The Heretic
New Member
- Joined
- Jun 9, 2003
- Messages
- 340
- Reaction score
- 0
An abstract from my upcoming book on Theothanatology:
Why deicide precedes posthumanism
The significance of the death of God has many aspects, but the most important one is the painful realization that metaphysical foundations have become empty, irrelevant, and consequently, romantic. But it is human weaknesses that keeps those foundations circulating under the pretense of necessity, due to shame, cowardice masquerading as arrogance, and self-indulgent nostalgia.
Even though absolute values have lost their credibility today, we still haven't come to grips with our murder of God. Moreover, the shift to secularism has eroded away the inertia of metaphysical foundations, yet the bloated and rotting divine corpse remains unacknowledged, the proverbial pink elephant nobody "sees."
Despite the obvious assassination of the divine, we refuse to admit the guilt of deicide. Thus our disavowal, in turn, serves as an artificial respirator that keeps a comatose, brain-dead God alive. It is possible that sooner or later, we will come clean, collectively, and see past Feuerbach's insight that man's psychological illusions are behind the self-projection of his highest attributes.
More importantly, we must go further than the all-too-easy replacement of God with Man, which jettisoned the philosophy of theism by introducing humanism in its place, for that is merely another attempt to forget the demise of the Divine.
Nothiing profitable will come from the substitute idolatry of humanism, for both humanism and religion are co-dependent. Man is the avatar of God on earth, but Jacques Lacan would say this is replacing Master Signifier with an excremental remainder.
Consequently, the death of God in turn is also the death of Man. Both "deaths" of abstractions are best understood as metaphors that signifies the collapse of humanism under the infection of nihilism in modernity.
The "death of God" is a mutation of Christianity, where the crucifixion of Christ signaled the end of the idea of God as a vengeful patriarch. The death of God, in turn, signals the end of man as a created being with a special status in all of Creation and a hotline to the Creator.
Our ineradicable need for metaphysics predispose a teleology for existence - which means the alternative, a meaningless universe and a lack of ultimate reason for the existence of the human race, is far too difficult to even conceive, much less cope with. If man has no preexisting purpose, no divine guarantee, then nor will its disappearance amount to anything either. The invention of God, perhaps, has to do with our hopes of being remembered in an absurdly empty universe. But the death of God is a necessary transition for the maturation of human culture, and the death of Man is absolutely essential for the continued evolution of the species....
Why deicide precedes posthumanism
The significance of the death of God has many aspects, but the most important one is the painful realization that metaphysical foundations have become empty, irrelevant, and consequently, romantic. But it is human weaknesses that keeps those foundations circulating under the pretense of necessity, due to shame, cowardice masquerading as arrogance, and self-indulgent nostalgia.
Even though absolute values have lost their credibility today, we still haven't come to grips with our murder of God. Moreover, the shift to secularism has eroded away the inertia of metaphysical foundations, yet the bloated and rotting divine corpse remains unacknowledged, the proverbial pink elephant nobody "sees."
Despite the obvious assassination of the divine, we refuse to admit the guilt of deicide. Thus our disavowal, in turn, serves as an artificial respirator that keeps a comatose, brain-dead God alive. It is possible that sooner or later, we will come clean, collectively, and see past Feuerbach's insight that man's psychological illusions are behind the self-projection of his highest attributes.
More importantly, we must go further than the all-too-easy replacement of God with Man, which jettisoned the philosophy of theism by introducing humanism in its place, for that is merely another attempt to forget the demise of the Divine.
Nothiing profitable will come from the substitute idolatry of humanism, for both humanism and religion are co-dependent. Man is the avatar of God on earth, but Jacques Lacan would say this is replacing Master Signifier with an excremental remainder.
Consequently, the death of God in turn is also the death of Man. Both "deaths" of abstractions are best understood as metaphors that signifies the collapse of humanism under the infection of nihilism in modernity.
The "death of God" is a mutation of Christianity, where the crucifixion of Christ signaled the end of the idea of God as a vengeful patriarch. The death of God, in turn, signals the end of man as a created being with a special status in all of Creation and a hotline to the Creator.
Our ineradicable need for metaphysics predispose a teleology for existence - which means the alternative, a meaningless universe and a lack of ultimate reason for the existence of the human race, is far too difficult to even conceive, much less cope with. If man has no preexisting purpose, no divine guarantee, then nor will its disappearance amount to anything either. The invention of God, perhaps, has to do with our hopes of being remembered in an absurdly empty universe. But the death of God is a necessary transition for the maturation of human culture, and the death of Man is absolutely essential for the continued evolution of the species....