No. of Recommendations: 2
Nietzsche worried that, if we fail to vanquish and decisively replace the shadow of values derived from God, we risk our culture slipping into a deep nihilism. The death of God means there is no going back: we either find a new mechanism for value creation ' a 'revaluation of values', as Nietzsche put it ' or we will eventually descend into a world where, recognizing our values are ultimately foundationless and meaningless, we will become apathetic and cynical ' even despairing.
This reminds me very much of the goldbugs' complaints that money has to have intrinsic value or else something nihilistic and immoral will happen. And what has the modern world found? Looked at in a Darwinian sense, the currencies which ran from the gold standard have so completely won the survival contest, that most students have to be taught that people used to think the value of the money was the silver or the gold!
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the argument that if we don't believe in god we have no way to anchor morality is this: how can believing in something that is false change its Physics? If you do believe in god and you are wrong, you don't have a more stable moral system out of the deal, you have a house of cards that hasn't fallen over yet.
Perhaps the lesson from religious dominance of moral systems is that we need an arbitrary power behind our society's moral system. The totalitarians certainly gave us that: absolute dictatorship over your thoughts and actions flowing not from the supernatural, but from that miraculous modern engine of creation: bureaucracy! Well the whole dictators killing 10s of millions of their own citizens and forcing the rest to lie about reality or die has (or should have been if you paid attention) been pretty discredited. So we need something else that is arbitrary.
How about just a strong belief in our values? The truth shall set you free, so elevate not lying to yourself to a primary commandment. It matters that we all get to play at understanding our truth, so elevate not forcing people to stop saying things you dislike to a primary commandment. Pretty clearly *a* pupose of civilization is to create immense societal wealth, but having done so in a complex cooperative way, we now need to argue interminably how to split up all the goodies. Well OK, then, elevate the right to argue, and maybe even vote on, your ideas about how to do all that to a primary commandment.
Almost everybody who believes in god secretly believes that god KNOWS what is good and bad, not that god CREATES what is good and bad. How many religious people would follow god if he announced that pedophilia was now sacred, as long as you brutally killed the child victims of it after you were done with them? No, it takes a real genius to think god can make up what is good and bad and we will just, MUST just, follow whatever with worship and praise. No, the thing that is/was impressive about god was just how smart she was, how much she got right.
So for many of us, taking god out of the equation doesn't change much. Instead of having a guy (or gal) with a long white beard and a personality picking winners and losers behind the whole thing, we just have the whole thing with nothing a human would recognize as a personality (or a beard for that matter) involved. The good stuff is good, it is no easier or harder to figure out what is good and bad than it is to figure out what god is/was telling us is/was good or bad. Jordan Peterson has this right. Act as if god existed because that is the best model we have for motivation to be good, but spend hours trying to answer the question "do you believe in god" because, as he has said, what does that even mean?
R:)
