God is Dead

Humans have long been concerned with certainty. We wish to know learn everything about our environment and dominate it entirely with our knowledge. Yet many questions seem to go unanswered and philosophers still ponder what reality is really like. They do this, of course, while they are driving cabs for a living because it is nearly impossible for philosophers to find jobs other than teaching which is unfortunate.

There are two major warring ideologies when it comes to attempting to explain what we see around us and if our perceptions can be trusted. The first one is realism, which is the doctrine of a external world that is completely separate from humans. If humans never lived it would make no difference because humans are only a part of a whole reality. The second is idealism, first presented by Immanual Kant in the 19th century, which argues that reality is mind dependent. Kant argued that everything that appeared to the mind was a product of the mind and so if there were no human minds there would be no reality.

I myself have always been compelled by realist philosophers because it seems ignorant and childish to think of ourselves as the most important thing in the universe. We are not the chosen people or the favorite children of some all knowing and guiding god nor are we going to be the Pokemon master. Fredrick Nietzche has recently become a favorite philosophers of mine because he is one of few men who are able to stand up to a life as unknowing, dangerous, and tragic as it is.

Each man and women only has their one life to live and we must say yes to life. We must embrace all that is terrible and impossible to understand and through all the inevitable pain and despair we must find our own joy. It is compelling to me that this man, living from 1844-1900, would have such good advice for our nation today. I look around today and I see people that are afraid and doubting and this is something that they simply cannot handle. They cannot live up to the fact that they will die and their life will have no meaning so they look to fools who promise them all the happiness they could never find in life yet deliver nothing. These people take the bait! They believe and fight and justify something that holds little justification because they are afraid of nothingness.

Life is nothingness and today we must be adults about it. We must face up to what is horrible and true with a strong and solemn embrace. “God is dead and we have killed him.” This was a terribly controversial quote from Nietzche and what he means to say is that we only pretend we believe because it is a habit. We killed god because we no longer truly believe. Those that believed in god centered their life around his worship. Today we center our lives around work and power. There was a time when we, as a people, truly did believe yet that time is now passed. Now we must throw out our childhood playthings and make our own meaning for life.