more from Twilight of the Idols:
We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.
I always sort of admired this guy, not because I think he is a good man, but he was a clear thinking man who at least did not try to lie.
He is basically to Atheism in the 19th century what Boyle was to Christianity in the 17th century.
It’s fascinating though- the Enlightenment Moderns saw Christianity, and all religion, as simply a non-thing, a way of saying “we do not know what”.
For example, the Egyptians did not know what a star was really made out of, so they called it a god, Ra- after all the sun is pretty amazing and at times I have looked up at it and sympathized with some primeval urge to worship it.
Fair enough, I say to the Moderns.
The problem is, the Moderns didn’t realize morality was not a real entity (ens reale) like the sun but a product of reason (ens rationis). They believed, that at some point, its universal nature would be discovered in the same way Newton “discovered” gravity. It never happened. Instead of religion being mere epiphenomena or a primitive turn of phrase for something naturally explicable, it was the meat of the whole thing.
Nietzsche was right… In a way though, I’m glad most people including Dawkins et. al. have not found out yet lest another Hitler come to power.
