On The Question of Whose God Is Dead.

Pre-modernity's God is dead, and for its survivors a nostalgia about morality haunts our every questionable new ethic. But that's not really what I'm thinking about tonight.

Tonight instead it seems relevant that not every culture's God is dead. What Nietzsche may have meant by his assertion was not a death of God but the death of the place of our God in our lives. Once we've committed regicide, invented scientific systems of thought, and private modes of consumption God is far from the dominant entity who ruled through manifestations of his will as transmitted by whoever was really in charge.

But maybe God is alive and well in the political experiences and philosophies of the Middle East, albeit that is a generalization of a region. I haven't been there, and even if I had I doubt that would save me from generalizing. I s'pose in this way I'm untrustworthy like other politicians who speak about vague and unusually secure experiences of places they otherwise would not venture to- except I have this notion that one day I'm going to go somewhere and most likely it will have nothing to do with business. I have digressed. I want to merely suggest it is unlikely that what Nietzsche was describing as a condition of modernity can be assumed to be universally true. This seems obvious, but I think it ought to be explicit and part of the conversation.

Anyone else care to answer whose God Nietzsche meant?

What are the underlying differences between a society departed from God and a society still with God?

What about the ghost of God and the question of morality after his departure? What of our capacity to invent ourselves anew in the face of moral uncertainty? What about the invention of social Gods and Pariahs; our levvys we pay with our own social credit, the fee for a mind not quelled by the tyranny of normalcy. Mill understood the tyranny of the majority, but Marx was the first to call this process alienation. Laing along with his predecessors questioned our scientific philosophies given the imperfections of society; that to be well adapted to a malformed social whole is not sanity but the mere illusion of the presence of sanity; all the while committing something quite insane: utter self-sacrifice not for a God but for the Godless man. Connolly iterates the magnitude of the danger of imagined wholeness; but this kind of Godless sacrifice may be more dangerous than those willing to die for a silent but omnicient spirit. We commit suicide against our own intellectual and spiritual liberty; for after we have killed God's spirit we have nothing left to destroy except our own.

We percieve historical woes committed in the name of God as not part of the formula for rational action, yet fail to percieve modern woes committed in the name of rationalism as producing nothing more than the negation of something; the void of valid ethics that follows from a Godless authority. Our critical vantage point liberates us from one tyranny of the universal for another. We set ourselves up in God's place as the keepers of our own moral character. We have not killed God, we fired him and put the Jones's in Gods place.