“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderer

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”- Friedrich Nietzsche.If your fundamental belief system collapses, how should you live?Nietzsche clearly said there would be two consequences of the collapse of ethical and religious belief systems. One would be nihilism. The belief in nothing. He regarded that as an escape from responsibility. It’s a logical consequence of the breakdown of religious belief systems but it is also a cop-out. It’s the cop-out that Dostoevsky explored very deeply in his novel, “Notes from Underground.”It describes an intelligent and irresponsible person who has slipped into a pit of meaninglessness. He experiences hate, resentment and revenge. It’s the kind of thing that would afflict someone in the underworld. They have nothing to hold them together.    Nietzsche also talked about the likelihood that people would turn to totalitarianism. He particularly discussed Communism as a replacement for religion.In Canada, if you were a lapsed Catholic in Quebec, the probability that you would be a separatist increased tenfold. Quebec separatists advocated the independence of their province from Canada. It was because Catholicism fell apart in Quebec in the late 1950s. It was one of the last places in the Western world where the feudal Catholic system had maintained itself up to that point. It collapsed just like the belief in Christianity did in Russia in the late 1880s.What happened in Quebec when Catholicism collapsed was that the birth rate plummeted. In the 1950s and earlier, it was common to see families with nine or 13 children.However, Quebec’s statistics bureau said the 2015 rate was 1.6 children per woman, down one percent from 2014. It marks the sixth consecutive year it has gone lower. It was because everybody bailed out on the church. Nobody got married. And if you were a lapsed Catholic, you were 10 times more likely to be a separatist. When Catholicism fell apart, people who needed very structural belief systems just turned to Nationalism as a natural alternative. That accounted for the rigidity and Utopian nature of the Quebec movement towards independence. They had axioms of belief that were unchangeable. Such as the future potential would justify any action. That is not an idea. That is a statement of faith.The same thing happened in Russia when the Communists became active in the 1920s. Any amount of horror was justifiable because it was going to bring about some future state of paradise.  However promises of Utopia never deliver the promised future paradise. It usually delivers the opposite.  More people died as a result of Communism than from homicide (58 million) and genocide (30 million) put together. If you combined the death toll of both World War I (37 million) and World War II (66 million), they exceed communism’s death count by only nine million.“What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?”- Nietzsche. -- source link

More pics about