From: "Wayne A. King" <kingwa-AT-a.crl.com>
Subject: Re: Greco-Roman Gods and the slave rebellion
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 03:04:00 -0500


Dan Dzenkowski wrote Monday, November 02, 1998 11:22 PM

>Postmodern drivel...

If so, why is that less acceptable than premodern/modern
drivel?  That there would only be a single sole point to N's
God is Dead reeks of logocentricism.  Or would N be forced
to accept his sole point would be what someone says it
was, only what they say it was, and nothing more can be
said or is possible?  So much for Nietzschean
perspectivism, I suppose.

A text is somewhat like water, for a sufficient understanding
it cannot always be just analyzed, but has to be used or tasted.
To understand is to apply the text to the Now - to today.  To
explain it is to relate it only to its own time, its own history, its
subsequent evolution until we reach understanding, an
understanding of our Now - its present meaning for us.
Every fresh moment demands at least some element of a
new understanding, a reinterpretation.  Else the Now
becomes the Was, and the living text becomes the
frozen word, the great weakness of orthodox biblicism.

>The point, if there were just one, most simply is the
>question of decadence as a negative factor in the
>health of the human species.


Don't necessarily disagree, but don't see why there couldn't
be other points as well.  Or that same point such decadence
could be described in completely different phraseology.  For
example,  Altizer describes the death of god as the coming of
the Second Innocence of Atheism, culminating in the resurrection
of the body (over the soul)  and thus restoring the preconscious
monism of will over Cartesian dualisms of body and soul.

>This belief was never satisfactory.

Well, N and the overwhelming majority of humanity sure
accepted it, although with N it was only during his youth.
Apparently it was satisfactory to him then and to the others,
at least while they accepted it, just as it is still apparently
satisfactory to the faithful today.  So, when you
pronounce it *never* satisfactory, without further clarification
or exclusion, I can envision ways that might be regarded as a
fallacy of an overstatement, an underestimation of the actual
power of belief in the biblical text by the masses from the perspective
of *explaining* the present moment.  It very well may be decadent
belief, but it appears still a very powerful decadent belief nevertheless.
I believe our goal remains to move from mere explanation to
understanding, existential understanding of our Now, and its great
possibilities for freedom.  Freedom from sin and all else that weighted
Christian civilization.

>The amazing thing is that people must
>have been incredibly sick to give up the  Greco-Roman (and that is just in
>Greece and Italy) gods in place of the Judeo-christain one.

Don't necessarily disagree, but that'd be the time of the first
innocence of atheism, pre-Greco-Roman gods.  Next
Zeus.  Then along comes Christianity, the light referred
to in the origins as depicted in Genesis.  Let there be light.
The light of human consciousness, to be more precise.
With it, the thirst for knowledge, the loss of instinct, the fall
of man into sin, shame, and the spirit of revenge.  Then, the
death of god pronounced by Zarathustra as an alternative
fall into darkness (pre-consciousness ... where there was
unity of instincts and pre-conscious will).  Z's death of God
paving the way for true human creativity, for faith in the
earth, for abandonment of the heavenly.  So we have the
second innocence through the death of god. You have already
appealed for the virtue of Dionysius, and we have Dionysius vs.
the Crucified. N signed himself under both names during his insanity.
The Crucified, however, was not necessarily the historical Jesus,
but the Pauline and synoptic Jesus.  From them , only traces can
be found of the real Jesus, the Zarathustra of his time.

>Nietzsche took
>the latter path, because the acceptance of the Judeo-Christain God was the
>beginning of the slave rebellion, which he ultimately despises.


N's view was that that Paul was the real first Christian.  The Pauline
Christ was a corruption of Jesus.  Jesus himself turned away from
rote law, blind following of tradition, ceremony, ritual, the letter of the
law, i.e. ,the state, and instead announced the glad tidings of the
kingdom of God which was *immediately* at hand then and there
... in that Now ... to anyone that understood Jesus.  Yet so few
understood!  Only later was the message of Jesus convoluted by
early Christianity into what we now call the slave rebellion.  Jesus
was for human freedom and love, as is Zarathustra, and both strongly
renounced the spirit of revenge.  But by Zarathustra's time, the only
way freedom was through the death of god.  Just as Jesus was
corrupted by Paul, so has N's Z been corrupted by Elisabeth and
others.  N reached true understanding of Jesus, realizing that
transcendence for us is only possible through the death of the
Christian God.  Zarathustra in this light may have been N's return
to the spirit of the original Jesus, the only possible return of the
Kingdom of God as the Now, the Now of eternal recurrence, the
Now of the "It will be" rather than the "It was."

>>  Yet at one time humanity accepted the death of
>>the Roman gods, so I suppose it is possible after all.
>
>Part of the slave rebellion.  The Greco Roman gods, were not believed in
the
>same way that the Jedeo-Christian one is.  The former were about the
>exemplification of man, the latter was about the sickening of man.


Regardless, gods that were once accepted by practically all later
came to be rejected ... at a great cost to humanity.  From the death
of the polytheistic Greco Roman gods arose Christianity.  From the
death of the Christian God arose Zarathustra, the innocence of the
second innocent becoming of atheism, the resurrection
of the body from the chains of the tortured soul.

Best regards from Hoot Owl Hollow, Georgia
Wayne A. King





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