Iain Provan's summary of Nietzsche's atheism:
"Where God himself is dead, as Friedrich Nietzsche so famously proclaimed in this good The Gay Science (1882), death must evidently be victorious int he end, and it begins to consume life in the present. For the death of God means there is no longer any truth that can claim absoluteness, universality, and eternity. There is no Truth, only many truths, there is no Right, only self-created moralities.
Nietzsche himself challenged, for example, the idea that such things as exploitation, domination, and injury to the weak are universally objectionable behaviors. Who is to say? God cannot, and when it dawns on people that God cannot because he is dead, what follows is widespread nihilism (a pervasive sense of purposelessness and meaninglessness) and then wide spread idolatry (as people embrace alternative absolutes to God as a way of investing life with meaning). Idolatry leads in turn (as always) to inhumanity to others, as the false gods require their sacrifices.
This is Nietzche's world, and we currently live in it. It is a culture of death, and romantic escapism is in truth a fairly innocuous response to it when compared with those other responses evoked from human beings as the twentieth century passed. It has been a century marked at one and the same time both by unparalleled progress in technology and by unparalleled despair and brutality as the value of human beings, set loose from the valuation of God, has plummeted in the world markets.
The cultural passion for romance and fairy tales can be seen as an emotional and cultural and moral refusal to accept that God is dead even while there has been a widespread intellectual capitulation to the idea. It is a sign of transcendence - an indication that we are indeed created in the image of God and cannot escape that reality even if part of us wishes to. The larger story that makes sense of these fairy tales - the biblical story - has long since been abandoned yet the culture cannot give up on its hope that somehow (author's emphasis) it is true that 'death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while'.
In other words, our culture refuses to accept that what it intuitively knows to be good - self-sacrificing love, commitment, intimacy -has no lasting place in the universe. It insists, against all the evidence, that good, in the end, defeats evil. It does so because the truth of God has not yet been fully suppressed in human hearts or in society and because nihilism has not yet, therefore, become a contagion. We will be in a pitiable state if it ever becomes the normal way of looking at the world, and it may yet, if the youth culture of the present moment is any guide.
Iain Provan, The NIV Application Commentary: Ecclesiastes/Song of Songs, p. 377.
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