or even 100 years into the future, and although he was, is generally regarded as an enemy of Christianity and superstition and was certainly an unbelievably outspoken opponent of Christian traditionalism, he also knew that if you let the old gods die, the probability that blood would flood the land was virtually 100 percent. So let me read you what he wrote. Have you not heard of that? Mad Man who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place and cried incessantly. I seek God as many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then he provoked.

Speaker 1:          00:54          Must much laughter. Why did he get lost? Said one. Did he lose his way like a child said another or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage or immigrated? That's the yelled and laughed. The Madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances. Where there is God, he cried. I shall tell you, we have killed him. You and I, all of us are as murderers, but how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun weather? Is it moving now with or are we moving now way from all sons? Are we not plunging continuously backwards, sideward, forward in all directions? Is there any opera down left? Are we not straying as though through an infinite nothing?

Speaker 1:          01:53          Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder, is not night and more night coming on all the while. Must not lanterns be lit in the morning. Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the grave diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? God's to decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. We have killed him. How shall we, the murderer of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned, has bled to death under our knives? Who will wipe this blood office? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of Atonement, what sacred game show we have to invent is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become God simply to seem worthy of it?

Speaker 1:          02:56          Well, as you can tell, that's a much different notion from the casual God is dead quotation that's most generally associated with nature. Well, what is he saying? What he's saying? Something like this system like Christianity or any system that's Qa, that's oriented the society for thousands and thousands of years, can't simply be eradicated by a casual gesture, without consequences in suing and its aftermath. What consequences will need you to says, well, we'll no longer know up from down. What does he mean by that? Metaphorically? Well Up. That's where you're headed, right and down. That's what you want to stay away from, and when you eradicate the most fundamental presuppositions of your system, of values, then there is no up and there is no down and then where are you? Precisely. Well, it's not so easy. It's not so easy to say having not necessarily ever been in that position.

Speaker 1:          04:00          What is your life like when you don't know up from down? Is it merely neutral is merely no value left or could it possibly be the case that if up and down and both being eradicated, that the place that you're left in is something much more akin to a permanent state of suffering because maybe it's only the case that the constant capacity to thrive for up in being enough that you believe in. The constant striving for up is actually what makes your life bearable to you, and if you lost the sense of up and down, the place that you would end up would be not so much neutral as terrible. Now, if you have any belief system at all, you do this, so let's say you're an advocate of leftwing politics. You take a pro environmental stance or an anti corporate stance, which is a relatively common thing to do among undergraduates.

Speaker 1:          04:48          What do you do when you hold that belief system? You view the world as it lays itself out and you explained the manner in which it manifests itself in terms of the axioms of that belief system and you may know that you can do it right. You can tell a credible story about why the world is the way it is by adopting, say an anti corporate perspective because there are all sorts of terrible things about the world that are a consequence say of corporate maneuvering, and you might also say that and Piaget would say this, that it's a necessary developmental stage to acquire allegiance to a given belief system. Why? Well, any APP is better than none. That might be the first observation, so even if your belief system is relatively insufficient and easily challenged on intellectual grounds and perhaps not very complete anyways, the fact that it does lay out a moral structure for you and tell you, good for me, evil and right from wrong.

Speaker 1:          05:45          That's a. that's a plus. That's an advantage. Now it's relative intellectual weakness and it's incoherence. Assuming it is incoherent to some degree, that's a flaw, but that mean that the effort to establish a system like that is worthless. It's worthwhile and need just said, say with regards to Christianity and Europe, he said, well, the errors, intellectual and moral of Institutional Christianity are essentially beyond count, but there's one thing you have to remember. First of all, in ordering of that sort is necessary because the alternative, which is always hidden from you in so far as you're inside a moral system, the alternative as far worse chaos that's worse.