A vocal online contingent Christians have had to contend with in recent years are the Big-brained Nietzsche Bros.
In general, this group can be defined as wanting to enjoy all the benefits of living in Christendom while also living unfettered by Christian morals.
This related item from X was brought to my attention in a discussion between my valued neopatrons:
One of the strongest arguments against Nietzsche and for Christianity is Tech Futurism.
The Romans never had an Industrial Revolution because it was “unmanly” to tinker with labour when you could just have slaves.
Slaves and the Will to dominate kept them primitive despite their majesty.
The Muslims are the same, an incredible conquering people who never industrialised.
Only the Christian Europeans became technological
Related: Dark Ages
They couldn’t enslave, so they had to innovate.
This transformed them into the first masters of the world – beyond anything Rome or Arabia could have dreamed.
“Nietzscheans” are too seduced by master morality to see this and so fail Nietzsche’s test.
The ancient Greeks developed the steam engine. The Mayans discovered the number zero. The Chinese developed gunpowder. Yet the historical fact is that applied natural philosophy was stuck spinning its wheels until the advent of Christendom.
And while Christian morality is a necessary pillar of Western civilization, it was the unique cosmology those morals are derived from that got the West out of the rut nobody else had managed to escape.
Because with slight regional variations, the ancients were locked into cosmological models that didn’t extend much beyond solid state or cyclical views of history. The rules were either subject to the gods’ whims, or at best were accessible only to them, so there was no point in trying to discover constant physical laws.
It took the revelation of a God who is Himself reason to give men the idea that the underlying principles of nature accessible to reason.
And nobody wants to admit it, but the West’s apostasy from Christ the Logos lies at the root of the scientific replication crisis, the slowing and even regress of software innovation, and ultimately boats and planes crashing.
Never forget that the dominant state cult takes it as de fide doctrine that they can rules lawyer the laws of nature with enough magic thinking.
Thinking that such reality-optional cosmology can sustain first-world Western civilizational standards is delusional.
So is thinking that you can reassert Christian cosmology while denying the morals that necessarily follow from it.
What if Christopher Tolkien edited a Berserk novelization by Glen Cook?
Find out. Read it now
I don’t understand the Nietzsche bros. His life is a personal demonstration of the Death Cult. His own philosophizing seems to have weakened him and driven him insane. No children and cared for by his mother to his early end.
Sounds exactly like what the West needs. *ahem*
At this point, I consider any description of Nietzsche as a philosopher a red flag.
Vox’s SSH analysis of Nietzsche revealed a lot about his fans. Lots of Gamma types came out to defend the pee-drinking lunatic and his musing about being an Ubermensch.
Normal people would find his life disqualifying. But the fantasy of being the Last Man who judges everyone else resonates with those who think of themselves as Secret Kings.
Philosophizing is all well and good, but at some point you’re gonna have to arrive at some conclusions, or else you’re gonna end up as a brain on stilts.
Yesterday, Space X’s rocket landing blew up my timeline. Truth be told, I didn’t pay too much mind until someone made the comment that it was a huge deal. Citing that America used to be a hopeful nation that saw a future in the stars and beyond, now that’s not the case, we’re stagnant.
It dawned on me in that moment just how vital hope is for a nation. Without hope, we do not create, we do not build, we just recycle at best or tear down at worst. This is evident with everything in our culture how it’s all – temporary, recycled, unoriginal.
If memory serves, it was Mother Teresa who pointed out that a nation who kill their own children is one without hope. And a nation that has no hope has no future.
I think the same when I watch conspirabros start talking about simulations and alternate dimensions/universes. You guys literally only starting considering this because of the time period you live in and the entertainment you consume. It’s hard to make fun of the ancients for thinking everything is a god when their basis for thinking so is stronger than an atomized schizo who can’t even spend five minutes in conversation with anyone in a church.
A lot of the source of this problem is the worship of Individualism and Thinking For Yourself(tm) (IE, whichever media conglomerate tricks you into believing what gives them your money and worship), a mistake that will have to be corrected before anything actually changes.
There is no esoteric hidden answer for our ills. Just literally stop listening to crazy people who want you isolated from a strong community and believing things that will keep you from it.
I’ll believe in multiverses when a scintilla of physical evidence can be broken off those pretty, pretty mathematical formulae. Atheists assume that the Multiverse is an escape hatch from God for them, even though Multiverses are a subset of Reality. God rules Reality. Too bad, Atheist Bros.
Back in the day, Michio Kaku would go on Coast to Coast AM and say, in effect, that string theory must be true because no one has a better explanation that fits current understandings of physics. That was some Reddit-grade “The only possible answers are those within my comprehension” thinking.
That level of blinkered thinking is all the rage in modern-day physics, more’s the pity. Mythematics on steroids.
I lost a lot of respect for Kaku when I read Hyperspace as an adult and realized that he claimed that science had disproven Aquinas’s proofs for God, but his discussion made it clear that he had no idea what Aquinas was actually arguing.
The best thing the theologians – and particularly the philosopher-theologians – can do for scientists, besides pray, is to tell them to find their lane and stay there.
I would guess much of their preference comes from the fact that it’s an answer that they themselves control, as it doesn’t ask anything of them. It gives them no commandments, no obligations, no sacraments, nothing. It’s just something they can ‘learn’ and ‘study’ in order to become some Neo-esque figure that can bend reality to their every whim. They want an answer that allows them to FEEL like they’re in control by virtue of their boundless intellect.
One small problem though: if you’re gonna be Atlas and hoist the world on your back, once it falls, you’re gonna bear the brunt of that fall alone.
“And nobody wants to admit it, but the West’s apostasy from Christ the Logos lies at the root of the scientific replication crisis, the slowing and even regress of software innovation, and ultimately boats and planes crashing.”
There’s a very interesting talk by Jonathan Blow (who created Braid) which talks about how software development has declined compared to 30 years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko).
Whilst the actual content is fairly technical if you’re not familiar with programming, the general gist of it is that modern software development is more concerned with writing code according to abstract and even philosophical ‘design patterns’ instead of the actual functioning of the hardware. What this has done is create an entire generation of programmers with little to no understanding of crucial concepts such as memory usage, which is one of the major reasons for the rise of broken, unoptimized software.
Simply put, the generation that built the foundation of all our modern tech infrastructure is slowly retiring and/or passing away, and very few young programmers have a level of understanding of all the various systems that comes even close to what those men had. All because the tech industry completely lost sight of the root of things and instead began following abstract ideas based on philosophies that have no strong basis in reality.
Which sounds really familiar indeed…
Many people seem to have forgotten that a society which has no shared traditions and moral framework and thus, no social cohesion, cannot survive. I’m starting to think Cultural Ground Zero was the moment when the degradation reached some sort of critical mass in the West. Since 1997, mainstream Western culture basically consists of upholding decaying institutions/philosophies based on flawed 20th-century worldviews by any means necessary. All further decline from that point is just the result of collapsing social cohesion leading to the high social standards the West had becoming unmaintainable, which directly effects the level of technology society is even capable of supporting. I’m convinced the Internet as we know it couldn’t have come into existence under these social conditions.
In short, if we cannot find a way to reassert the Christian moral framework, future generations will end up like the barbarians looking at the aquaducts and colosseums of Rome…
One place you can really see this is in retro gaming. Some retro developers are great and will make games that are so accurate to the time period that they actually could run on the system in question.
But the more common scenario is this: “I made this game to resemble PC adventure games from the 90’s. It has no features that wouldn’t be available at that time. But to run it you’ll need the processing power and RAM capabilities of a system from 2022 or later for some reason.”
The Soviet Union ultimately collapsed because its materialist philosophy lost the ability to provide meaning to its people. Over time, this lead to a loss of faith in the cause, intensifying the corruption and kleptocracy of the regime – essentially moral and institutional decline that prevented any of the endemic problems from being solved. I reckon we might be on the path to something similar…
On the note of a discoverable, rational world with rules, it’s worth noting that the Muslims *used* to have this, at least in one faction – the Mu’tazilites. However, they ultimately lost the ideological struggle to their rivals, the Asharites, who went on to form the basis of most modern Islamic thought. Asharites are Occasionalists who assert that all actions, including human actions, are directly caused by God rather than having their own causal power. For instance, they’d say that a fire burns something not because the fire has an inherent power of burning, but because God acts to cause it to burn. In other words, secondary causality isn’t real and thus investigating it is pointless or possibly even blasphemy.