I don’t think Nietzsche has any disciples, since anyone who believes themselves to be a disciple of any man is certainly not someone who has listened to anything Nietzsche had to say.
That isn’t a paradox. That’s a Catch-22, and in Nietzsche’s favor, I might add.
Sorry, but you can’t allow Nietzche to blame the Inquisition on the teachings of Christ without turning around and hanging the Shoah on Nietzche. I don’t mean that it isn’t fair. I mean that it doesn’t logically follow.
For if the greatest thing is for Christ’s disciples to have done what made them feel powerful and what their own sense of right and wrong guided them to, instead of following the truth Christ taught, then they were, in reality, more in Nietzche’s camp than in Christ’s!
Now, perhaps you will say they were corrupted as youths, for not esteeming those who thought differently than they did. But would you not be condemning them for thinking differently than you do? Do you see where the Catch-22 in his thinking is, then?
The problem with Nietzche is that he fails to see that acceptance of others requires one to embrace and accept one’s own powerlessness. You have to give up power over others and must relinquish the perogative to judge others, if you’re going to accept them as they are. Otherwise, you are in a logically untenable position. IMHO, he* totally* did not grasp that. On those grounds alone, his philosophy is inferior to that in the Gospels.
that’s obviously a misunderstanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy. His statement here is a follow on of Darwin’s survival of the fittest. If life is a struggle for existence in which the fittest survive, then strength is the ultimate virtue, and weakness the only fault.
However, Nietzsche did agree with the need for punishing criminals (and obviously did not praise murder or rape); though he viewed crime in an interesting way (as rebellion rather than mere deviant behavior).
But rebellion from what? From natural law? For natural law can only be correctly understood if one does not have a warped understanding about what strength and weakness are from the vantage point of survival of the
species, not the individual. This is understandable, as Darwinism was in its infancy, and barely recognized the Darwinian advantage that comes from altruism.
Besides, who cares what Nietzche thought about punishing criminals? What do
you think? Do you see how in trying to follow his philosophy, you’re forced into talking out of both sides of your mouth?
The thing is reports of miracles are almost always in the distant past. When they are made today and exposed to rigorous scrutiny they are always debunked… If anything that shows the absence of divine intervention rather than the occurrence of any miracles, because by any estimation 67 out of hundreds of thousands or millions is a normal statistical occurrence.
With regard to Fatima, ever wonder why the children who allegedly saw Mary saw a tall white woman rather than anything resembling what Mary would have actually looked like? Hint, all the statutes of Mary tend to depict a western European woman rather than a Semitic woman from then Palestine. Moreover, the girls didn’t report their predictions before the event happened, but rather wrote about them after the fact. There are also reports of a similar atmospheric event in China in 1983 (no one attributed that to any god or goddess). Additionally, not a single astronomer witnessed any abnormal solar activity that day … so if anything did happen it was a local atmospheric event (not a solar event).
I think it’s all fabrication & can be easily debunked?
a) Catholic dogma does not require acceptance of private revelations, such as Fatima. So fine, think it a fabrication. You would not be outside the faith.
b) It is not true that recent miracles are always debunked.
Perhaps you are not well-acquainted with the process of canonization. It requires the appointment of a person whose job it is to be sceptical of all claims made on behalf of the candidate for beatification or canonization. Miracles that have a natural explanation are not accepted as evidence of intercession:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil’s_advocate
c) St. Juan Diego had seen statues in which Mary looked European, yet the woman who appeared to him (and the image that appeared without explanation on his tilma) appeared to be a native of the Americas. Besides, you have to admit that if there is such a thing as life after death, you have no reason whatsoever to impose the restriction that people from the afterlike have to look the way *you *expect they should. There is no reason that they could not appear in a manner that touches the heart of those who see them, rather than something that comforts your own intellectual limits. The same goes for expecting that God must have willed us to have original manuscripts, since it is
your will that we have them. How can you cling to such a stubborn lack of imagination, and yet call yourself one who esteems the creative thinker?
d) On what basis did you decide what the “normal statistical occurence” of miracles should be? Let’s face it: there is no accepted number for a “normal” occurence of miracles! You just made that up! If you don’t have a number by which the incidence of actual miracles can be proved, then you have just invented a concept that cannot also not be used to disprove. If you don’t have any good numbers to start with, after all, you can’t do any statistics that are worth two bits. You’re using your own judgment, fine, but don’t pretend it has anything to do with formal mathematics.
