Lia’s Reviews > After the Death of God > Status Update

I suppose Vattimo / Caputo would be against any kind of revolt, even the Gandhi kind, because they come from the standpoint of someone with strong ... “thinking”? It involves a will to overwrite injustice with your sense of a just world order, at which point the (originally) weak will no longer be a helpless cry in the desert.

when the Church insists on doctrinal conformity and engages in various inquisitions—this reveals a certain confessional weakness because it promotes in a conceptual way the idea of the Church as an army. An army regiments your sexual life, enforcing rigid conformity and discipline...the insistence of the Church on these points is a way of training an army that is supposed to be ready for a new war, a new world.

violence is the fact of shutting down, silencing, breaking off the dialogue of questions and answers. This is what ultimate foundations do; they impose themselves as impervious to further questions as objects of contemplation

Nietzsche realized the occurrence of the death of God that corresponds to the idea of the dissolution of metaphysics. We don’t believe in the Greek metaphysical God as the rational structure of the world. This God obviously has nothing to do with the Christian God.

the Church has the possibility to completely renew a community founded on the event of Christianity that puts an end to metaphysics. But they did not do that because they still were very strongly engaged in secular culture. So only after a lot of revolutions did Christianity realize that the core idea of Christianity was the negation of a necessarily objective rational (i.e., eternal) structure of the world.

Augustine:

as a philosopher he calls the people to come back to themselves by inhabiting the mind within.

as a bishop he had to organize a community, to take cover and protect the structures of the ancient world.

the death of God about which Nietzsche speaks is the death of Christ on the cross. Why? Because it is exactly after Christianity, or the event of Christianity, that it becomes possible to no longer believe in the classical, rational gods of the Greeks.

... Giambattista Vico, who describes the condition of primitive man as somebody who sought in everything and every natural event the work of a god. In many senses this is the same in Nietzsche. The origins of God, therefore, lie in the natural processes through which we pray to God in order to protect ourselves from natural forces. As such, this primitive state of consciousness must be deconstructed.

In terms of Nietzsche , the anthropological meaning to the death of God is most clear. It is the idea that mankind has killed God because they recognize he is no longer a necessity. God was born into human consciousness to provide some security against the dangers of natural life.

Section II