NOTHING NEW UNDER THE ... HEADINGS

In my book I explicitly stated the obvious - one of my specialities - by insisting that it, and as a natural consequence this blog, makes no claim to be original.  I have admitted that much, if not most, of it has been said before.  I do hope however that at least sometimes I put old wine into new bottles, and offer a different, personalized expression of why I am an atheist and why I consider religion ridiculous.

A recent Reflection is a good example of all this.  I confess that I have never read any of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's books.  But like so many others, I am aware of some of his ideas and even quotations.  The piece on alcohol, addiction and religion ("State of Denial") is a case in point.  (The allusion to Marx is too obvious, even for me, to deserve comment.)  I wrote it before I discovered what the great philosopher had written on the subject.  I have never opened his book The Anti-Christ, but I did discover on the Net the following quotation from it :  "Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity".  That's it.  That's all I know (so far) about what he wrote on the subject.  His development of it is no doubt more pertinent and penetrating than my poor Reflection.  I'm no Nietzsche, but I don't think anyone will accuse me of plagiarizing his ideas.

I did discover on the same site another quotation from Herr Nietzsche, this one from his other famous work which I have not read either, Thus Spake Zarathustra.  It provides, post factum, a sort of justification for my sometimes criticized tongue-in-cheek, ticklers-and-teasers approach to ridiculing religion : "One does not kill by anger but by laughter."  I couldn't have said it better myself.

                                                               DELENDA   RELIGIO

Comments

[frankophile]

Funny you should say that, Thom. Would like to have said it myself. Then again, though they were mates, Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus often said things differently.

[thom]

But laughing at people often makes them angry - so we must insist that we are not laughing at them but at what they think and believe.

Believers maintain that God is perfect in all things. Hence He/She/It must be perfectly funny. Personally I find the whole idea of God perfectly funny - a non-material being that has personality, likes and dislikes, choices, favourites, changes of mind and all the human attributes we have endowed Him/Her/It with - even humour

Giving God such attributes makes Him/Her/It accessible, likeable - even loveable; a rather more difficult feat to accomplish if we were to think of God as some pulsating amorphous mass of irridescent ectoplasm. Yuk! But just as funny. Almost perfect.