Yah, he made such a glaring mistake when he declared that God is dead that all his credibility is lost to me.
"Ve believe in nossing, Lebowski."
"Yahhh."
"Fucking nihilists, dude."
"The fool has said in his heart, 'there is no God.'" -Psalm 14:1
Nietzsche was a fucking idiot.
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Nietzsche is one of the most misunderstood of philosophers, mostly because of what his
sister did to pervert his texts after his death. It seems that the only thing anyone can remember about him these days is that he said,
"God is dead". This is not precisely true; the quote which really put, "God is Dead", on the map was actually from a character in his book
Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is hardly the linchpin of his philosophy, yet it is important.
To elaborate, in
The Gay Science (not what you think), he goes on as follows:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?—Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann
What he's saying here is not that God is actually dead, not literally. He's saying that God might as well be dead for all the attention that we pay to him. Nietzsche is saying that God has become irrelevant, not because he ceased to exist, but because people stopped caring about him, and started worshiping themselves in his place—which is a pretty Christian point of view, if you think about it.
Fundamentalists fail to see this because they are unable to understand metaphor. What most people don't know is that Nietzsche was a biblical scholar that could write circles around most who profess to know the Bible. Nietzsche was not a nihilist; he saw it as a problem to be overcome. Nihilists care about nothing. People who care about nothing don't write books full of the ideas that they care about so much that it drives them to madness.
It's too bad no one reads the classics. I blame the current state of our education system and it's focus on producing hospital billing specialists, and other such sycophants, rather than concentrating on academics such as philosophy (including natural philosophy, also known as science) and mathematics. But that's a whole other rant.
