Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Rene Girard on Nietzsche and Irresponsible Rhetoric

Just read Rene Girard's I See Satan Fall Like Lightning.  Several blog/internet associates impelled me to read him and I finally gave in to my good fortune.  The following quote is kind of incidental to his main arguments of this fascinating book but struck me as pithy and relevant to our times.  The book came out in 1999.

"Nietzsche shared with many intellectuals of his time and our own a passion for irresponsible rhetoric in the attempt to get one up on opponents.  But philosophers, for their misfortune, are not the only people in the world.  Genuinely mad and frantic people are all around them and do them the worst turn of all:  they take them at their word."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

But then again you get the never-ending blood-soaked applied Christian politics (of true believers) as described in these references. Remembering that ALL of the horrors described in the references below were "authorized" by the ecclessiastical establishments of there time and place.

www.dartmouth.edu/~spanmod/mural/panel13.html

www.jesusneverexisted.com/cruelty.html

www.nobeliefs.com/nazis.htm

www.logosjournal.com/hammer_kellner

Remember too, that the WWII Nazi Holocaust (against the Jews) was the INEVITABLE result of centuries of church sponsored (and inflamed) anti-semitism

Anonymous said...

Two of the human worlds most destructive statements/documents were the Papal Bulls of 1455 and 1493 which "authorized" the systematic plunder of the "new" world" in the name of "God".

The two most destructive "ideas" that are causing most of the violence in the world - even potentially catastrophically so are the entirely false presumptions shared by hundreds of millions of true believers are.

1. That Christianity (Christian-ISM) is the one true way/faith/revelation/religion and that Christians have been given a "great commission" to convert all of humankind to this one "true" way. Such a bogus belief was used to justify the Papal Bulls above.

2. That Islam (Islam-ism) is the "final revelation" to humankind and thus the one true way/faith/revelation/religion and that Islamic true believers have the obligation/duty to convert all of humankind to this one "true" way.

SteveA said...

Thanks for stopping by. I am fascinated by the Logos Journal which you referred to. Plan to spend some time there. It seems to me that some of the best things and some of the worst things are connected to religion.

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