"Nietzsche is dead."
See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.
—Colossians 2:8
Year end and year out, beatniks and assorted miscreants boast of the philosophical insight offered by that crass atheistic Friedrich Nietzsche, the author of sordid works as The Anti-Christ. Nietzsche once opined:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?Nietzche proposed that man create his own morality: and that he embrace the tabula rasa (blank slate). Nietzsche believed there could be positive possibilities for humans without God. Relinquishing the belief in God opens the way for human creative abilities to fully develop he posited; it also opens the way for human depravity to become unbridled in the absence of moral constraints such as the consciousness of eternal and just God and a final judgment. The Christian God, he wrote, would no longer stand in the way, so human beings might stop turning their eyes toward a supernatural realm and begin to acknowledge the value of this world. The recognition that "God is dead" would be like a blank canvas.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
It should probably not be a surprised that the later-day fascists—particularly one Adolf Hitler praised the philosophy of the insane syphilis-carrier Nietzsche. In his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:
There was some ground for this appropriation of Nietzsche as one of the originators of the Nazi Weltanschauung. Had not the philosopher thundered against democracy and parliaments, preached the will to power, praised war and proclaimed the coming of the master race and the superman--and in the most telling aphorisms? (100).
Ideas have consequences as Richard Weaver posited. With Nietzsche's amorality, Hitler and the National Socialist rationalized some of the most barbaric acts of inhumanity in history, rivaled only by the communists.
The simple fact of the matter is that Nietzsche is dead; and God is alive!
1 Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? 2 The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, 3 Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us. 4 He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the LORD shall have them in derision. 5 Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure. (Psalm 2:1-5)
