Posted by
Paul Derengowski on Thursday, October 29, 2009 12:00:00 AM
The sobering
words of the eccentric philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche over 120 years
ago in Europe are ever-becoming more true in America today. "God is
dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." Unfortunately, too
many want to pretend otherwise, and then whine and complain about
freedoms lost, immorality run amok, fiscal irresponsibility and fraud,
or whatever happens to be the most sensational news item of the day.
It wasn't that
Nietzsche actually believed that God was literally dead as a being.
What he meant was that by how humans tend to go about their lives, for
all practical purposes, God was a irrelevant afterthought. He didn't
really exist anymore as a central figure in people's thought processes
and planning. People had become practical atheists. Oh, allusions
might be made to "a god" in a sensuous thrill of vague religiosity, but
after the temporal orgasm of subjective spirituality had subsided, all
that was left was an empty shell, a caricature if you will, of a being
who had long since died due to neglect. Europe today is now reaping
the consequences of killing off God, and Western American countries are
not far behind in reaping the same.
A sad, but
telling, indication that Americans are slowly murdering God is through
their addiction to politics as the panacea to everything. If the
politician isn't looked upon as the savior to provide jobs and social
welfare, then he/she is lobbied to provide universal health care. And
if the politician isn't looked upon as the great physician, then he/she
is lobbied to pass legislation to dictate what is proper religious
speech and practice.
To makes things
worse, day-after-day-after-day one cannot avoid being bombarded by the
incessant, monotonous, and insipid political banter in the media.
Mindless automatons constantly fill the airwaves with enough disjointed
rhetoric, theorizing, and blather to sicken the heartiest soul. And
why? Because as J. P. Moreland once wrote, politics is the "surrogate
for a Higher Power." Since we, as a society, have collectively
terminated any genuine relationship with that "Higher Power," then we
have created a vacuum in our souls. Man has become the measure of all
things, in other words, and by severing our relationship with God, now
man needs to find a replacement, and politics is that cheap substitute.
The problems,
though, with relying on political chatter, minus God, to resolve
anything are obvious. There is absolutely zero objectivity in the
decisions made, since everything revolves around almighty opinion.
There is endless bureaucracy, confusion, and mayhem due to the lack of
a credible standard to measure the commentary. Moreover, resources are
wasted, corruption of moral values become the norm, and society itself
begins to self-destruct in a free-for-all trying to make sense out of
nonsense.
To make things
worse, God's murderers fork over millions of dollars every year to keep
the political talking heads chattering on the public airwaves, falsely
assuming that if they can only get the right political figure elected
into office, then that will cure all our problems. Such an
empty-headed self-delusion as that is as pathetic as saying that so
long as a person doesn't hit the ground after jumping out of an
airplane, then that person is flying. Nevertheless, we often love our
delusions to the point where we're willing to take a Kirkegaardian
"leap of faith," even though we have no idea where we're leaping to,
nor do we care.
Yes, God is
dead…and we have killed him. All that is left now is to bury him.
But, amid our delusion and pride, that isn't going to happen. We'll
just keep on ignoring his dead carcass, or maybe even prop it up as an
idol to go along with the rest of the idols we've erected along the
way, including politics. And when our children, or children's children
look back and see what we did to kill God, maybe by then they won't be
as ashamed of Him as we currently are; they'll destroy the dead idols,
and realize that God wasn't dead after all. We were. We just refused
to admit it.