Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody

In Nietzsche’s mind such moralistic attachment to truth, though inspired by a religious and moral injunction that none shall lie, leads to the discovery of truths that undermine religion and moralism themselves—partly by showing that many religious and moral beliefs are rooted in falsehoods and partly by exposing the truth about some of the immoral and dishonest ways that religions and moralities actually propagate themselves as real world systems of domination and control.

Morality itself, in Nietzsche’s view, is deeply hypocritical according to its own standards. And any Christian who takes the commandment against lying seriously at all is going to have to leave Christianity on precisely that account.

I am like Nietzsche’s camel. While I am many miles away from morally perfect, I have been a generally conscientious person since I was a child and was devoutly, zealously, evangelically, self-sacrificially, and mildly puritanically religious until I was 21. And I am open to certain interpretations of my personality that see it as still fundamentally religious—as long as they do not confuse that for faith-based thinking or other forms of closed-mindedness, authoritarianism, or deference to unwarranted authorities of thought or practice. I think a fair accounting would acquit me of such charges, whatever the other inadequacies of my intellect and character.

What I am stressing here is something that both the faithful and the always-secular rarely seem to understand about at least some of us apostates. For some of us, our rejection of our faith is not merely the abandonment of our religious values but, at the same time, very much our fulfillment of them. It was Christianity that led me to reject Christianity.

Of course some people can reject Christianity, or any other religion, because secular values become more important than religious ones. But love of truth is not implanted, oriented, or motivated psychologically the same for everyone. While some might have that develop that love from the delight of  love of learning, others might find it grows strongest out of fury over being deceived, or others might have it take root because of curiosity, wonder, fear, or the simple satisfaction and feeling of victory in exercising natural intellectual talents. Biographically, the love of truth was preached to me religiously, as a matter of absolute importance because of the religious stakes that rode on it. It mattered that people believed the truth and that they did the good because their very salvation hung on this.

And even in the wake of my rejection of faith (and, with it, the irrationalistic dogmas and habits of thought that were major parts of my Christianity), my supreme estimation of the value of truth might still be interpreted as having a religious, zealous, unmoderated character. I revere the truth, I am willing to suffer quite a bit for it, and still viscerally reject attempts to relativize its value.

I have a hard time accepting that some other values might override the value of truth in some cases.  I do not accept easily that it is okay for some people to be deceived, or that in some people a multitude of other virtues might cover their sins of intellectual dishonesty.  But even on these scores, my love of truth itself leads me to recognize and acknowledge and understand its limited value.  The religious devotion to truth involves learning to not make an idol of truth since that would be to dishonor it.

But, nonetheless, out of concern for truth, I must admit that I am in many respects an evangelist of truthfulness. I am almost pathologically self-disclosing. I view intellectual honesty as a deeply moral matter and excellence of thought as a central human virtue and I only recognize its limits and needs to be balanced against other virtues insofar as it itself requires that I see and acknowledge this.

And, again, while there are many other routes to a love of truth which have no need of religion, ironically my love of truth was cultivated, as it has been for many others before and since me, in that den of manipulative lies that is the Christian church.

And, so, as Nietzsche thinks necessary, my “camel” spirit had to take the character of a lion’s spirit and proudly and defiantly say “no” to the false “thou shalts” of a dishonest and flawed religious value system and “no” to the false beliefs which propped it up.  This was the outgrowth of my religious, moralistic, camel’s nature reaching its logical and practical conclusions. I rejected faith-based religion religiously, at least insofar as my rejection of faith grew out of my religious struggle.

I bring all of this up for a reason. Faithful religious people do not, in my experience, seem to understand that some of us apostates are not like other atheists. We are not total outsiders. Our critique is partly an internal critique of religion, out of religiousness.  We are attacking the idols and falsehoods that are promulgated as Truth.

In practice, if no longer in belief, there is a continuity of our religiosity back to the days when it took a faith-based, God-fearing form rather than a faithless, godless one. In terms of spirit, some of us apostates, are still closer in temperament in numerous ways to our former brethren than to some of our fellow atheists. In some ways we are still inescapably their brethren and, despite our explicit, rationally rigorous, and wholehearted rejection of the contents of their beliefs and some of their worse moral values, our rejection is what we see as the rightful conclusion of the values they themselves have.

In other words, in some ways, we apostates want to be heard as saying that if our former brethren would themselves be true to the values we share, they would leave the faith right along with us. We sometimes want to be heard on these grounds.

Of course, we get it that we are disowned.  And we want to be–because we think the rot of false beliefs, regressive morals, and cultish practices pervert and ruin what is still intense and passionately alive about the religiosity we have from back in our faith-based days (regardless of whether we conceptualize it as “religiosity” any more now that we lack gods to worship). But we do not want our former brethren to deny that we were really among them and we really want them to get that we left not out of a failure of moral and religious seriousness but out of an abundance of it.

And maybe I speak only for me but it galls me when I see liberally minded people who were never at all religious bash apostates for attacking the religious beliefs that we ourselves once held. If such liberals are really so respectful of religion, then it would be nice if they respected the kind of religious experience that leads to apostasy.  Apostates often have too few friends and sympathizers when they are going through one of the most alienating experiences of their lives.

If all religions that are not violent or hateful are valid, then appreciate that apostasy can be just as much a sincere expression of religiosity as faithful adherence to dogma is—and maybe even a purer and more admirable form. And the liberal-minded shouldn’t always assume that an atheist is attacking something he does not care to understand or appreciate in all its manifold colors. For many of us it was something deep in our bones that we now wrestle against—not because there is any temptation left to believe its nonsense, but because it was so deep and enduring a part of our personal formation.

For many of us, this is, in “spiritual” terms, a conflict with our former brethren. It’s a family feud and as outsiders to it, the never-religious really should not take sides and tell us atheists to leave the religious alone, if they are sincere about respecting people’s religious experience. Some of our atheisms represent the culmination and the final truth and interpretation of our religious experiences. And some of our religious natures are expressed atheistically. Some of our pieties are to truth and the objective good, at the expense of faith and even at the expense of our very families when they are wrongheaded. It’s personal to us. Our experiences are valid and they count. Institutional religion does not want to acknowledge our experiences because they call them into question. Don’t attempt to exclude our voice from the discussion. Don’t silence our sides of the religious story.

It’s not truthful. It’s not fair. It’s not even religiously tolerant.

Your Thoughts?

Be sure to catch each installment of BlagHag’s funny, depressing, informative, and educational report on her trip the creation museum by following these links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

And PZ Myers is also publishing links of more accounts, here is his first big list.

Your Thoughts?

And we in the camel community couldn’t be happier with the new album’s cover art:

Wilco, The Album Cover

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIe4orty1LI&hl=en&fs=1&]

Plus, the lovely Amy Millan, the amazing co-lead singer of the amazing band Stars releases her second album on September 8.  It’s called Masters of the Burial and it contains a Death Cab For Cutie cover.  Here’s a video of one of her better solo songs from her pretty good first album, Honey From the Tombs:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKwAuGJ9w3Y&hl=en&fs=1&]

And everyone should own this album, so get on it if you don’t have it already.

It’s a combination of two images in Nietzsche.  The camel comes from “The Three Transformations,” a section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  He is there describing transformations that the “spirit” must undergo.  First it must become a camel.  The camel represents austere, ascetic, obedient commitment to moral ideals, especially truthfulness.  The camel’s truthfulness though leads the camel eventually to understand the conditional character of morality, that it has no divine origin and that his camel like subservience is not justified.

The camel stage ends when the spirit must become a lion to do what the camel cannot:  defy the “Dragon of ‘Thou shalt’” with the counter-answer of “I will,” therewith rejecting the authority of all those who claim that all values are unalterably fixed.  The camel’s obediently, reverentially, ascetically moral endeavor of utmost truthfulness itself leads him to discover the responsibility to reject belief in immutable, absolute bases for obedience.  Yet if he is to actually reject this precondition of his quintissential activities, the camel must become a different kind of animal, a lion.  It is the lion that confronts the “Dragon of Thou Shalt.”  The Dragon of Thou Shalt tries to claim that there can be no new values, no moral reimagination but only fixed, preexisting commands.  Only the lion has the defiant courage to say No to the Dragon of Thou Shalt.

But the lion’s self-assertive freedom to say no to the old values is not the end.   The lion must transform into a child with an innocent ability to say “yes.”  Freedom must evolve from the lion’s negativity and rejection, its form as freedom from the sway of another’s law, to an affirmative freedom not characterized in terms of what it opposes.  The lion can only be creative negatively as a creative destroyer of the false and as such is always in a dialectical dependence on that which he is no-saying to.

So the lion must become a child: an affirmativeness that has no conscious need to reject anything.  Nietzsche describes the child as “innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes.’”  Not continuing to say “no,” the spirit now forgets he ever had to say no.  This is a new beginning, in some way distinct from a merely altered continuation.  This spirit is not responsive to external determinants, for the law that the camel reverentially obeyed and which the lion summoned its courage reactively to oppose is no longer influential.

As a camel, Nietzsche demand the hardest burden of truth he can, which will lead him to reject moral dogmatism with lion-like defiance, and finally then to advocate the child’s innocent, affirmative approach to life—no longer worried about overturning the previous morality but simply creating without reference to it.

In my dissertation I make the claim that “The Three Transformations” encapsulates Nietzsche’s project and his goals.  I argue that understanding Nietzsche’s prima facie conflicting remarks often depends on whether he is writing from the perspective of the camel, the perspective of the lion, or the perspective of the camel, so to speak.  His “camel” remarks are those within the language and assumptions of traditional morality.  His “lion” remarks are those which are critically attempting tear down the lies and errors of traditional morality and Christianity.  The “child” remarks are those where Nietzsche is valuing positively–sketching and celebrating the various possibilities for a genuinely affirmative new ethics based on an embrace of reality rather than an otherworldly morality’s disdain for this world.

The hammer comes from the subtitle to Twilight of the Idols, “How One Philosophizes With A Hammer.”  The hammer to which Nietzsche refers is a tuning fork.  The metaphor he employs is that he is striking idols with this tuning fork in order to test them to see what sounds they make.

But I also like the other connotations evoked by the image of a hammer.