Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Resolving Nietzsche's mistaken radicalism


Nietzsche said that the big challenge of Christianity was to declare all property, acquisition, police, state, Church, art, the military, etc. as only sinful obstacles in the way of happiness and enlightenment, while at the same time trying to build up a Christian organization in the world. This led to the elaborate theology and religious philosophy developed to salvage actual life within an essentially anti-life religion. We see how the Papacy and later Reformers never were able to conduct politics in a Christian way and were Machiavellian, gradually adopting everything they originally rejected. Nietzsche then proceeded to utterly condemn Christianity calling for its destruction.

What Nietzsche did not see was that the anti-life religious philosophy in Christianity, and in Eastern religions, refers only to the Involutionary Inward Path to the Father Within or the God Within, where it belongs, which is reached only by ridding the body of all desires, and it does not apply to the Evolutionary Outward Path of material and supermaterial evolution to real Godhood. This led Nietzsche to a radicalism which does not fit well with conservative human nature, which is basically kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, religious-making, and with group-selection as the primary unit of selection. Duality between life and anti-life therefore is not necessary. The Father Within is the symbolic-experience of the real Godhood reached in outward evolution. The Twofold Path resolves Nietzsche's mistaken radicalism, and more conservatively retains some of his hope for the future.

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