tonight, not wanting to sleep, for various reasons, and because i am growingly, yet with staggered growth, more confidant i went back to your site on my bookmarks.
it seems, having read now the most of your posts surrounding this one, that you actually meant what you have written. i found it horrifying, to the point of not being able to read through the rest of your blog at all, when i first found the page. only because i thought you were being ironic. Very very ironic.

i don’t know how to proceed, since i have lived with the shadow of your intent for these months and not its truth…
I am a christian anarchist, and a nihilist; i love movies and music and thinking. I love life, but only because it affords me the ability to fight desperately and viciously. for me the world, which to a large degree is my self -since the type and character of my mind has given to me an almost literally solipsistic experience of reality a Great deal of the time- only gains value in that it is something to be overcome. One fights, many or all fight, because we have to, and we (i) wage war because it is right, because there is no choice, and because love commands a joyful giver. what could there be that would be better than a reality that demands our acquiescence and the betrayal of god? what could one take joy in more than the infinitesimal and infinitely repeating plowing of choice? what kills more than life? only a life that to be lived must die.

but you were serious; what you wrote.
i looked on the web – to find someone who claimed nihilism and christianity both; and there you were; and it was too much to believe. i thought you mocked my stance. i thought you made a game of my folly, my stubborn furrows, my struggle, my apostasy.

i am not wholly apostate, though that is a claim birthed of hope. i write a zine, titled Girding For War: A Journal Of Christian Anarchism. i am proudly and ridiculously a protestant. i hope upon hope that salvation is by grace, through faith. i further hope and take heart that my god and the Lord transcends us — that universalism still has something to say…

when not solipsistic i (one) can only laugh. the world is too horrible. the gospel is simply that: that light came into true darkness.
horrifying.

my two fav. movies are synecdoche new york and i’m still here. i wonder what you think of them.
my fav. bands are NMH and Catharsis – anarcho-punk metal.
i love humans, and the grace of kindness and the ridiculous. i love spit and fantasy and word and my god, who has saved me too many times to recall, it even seems and was and is, for that is grace, moment to moment. in all things i am saved from myself.

i wish you well, wherever this finds you.
i hope your health is well. i worry you are predisposed, the elapsed time since your last post, and not, rather, busy with new life. it always will come.

be well in grace sister.
L.L.

To answer the OP, Nietzsche’s definition, if that is indeed accurate, certainly isn’t how the term is understood by any semantical definition today. His post made it quite clear that he was discussing existential, or moral, nihilism.

Your claims would be dependent upon Christianity actually having undermined itself by its quest for truth. Setting aside the fact that we live in a world were absolute truth is almost precluded, Christianity’s valuing the truth has in no way undermined it over the course of the last 2000 years and I can see no conceivable reason why it should do so in the future.

Finally, Judeo-Christian morality is intrinsically linked to its divine isnpiration… the first, and most important commandment is to love God. Many theological perspectives emphasise how we are to implement Christian morality in our lives through more fully following this commandment. Were it not decreed by God it would, for a start, lose its rational basis – becoming nonsensical… given that it is inherently connected to God. As he stated it would simply be another subjective life philosophy… and a particularly stupid one given that Christianity largely disregards the idea of self-interest. In addition, as a rational actor, he has stated that he (like myself) would necessarily embrace nihilism. Finally, Christian moral thought itself recognises that “if only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men” 1 Corinthians 15:19.

If I were not a Christian I would be a nihilist…

Nietzsche would say you are a nihilist because you are a Christian. He defined nihilism any belief system that is undermined by its own highest values. Since Christianity, following its Greek-side, makes truth the highest of values, it will eventually undo itself by testing the truth of its Hebrew-side mythologies.

I think your claim that you only follow morality because you belief it to be absolute, that is, guaranteed by a divine reality, is evidence of your truth-seeking undermining you own commitment to moral justice. However, I don’t believe you need throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Would not the history of Judeo-Christian moral thought be the same whether or not God exists? If so, how are you failed by a morality that lacks ultimate justice?

I totally agree that bigotry, closed-mindedness, violence, etc. are human problems and not strictly problems that are tied to a belief in God. They are often belief problems, to be sure, but problems that are just as likely to be rooted in religious dogmas as with its secular parallels.

I don’t think I ever said that all of mans problems are rooted in a belief in God. I don’t believe that I said that atheists were morally superior to believers either. I’m not sure where that came from. If it was from the infectious disease analogy, I hope my explanation above accounts for my intentions.

Would you say that there are also strains of atheism, some of which are fatal, some benign?

And if so, doesn’t this hint at the problem (of ideological “disease”) transcending the fact that an individual or culture is religious? Isn’t it true that bigotry, oppression, close-mindedness, violence, and authoritarian domination are primarily human problems, in the broadest sense, rather than religous problems?

I just don’t see a strong connection between social problems and belief in God or the supernatural. There is something to be said for the particular manifestations of certain, religious dogmas (say, Islamic martyrdom or the Spanish Inquisition), but there tends to be secular parallels to these (Japanese Kamikaze pilots, Pol Pot’s slaughter of millions).

It seems to me that depravity transcends metaphysical ideology altogether.

Whereas earlier, I mentioned that I thought atheists were no less good people than religious folks, it almost sounds like the implication of the notion of religion-as-disease is the moral superiority of atheism. Do you see things this way?

Forgive the hyperbole but perhaps belief is a bit like an infectious disease. It spreads and spreads. People become infected. Some strains are fatal; some strains are benign. Certain populations, cultural/geographic/familial, are more susceptible and quick to become infected. Some indeed may have weak immune systems. Yet some people–although not because they are morally superior people–are immune. Perhaps I am just immune from faith/belief. Certainly, I don’t want myself or others to get infected. But that doesn’t mean that I think the infected are inherently bad people (though I grant that disease is too often seen as a character flaw in our society).

Wow. I think I may have just made the best argument for universal health care and/or vaccination policy that has been made since the onset of the Obama era.

But in the case of God, is the difference reducible to personal disposition (or maybe credulity)?

That is, presumably for you the existence of God is about as likely as the existence of unicorns (or at least unicorn hoof beats).

For me, denying the existence of God comes close to denying some relatively uncontroversial fact about the world.

Do you think it all comes down to intuition?

What I might have been getting at is that, in a practical sense, when I hear hoof beats behind me I first think horses and not zebras. And I almost never think unicorns.

Thanks for replying. If you are still out there, a quick question. You mentioned that your life and beliefs are not based on abstractions like double blind experiments. I’m curious, does this mean that rational inquiry takes a back seat to something else when shaping our worldviews?

That sounds pejorative but I don’t mean it that way. I’m really curious.

My secular world is not an adversarial one. Its not a world that requires me to conduct double-blind experiments on every last detail of life in order to rationalize our very existence. Its simply a world without god(s). I’m fine with that too.