My Google alert sent me here today, to some ridiculously ass backwards article entitled “For atheists, death is the only point of life”. The author sites the belief Steve Jobs was inspired by, to live every day as if it were your last. She sees this as atheists fixated on death, and believes this negative fixation makes Christianity more appealing but she’s got it completely wrong.

Living is the point of life for an atheist. Life is precious because it’s finite; thus, we appreciate it and don’t squander it. In contrast, the author states the Christian belief is that “this life is simply a preparation for the fullness of life that we hope to experience after death”. Now you tell me who’s made death the point of life, the one who realized that they’d better make the most of the time that they’ve got or the one who is waiting for their “real” life, their better, perfect life to begin after death. If my “real” life wasn’t going to get going until after death, then death couldn’t come fast enough for me. Let’s get on with it, already! What value could you place on this life it it were nothing more than preparation, a rehearsal for your real life?

No, the believer has death as the point of life for they believe, or as the author put it, they hope it’s the gateway to life, the preferred and perfect life. Think about how they use death as a cornerstone of their belief. Their entire belief system is predicated upon death, or more specifically what will happen after death. Sin is the currency of this belief, like an ever increasing credit debt that if you let get too high, will prevent you from being able to access your preferred life after death and be forced to go to hell. It’s this threat of hell that the religion uses as leverage. It’s instrumental in so many of its arguments such as Pascal’s Wager and the so-called “fire and brimstone” sermons.

Death is a fixation for the believer. They can’t bare it so they pacify themselves with this fantasy of a next life. They can’t even properly deal with the deaths of others close to them. Talk to any believer just after someone they’ve loved died at what are the talking points? “He’s in a better place now”, or “I can’t wait to see them again someday”. They don’t ever fully come to terms with their losses and thus don’t come to terms with their own inevitable demise.

In contrast, I find the atheist stronger. The atheist doesn’t fear either their profound sadness and loss as those they love die nor fixate or fret about their own inevitable end. The belief the author sites as Jobs’ guiding principle, that you should live every day as if it were your last, is not fixated on death. On the contrary, it’s life affirming. It’s a slap of reality which is meant to wake you up and motivate you to not squander what you have, to love and appreciate every moment and make your life meaningful.

Nietzsche presented this idea via a story about a being who comes to you and tells you that your life is at an end, and that for the rest of eternity you’ll continue to repeat it. Afterwards he asked whether you’d view such a being as a devil or angel. Would such a fate be a sentence or a reward? If you made living the point of life, living well and meaningfully, then it should be a reward, but if instead you lived it as a mere preparation for some next life, then surely such a pronouncement would be seen as a sentence of hell.

So I would have loved to have shared any of this in the comments section below the article, but then I noticed the following:

Amazing how the religious closely moderate, censor and outright block contrasting views, no? It’s always lies that require protection.

• The Nietzsche family had produced a proud line of ministers prior to Friedrich’s birth in 1844 that stretched back to the early 17th century and his mother’s side had many as well. The irony that from such an illustrious christian heritage the man who would proclaim “god is dead”, rail against christianity for most of his life, proclaim himself antichrist and the god Dionysus I find to be delicious irony.

• Many feel Nietzsche had syphilis, either congenital or by way of a prostitute. Either way, he was plagued most of his life with ill health, sometimes relying on friends to take dictation or willfully struggling through his pains to write for moments at a time. It is with this knowledge that it is in part clear to see inspiration for his fierce ideas of the power of will and overcoming. His eventual mental collapse is another thing many take as evidence for his syphilis.

• The concept of the Ubermensch (often referred to as either the Overman or the Superman) was not a supremacist validation for subjugating others or a brutish affirmation of “survival of the fittest”. It was an ideal, a goal to strive for as an individual and on the whole by society. The concept, central to Nietzsche’s philosophy and apparent in every aspect of it, was one of perpetual growth and improvement, or in his words “renewal”. Never at any time did he claim to be a superman nor label any person, nation or race as such. He spoke of being a bridge to the Ubermensch.

This goes hand in hand with misunderstanding his Will to Power as being a might makes right justification to impose your will over others, essentially enslaving the weak. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Nietzche saw this as actually a retarded will, one of immense inadequacies by which one attempts to compensate for failing to lord over oneself by lording over others. This retarded will he often called “resentiment”, a key component of “slave morality”, the morality of both the weak (defined as those who lack strength of will) and those who seek to weaken. He found religions, especially christianity, to be prime examples of slave morality.

• In an almost feverish final burst of genius before he went mad in 1889, from 1886-1888 he consolidated his thought and cranked out part V of The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, The Antichrist, The Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo, and Dionysus Dithyrambs, with the last five all written in 1888! He also started but never finished The Will to Power: Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values.

• Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth was an anti-semetic cunt. She married a powerful anti-semite named Bernhard Förster in 1886(a wedding Freidrich didn’t attend because he opposed the marriage due to Forster’s anti-semeticism) who founded a colony in Paraguay which failed miserably. There were comments made by Forster revealing how dominating Elizabeth was and after the failure of the colony and the pressure and demands from Elizabeth, he committed suicide. Elizabeth also conspired to keep Freidrich from a young Russian aristocrat named Lou Salomâ, who he awkwardly proposed to and was in competition with Paul Rhee over her affections. It was Elizabeth who, once Freidrich went mad, gained sole possession of all of his works, including the unfinished Will To Power, and “cared” for him by propping him in a chair and selling tickets to come see him. It is in this state, dirty, unkept and with wild hair and mustache, that we mostly know of him today. For decades she edited and misinterpreted his works and released this trash loaded with her ignorant ideas and anti-semeticism to the world as his which the German nationals of WWI loved, namely one pathetic failed artist serving as a corporal named Adolph Hitler, whose Nazis later made this false Nietzsche their patron saint.

• Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for German nationalism and was not only not anti-semetic but in fact often praised the Jews for their contributions to the cultures they become a part of and considered those cultures most fortunate. He also broke with his editor Schmeitzner in 1886 over his anti-semetism.

• Of course much of the blame for Nietzsche being misunderstood is actually Nietzsche himself. First, as a lover of poetry and literature, he simply writes too creatively. His clever sarcasm, his flowery language, metaphors, turns of phrase, and general free flowing prose is a large departure from most philosophical writings which are dry, analytical and read like technical manuals. To make matters worse, Nietzsche was wildly opposed to systems of any kind. He felt that once one commits to a system, they are then enslaved by it. His criticism of other philosophers and intellectuals was that once establishing a system of thought, they can no longer question it and if they do, can’t reject it or else lose everything they’ve built. In sharp contrast to this, Nietzsche may turn on his own opinions from book to book. Partly this was to challenge their validity, partly it was because he honestly may have changed his mind. Personally, I also feel he may have done this simply to be cheeky. He often deliberately challenged what was most popular, and did not exempt himself.

Here is part 1 of an interesting BBC documentary of Nietzsche. I like very much what Will Self says about him, that “his philosophy was not to think like him, but to think for yourself”.

Oh I forgot to add that when you choose to read Nietzsche (which should be like right now) only read a Walter Kaufman translation.

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