Up@dawn 2.0

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Section 14 Group 3 (10/18)

Hello all,
This week we are talking about Friedrich Nietzsche and "The Death of God." Nietzsche wasn't literally saying that God died, but rather that the belief in God was no longer reasonable. The main thing he focused on was that if God is dead, what happens to morality. Most people base their morals and values off of religion and what God wants, so if God is dead how do people know how they are supposed to act. "Where once religion had provided meaning and a limit on moral action, the absence of God made everything possible and removed all limits." What would people do if there are no longer fixed ideas of what is moral and what is not. Nietzsche did think that the positive side of this was that now people could create their own values instead of being governed by religion.
Nietzsche preferred the values of aristocrats, celebrating strong heroes, over the Christian morality of compassion for the weak. He thought that every individual shouldn't have the same worth and that that idea was one of the mistakes of Christianity, and it was also holding humanity back. Neitzsche was influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and he viewed the main character in his book Thus Spake Zaruthustra as the next step in humanity's development. He also emphasized emotions and irrational forces playing a role in the shaping of human values.

Questions:
Why did Nietzsche say "God is Dead?"

Nietzsche thought that Christianity was holding humanity back because people were then governed by what was considered moral in God's terms, do you think this is true and that humanity would evolve if everyone looked out for their own interests first and thought about how they affected other people second?

1 comment:

  1. Kendall Martin 1410:08 PM CDT

    Well since no one has commented on the Nietzsche stuff, here are questions for Ayer:

    What did Ayer call the principle of dividing statements into those that made sense and those that were nonsense?
    A: the Verification Principle

    Do you think Ayer considered the fact that his theory didn't pass its own test of being true by definition or empirically verifiable?

    ReplyDelete

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