Sunday, November 02, 2003
"The believer is happy. The doubter is wise."
"... hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good - a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! - As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty; and many of them have not yet been discovered." -Nietzsche
"Of all the strange "crimes" that human beings have legislated out of nothing, "blasphemy" is the most amazing -- with "obscenity" and "indecent exposure" fighting it out for second and third place."
"To admit a belief merely because it is a custom - but that means to be dishonest, cowardly, lazy! - And so could dishonesty, cowardice and laziness be the preconditions for morality?" -Nietzsche
"God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. It says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills. "
"The everyday Christian. -- If the Christian dogmas of a revengeful God, universal sinfulness, election by divine grace and the danger of eternal damnation were true, it would be a sign of weak-mindedness and lack of character not to become a priest, apostle or hermit and, in fear and trembling, to work solely on one's own salvation; it would be senseless to lose sight of ones eternal advantage for the sake of temporal comfort. If we may assume that these things are at any rate believed true, then the everyday Christian cuts a miserable figure; he is a man who really cannot count to three, and who precisely on account of his spiritual imbecility does not deserve to be punished so harshly as Christianity promises to punish him. " -Nietzsche
Why is it that everyone who came before Jesus went to hell, and didn't just cease to exist instead? I mean, he opened the gate to heaven and conquered death and such, but I thought death was ceasing to exist, not going to eternal torture. And if a "Christian" can be a horrible person and end up in hell, then why can't the opposite be true? Why can't a non-Christian be an amazing person, always kind to his neighbor, and go to heaven? Oh, God will enter their hearts and encourage their conversion of faith? No one's going to have an epiphany telling them to abandon all they've known in their entire life any sooner than I'm going to deny Christ and take up Judaism. If Adam and Eve were willing to risk their eternal souls for a mere taste of the vast expanse of knowledge in the world, if they thought it was worth it, do you think they were on to something?
Yes, I know I have a problem- my faith doesn't make me happy, nor does God. People do, and so does music. In fact, God seems to have been the cause of several less-than-pleasant goings-on in my life. It was God I leaned to during my mother's accident and recovery, and as a result, bottled everything up inside and never talked to a single person about it. I thought God was the only one who could solve all my problems. From that I became such an extreme introvert that I hardly made any friends in the following year or two. It is only by meeting one, maybe two extraordinary people by chance since then that I've been able to come out of my shell, enjoy the presence of others, and learn to live again. And God didn't help me at all in the depression I'd been in since the start of this year (maybe even longer than that). I don't know what started it, but I know my faith never helped me through it or out of it. I did. It was my firm decision to stop being the way I was that helped me progress from being the miserable and mean little wretch you all knew last semester to an actually happy person in the last few months. Me.
"The compassionate Christian. -- The reverse side of Christian compassion for the suffering of one's neighbor is a profound suspicion of all the joy of one's neighbor, of his joy in all that he wants to do and can. " -Nietzsche
So what has God done for me lately? I mean, I've built homes for the needy, given donations all over the place, prayed for forgiveness for wrongs I never did, but what have I seen come of it? Oh yeah, Jesus died to save me, suffered for all the sins of the world, and gave me eternal life. Well, why shouldn't I be held accountable for my own actions? And I've already discussed my feelings on eternal life. I'm happy with the temporal life I've been given and can't be sure I'll ever see anything after it. (It reminds me of this website Bonsai Kittens that everyone's got their panties in a bunch for. It's a hoax, all you clever people. There's no finished photo, {"No eye has seen nor ear heard what the Lord has in store for those he loves.} and if that doesn't convince you, look at the guestbook signatures, read the answers, and look me in the eye and honestly tell me you believe that shit's real. But this is all beside the point.) And if Jesus suffered for us all to be saved, if He died as punishment for all our sins, then why do we still go to hell?
Now, I really hope my Mormon friends won't hold this next part against me because I'm just trying to prove a point. Ok, we all think Joseph Smith the prophet is a crackpot, heretic, and liar. Why? Because no proof of his golden tablets exists. The faith he started that now sweeps the nation with millions of members and more everyday is huge and survived because he supposedly had a very captivating personality and people were apt to believe him and his message. Now do you really think he's been the only successful messiah in the thousands of years humans have been around with a congenial personality whom everyone wanted to believe? And he managed to make people believe in his divinity or whatever only in the 1800s. Do you know how easy it would have been to make thousands of people believe every word you said two thousand years ago before science and logic even existed? I'm not saying that's what happened, but I am saying that it is very possible, and could easily have happened. Man, I'd love to make up some religious offshoot and gather hundreds of followers, then roll over in my grave in laughter when millions still believed my bullshit hundreds of years later.
"Christianity as antiquity. -- When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a Jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed - whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions - is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross -- how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed?" from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.405, R.J. Hollingdale transl.
What else? Oh yeah, why do I need someone else (priest) to get to Jesus, to get God's forgiveness, to understand his message, and to hear his Word? Someone tried telling me that that's not how it is at all. Well, you can't have the Eucharist (which Catholics believe IS Jesus, not a representation) without a priest. You have to go to Mass (church) to get it and listen to His Word. You have to sit through the priest's homily (explanation and interpretation of the text) and agree with it to understand and derive meaning from the Word, etc., etc. Am I (merely a lay person) really that incapable of reading the Bible on my own and understanding it? Ouch, and here I was thinking a 720 on the SAT verbal section proved my understanding of language. Maybe not. Maybe those priests learned more in seminary school than we'll ever learn at a university or Ivy League school. Riiight... This is a snippit of wisdom from Alex's Xanga: "Never believe something just because someone tells you to. Believe it if it feels right. Organized religion just doesn't seem right. Example: everyone getting up on Sunday morning at the same time and going to a building to listen to one person's interpretation of text because he is "holier than thou". Instead of doing that, why don't people get out the bible and interpret it themselves?" Yep.
Ok, I'm done ranting for the moment, but I might add more later, so check back. Until then, turn these over in your mind a bit:
"*The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universe, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.
*The second most preposterous notion is that copulation is inherently sinful. "
"Is it really his "carnal nature" that makes him transgress again and again? And not rather, as he himself suspected later, behind it the law itself, which must constantly prove itself unfulfillable and which lures him to transgression with irresistible charm?" -Nietzsche
"History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it."
"Where the good begins.-- Where the poor power of the eye can no longer see the evil impulse as such because it has become too subtle, man posits the realm of goodness; and the feeling that we have now entered the realm of goodness excites all those impulses which had been threatened and limited by the evil impulses, like the feeling of security, of comfort, of benevolence. Hence, the duller the eye, the more extensive the good. Hence the eternal cheerfulness of the common people and of children. Hence the gloominess and grief - akin to a bad conscience - of the great thinkers." -Nietzsche
And as such, I am very sorrowful, for denying all I've known all my life on one hand or denying myself on the other. For being miserable for the sake of those who look up to me for my faith, or being miserable for the sake of my both delicate and powerful state of mind.