Who would've thought a little post about peanut butter...162 responses later... ;)
OK, trying to catch up:
@ivo:
Firstly, Nietzsche was NOT a facist, his philosophy is directly opposed to mass movements and big governments, and for you to mischaracterize him that badly tells me either you've not actually read the man's works and have just been going off of what you've heard from others or a popular misconception born out of WWII, or else you read hum and misunderstood him as badly as you possibly could.
Nietzsche had a weird thing with his sister (I don't know if that's really incest so much as he just didn't know how the fuck to deal with women...which as an aside I just find one of the great in-jokes in philosophy: a guy can challenge God and the Church and our entire conception of how we live our lives and that's no problem for him...but he can't ever figure out women and even in his books he's wildly incosistent on his viws on them- so women are more confusing than God? You know, I and I think a l,ot of guys would probably sympathize with that sentiment sometimes lol...) but was not a facist and not at all like the characiture you paint him out to be.
Secondly, ivo, I am not a believer, and I'm not saying anyone who is not is an extremist. For the record I am a skeptic as to WHAT is a higher power, if that's an intelligent and deified being or a creating chemical force or whatever, but I think there's something, and that the Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and all the rest, all those ideas can be looked at but NONE can be taken as the 100% correct answer, and likewise no atheistic idea, even the ones that ARE good and fit beautifully in logic, are 100% convincing in their case...I believe that the discovery of what the "truth of it all" is is yet to be made, and has not been made, one way or the other by the theists or atheists.
FINALLY, ivo, you seem to have an erroneous impression of my "void" mentioning, making you 0-3 in reading comprehension; as Frendly Sowrd and Crazy Anglican got what I meant (I'm just glancing over the 50+ replies since I left but I think at a glance Anglican was overall closer with maybe Sword being closer to home on one or two points) I'm chocking that up to your mishap, then, since it was understood by the other two out of the three who read it.
@dexter morgan:
You just hit upon a key phrase- "hits all the available data." Well, if you feel you have an answer that's not God, of course you won't have a void- you've filled it with that answer. Now, whether that answer is 100% valid is another matter- and non offense but as I have yet to see anyone from any walk of faith or lackthereof give me an answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything, so to speak, that fits 100%, I am not optimistic that yours will be that perfect one, but I'd love to hear your answer, it might have some good ideas in it- but the point is if you have New Idea X to fill the void in our undeniably-more secular society and the "Death of God" (again, that's to be taken as the death of the IDEA, not the actual deity, too many people take that statement literally) then of course you won't feel the pain of the void...there's no void for you anymore, you filled it, even if you were never aware of the void to begin with, you've filled it for yourself.
The "void" is just as much a historical claim as it is a philosophical one. Look post-Darwin and post-Nietzsche, when the science world gives the theory of evolution and directly challenges Genesis and the books of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard coming first and blasting the Church while to an extent sparing Christianity in his ciricism, and Nietzsche following and blasting the whole operation altogether by saying "God is Dead," "There was only ever one true Christian and he died on the cross," etc.) also oppose the traditional viewpoint of the until-then largely-Christian Western World, and there's the void.
Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Beckett- all follow out of that void and make it bigger, as two huge World Wars and the horrors of facism, totalitarianism, the possibility of nuclear annihilation, the Holocaust...all this makes for a Western World that starts to severely wonder how a "always-loving" God could allow for such attrocities...or perhaps even still be looking over them...or even exist at all.
Camus' "The Fall" and "The Stranger" and "The Plague."
Beckett's "Waiting For Godot" and Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead."
Heidegger's challenge to our very idea of existence in "Being and Time" and Sartre's response in what was arguably the last truly great and important philosophical text to date, "Being and Nothingness" (you can argue for maybe "A Theory of Justice" by John Rawls being the latest and certainly that's a very important work of political philosophy and certainly a great text, but it's not as well known to the mainstream and thus maybe not as big of an impact as "Being and Nothingness," but I digress.)
ALL texts which expound upon, or respond to, or talk about, or is a work of art born out of...that VOID.
Nowadays, I think there's actually an intersting phenomenon with that void, in that maybe it's "better" now but that it will be "back" and be "worse" when it rears its head again.
To explain that- I think the mainstream has accepted, to a certain degree, the fact that there are atheists and agnostics and some people of various faiths might even acknowledge the fact that some of the logic in Atheism is quite sound and is a bit of a blow to the pre-20th century mostly intact "Christian West," so to speak. We have Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Darwin in the 19th Century, but Kierkegaard doesn't really speak out against Christianity so much as how the Church mangles it's true meaning in his opinion and besides that is greedy and a do-nothing organization, and then both Darwin's and Nietzsche's ideas are met with scorn in the 19th Century or else simply ignored by a lot of people, they have some influence but become MUCH BIGGER influences in the 20th Century. The 20th Century gives more and more technology, to the point where we can clone and build increasingly-sophisticated robots...to a certain extent we cAN (though probably shouldn't to a great extent) play God. With all this technology, we have two HUGE wars that become showcases for much of this technology- biological warfare and increasingly sophisticated and brutal and accurate guns and machine guns and mortars and on and on, we go from having flight be a dream outside of a balloon to having a few Wright Brothers-like planes to the equivalent of flying-machine-gun-planes in WWI to bigger and deadlier planes to having planes that are enormous and can drop the equivalent of a sun on a city. We have a 1 million or so Armenian Genocide, and then a 6 million or so Holocaust. We have a War of Empires, and then a War of Regimes. WWI sees warfare that is more and more dehumanizing, as you can get mowed down by someone with a machine gun or blown to bits and never see the face of your killer and, more significantly, you can kill now without ever seeing the face of the man you took a life and a future from- THAT is dehumanizing. Additionally, in WWI you can claim that all or most of the parties were to blame and were vicitms to some extent, so there's no clear-cut "good guy/bad guy" image of war. WWII rolls around, and we have facism and all the horrors of it in Germany, her territories, and Italy, a just-as-brutal communist regime in the USSR that's MASSIVE, democracies that try and appease Hitler and essentially throwing him other innocent people to rule over in the hopes their people will be spared a war "in our time," and then in Japan an empire with just as fanatical a devotion to their craft of killing as any other army in their time. THEN you have Jews and Arabs fighting a long, never-resolved (to this day) war in the "holy Land" and both sides have a claim and again we lack a clear-cut "good guy/bad guy" as both are good and bad to an extent, both do rights and wrongs. THEN the same thing in Korea (never resolved, with only still just a ceasefire, I think, so technically you might argue still at war and certainly still split) and, of course, that little Cold War thing where one slip of a thump and the world goes up in a (mushroom) poof of smoke.
So........yeah, people throught all that are wondering just a tad, "WHERE IS GOD?"
The play of the 20th Century (and I don't think that's disputable, no other theatrical work, stage or film, and I'll even go out on a limb and say no piece of fiction PERIOD is more important and more a sign of the times and the stresses of the world then and still today), "Waiting For Godot," is testament to that. Any doubt there's a void, watch "Godot" ONCE and I guarantee, if it's a good performance (see it live, the movie versions are terrible because you just can't do this as a movie, one of those works that don't translate from stage to screen well) you'll get what I mean when I say there's a HUGE void- STILL.
And the reason I say that this is "better" now but will return "worse" later is because, quite simply, we never filled, never directly DEALT WITH that void. We ignore it...some of us still hold faith the same as ever in spite of it...some are atheists and feel that the answer even if that answer raises more questions still...
We have yet to, in our Western Civilization, decide what to do, in as great a consensus as God once was, about this void, this challenge.
Think about it- again, as late as the 19th Century (and you can even say about the 1940s-1950s for some places) and you'll see that we had, as a Civilization as a whole, the whole of the West, mostly had one thing that the could agree on, and that was that there was a God, and that He was the God of the Bible. There were divisions within that idea, you had and still have Catholics and Protestants and Lutherans and Calvinists and then non-Christians like the Jews in Europe and American and all that, but they ALL, still, at least could believe as one:
In the Beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth.
That idea, as a unifiying force, stood for 2,000 years relatively sound, even with the Scientific Revolution in Galileo's time, you could still say God created the Heaven and the earth, and 99% of the West would likely be able to at least agree on THAT.
We don't even have THAT anymore after all those names and events of the last 150 years.
THAT is the void.
People try to ignore it, largely, and pretend it's "just a philosophical problem."
Except thopse tend to become BIG problems...for EVERYONE.
And if you don't believe that, again, look at the last 150 years- all those wars and issues have profound ideological underpinnings.
Marxism.
Facism.
"God promised us this land and our Temple!" vs. "We're here now with our Dome!"
And plenty more.
But ALL THOSE, all of them, pale in comparison to the God void.
Again, whether you were an American or Englishman or Frenchman or Spaniard or German or Russian or Pole or Austrian or Italian or whatever, you could at least all come together over the god idea.
That is now gone, we CAN'T.
And there are people who want to pretend nothing's changed ans worship like it's still the Dark Ages (fundamentalists) and on the other side there are people laughing and hooting and hollering at them for being childish fools (the Dawkins-style of atheists.)
And then a BIG chunk of the population in the middle, maybe leaning one way or the other but still the middle, and they're going to get caught in the crossfires.
Because we have a LOT of fanatics out there, in every religion, and in non-religion.
The popel who say "the world would be so much better if all the Jews were just gone" and, correspondingly, I'm sure, some Jews who think "you know, we had that site where the Dome of the Rock is first, we should just kill all the Muslims and the world would instantly be better" and "all religions are violent and we should just blow up all the religious leaders"
ALL IDEOLOGIES have their extremists.
And THEY are the ones that start things.
Extremists for the already-pissed Serbs, The Black Hand, start WWI.
A few extreme Germans find a extreme Austrian and you get the Nazis.
A radical regime makes the USSR atheistic and expunges religion there.
A few Arabs get it into their heads to fly a couple planes into towers.
Heck, even the American and French Revolution, it wasn't the Washingtons and Adamses and Jeffersons or the normal farmer or fisherman that started it, it was some VERY angry colonists...and it GREW...and then...
That Void is still there, and it drags on people without there even knowing it, because it's a drag on society.
And mark my words- before we had just swords or guns to fight out issues, and at least had that unifying idea of God.
We now have weapons that can destroy all life on Earth, and we have lost not only that one common ground, but one that was perceived to be a protector of sorts, it says Jesus or some messiah will SAVE US.
The next wars will be bigger, and deadlier, and all-the-more horrific unless we fill the void. We haven't grown closer as a people, we've just fragmented more (hell, in America, on a microcosm of this, you can see it in out admittedly-broken politcal parties- not D or R anymore, now you have D and R and I and Tea Partiers and different cations inside D and R and smaller factions inside those...it's BROKEN.)
In "Godot" they stay there and wait...and wait...and suffer...and wait. They are in a literal void of sorts. And if they just moved, just left, just tried to fill the literal void of the world or the void within themselves, they might be fine, they're shown to be capable and smart enough to do so.
But they can't, because, as they will tell you over and over, "We're waiting for Godot!"
For Godot has promised to help them and solve all their problems, to give their life meaning.
Godot's abscence is the void.
God's absence is ours.
Without an answer, something that was as perfect an answer for everything as God was, we're no better off than Didi or Gogo (the two characters.)
So yeah- there's the void...in brief. ;)
We need 2 in a live game starts @ 9:20am(PST)
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