The philosopher Friedrich Nietszche wasn’t religious, but had this part right
I have a religious faith. I wasn’t born with it, I’m a convert. It became clearer and clearer over time to me that God exists, loves me, and we are all God’s loved children on a path of potential. It’s a logical thing, an emotional one, a metaphysical one, an empirical one. It’s not easy to explain or evidence, but I’ve seen enough to confirm it for myself, and it’s very real once it comes to you. I don’t expect anyone else to share my views, though many do and many don’t. It’s not a crutch – though it does provide Hope. It’s far, far more uncomfortable and demanding than a crutch.
I believe from this that the first and most important gift we have is life itself. Then second only to the sanctity of life is Agency – the freedom to act (and hence learn) for oneself, whilst respecting (and hopefully loving) others equally. How else can we progress ourselves? By being instructed and indoctrinated only, we cannot progress developmentally – this happens through repeated choice-making and learning from the results. We need a pluralistic society from which to learn and choose. And yes, for those interested in the question of perpetuating inequity in Christianity, we could discuss the relation between equality and equity within that religion.
Friedrich Nietszche wasn’t religious, and was critical of Christianity. He was critical in some ways similar to how Ayn Rand was – the potential immorality of selflessness and altruism. But he was a genius. Don’t be overawed by geniuses. Like the rest of us, geniuses get some things right and some things wrong. It’s just that geniuses got one or more things right which are extraordinary. And then they are known and remembered for that. They also get things wrong, and these are sometimes too easily forgotten in a generalised adulation we have of them, around the aura of the extraordinary parts of them.
We are all flawed, but sometimes geniuses.
Nietszche thought deeply about a huge range of topics. He was famous in the late 1800’s, after Darwin and Marx and other challenges to Christianity, for saying, “God is dead…and we have killed him…who will wipe the blood off us?…What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?”.
We are seeing these games now. People in the UK for example eschew organised religion (or rather eschew Chritianity – Islam and other religions have retained more), and while some are atheist, some maintain ‘individual spirituality’; or join extreme versions of illiberal left-wing DEI or right-wing cult. These are very closely related to religion, with their original sins (racial, colonial), in-and-outgroups (the faithful/heathen – ‘misinformed’), leader-groups (priesthood), codes and symbols (new language meanings) and excommunication (cancel culture). I’m not saying it’s all bad, but it’s a dangerous game to play, spritually. For a more incisive illumination and analogy read The New Puritans by the brilliant author and comedian Andrew Doyle (2022) – who also happens to talk about himself being gay yet ostracised in the DEI community.
More and more people (even a few of the heavier atheists) are coming to the conclusion that whether or not God exists, getting rid of Him might not have been so clever. Unless of course, you’ve been ideologically captured into a new pseudo-religion yourself. Then you probably won’t see the damage you are creating outside your bubble. I admit I also live in a religious bubble (but keep my eyes pretty wide open, I hope).
So I think Nietszche was wrong that God doesn’t exist; he was right that it was a bad idea to kill Him. He thought that Christianity was weak and lacked morality and he had lots to say about the weakness of selflessness – which I think he had a point about, but got it twisted. I’m not sure yet whether he said much about other religions (Islam, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Judaism, indigenous and others).
The point for me is that religion is a significant net benefit from a societal perspective when it is infused with:
- a deep belief that He (She if you wish) is a God of love, and that we are all His children. That makes us all loved brothers and sisters who should try their very best to love and cherish each other, and care voluntarily for one another, even if they take a different view or path.
- the humility to recognise we are not God ourselves; that there is a higher power; that we are fallible and flawed, and therefore could be wrong. And so we should exercise self-restraint against our certainty, not employing Nietszche or the post-modernists’ ‘Will to Power’ to dominate others unrighteously, even for a Utopian vision we cannot guarantee.
- a belief in developing self through self-responsibility, self-reliance and self-dependence before thinking we are qualified to change the world.
- a belief in charity – of loving thy neighbour as thyself; of voluntarily recognising our role in helping others (relates to equality and equity).
- a tolerance of those who disagree – we disagree as equals. We just do not tolerate the intolerant to the point of being suicidal or abused by those intolerant of us. Practically this implies self-defence is OK and we offer at least the same respect to others as they do to us – but our tolerance is not absolute or pacifist in the face of attack).
Without an underpin like this to society, I think both left-wing (collectivist) and right-wing (individualist but oligarchal) politics fail.
The collectivist model fails as it develops into a binary in- and out-group (plus neglect/abuse of atomised individuals), ousting and persecuting the individual who thinks differently to the collective orthodoxy. There is no corrective feedback mechanism for the orthodoxy, which fails to learn and innovate without the cognitive diversity and viewpoint diversity that original and heterodox individual thinking brings.
The individualist but oligarchal model of capitalism fails without these tenets as it becomes the Darwinist law of the jungle, where a minority are not ‘selected’ by ‘natural’ means. Unless private charity caters sufficiently for the ‘poor and vulnerable’ (which in turn depends on goodwill or a good ‘spirit’), the poor may die or languish – sometimes over two or three generations. Individualism can also spawn an unhealthy unconcern for others (tempered at least by the transactional need to serve to earn); and ‘equal rights for all’ can be distorted by oligarchal power.
John Lennon in Imagine advocated “No religion” as a provider of peace. But he didn’t recognise the vacuum this leaves in the human psyche that Nietszche earlier had identified. Nietszche didn’t get it all right – but in his famous quote about killing God, he got it exactly right. Geniusly right. And we are living it now.
My argument then is that both left- and right-wing politics eventually fail without a religious underpin of basic Christian-like principles – beliefs plus actions – to temper us and guide us.
Whatever you call these principles, we never had them in every human heart, and it doesn’t solve everything, of course. No societal system can solve the core issue of the flaws and egos of the human heart. But distributed sufficiently across society, these principles will temper the moral excesses of individuals and institutions of all kinds.
As Nietszche might say, Godless is not great.