Nietzsche

Nietzsche is mostly known for his call of "the death of God." Although there is some truth to this, religion has prevailed so far and seems to be gathering quite a group of dedicated follower. Modern science has definitely brought doubt to many of the older ways of looking at God, but the religious leaders have simply stuck to their guns and keep proclaiming  "God allows (new scientific thing that does "good") to happen." They always find a way to keep God in a good, moral light. I think they have a flawless plan here. It's kind of like Apple Inc. with the iPhone. Every time a new Android phone comes out, all of the iPhone faithful start quoting the commercials about how iPhone was there first and made all of this smart phone stuff possible. Even though that's not true, people believe it. They eat it up. They've just got such a great marketing team over there at Apple.

Where Nietzsche really hit the mark with me is his view on how everyone is full of crap. We all see things through our own perspective and rarely, if ever, take the time to try and look at things in a different way. I had dinner with my GF, along with her sister and brother in-law. We were at an Italian restaurant and the subject of traveling and seeing the world was brought up. I've always wanted a chance to do just that, see the world and all of the different people first hand and get a feel for them on my own. She thought that was the stupidest idea that any person or animal could ever even slightly begin to imagine, much less actually think about it and agree with it. I'll paraphrase her comments on it, but she basically said that she saw no reason to travel whenever she could just look at a picture and see it. She then pointed to a picture of a Tuscan sunset on the wall and reaffirmed her statements by saying something like, "See? There's a sunset. Big deal. I can see it right here and not spend a bunch of money and have to deal with foreigners." So she'll never see or hear or feel any of that stuff on her own. She'll live her life through other people with that sort of logic. That kind of thinking just seems about as fake as anyone can get. I guess it's the same as when people who read books about people who do things, exciting things, merely finish the book and do nothing but read the next one without exploring the adventures in the previous one. Those people are the wallflowers of the world.

As it was stated in class, Nietzsche shifted criticism from finding truth to finding meaning. I like to think that Mulder finally realized this on his quest for the truth. Although there is truth out there somewhere, the important thing is that whatever that truth is, the meaning that it holds is what someone should be trying to obtain. As in reading books and watching movies, there are many great lessons for the readers and viewers to focus on and take away with them at the end. I think this is what Nietzsche envisioned when he saw religion taking a fall and literature taking over in its place as to where people could gather their moral senses.