Foolishness

These days I hear so much about how the bible is a source for the Judeo-Christian morality that so dominates the world today. Even Nietzsche, an Atheist if there ever was one, believed that if God was done away with (Meaning, if a person was an atheist) then it was ridiculous to not do away with the Judeo-Christian morality that claims the commandments and literature of that God to be the source of modern morality.

Nietzsche would be correct to do away with modern morality if it were true that it was sourced primarily in a faulty religious tradition. Yet this is not the case, it has not been the case for millenia, I have my doubts that it was ever truly the case (Though the conditions under which religion was created are mysterious to me beyond all other things). Morality has changed and evolved throughout civilization, it has its origins in religious and secular tradition, in religions now dead and religions currently alive. Throughout this evolution our concept of morality, the things we have deemed worthy of law and the labels of 'good' and 'evil.'

There is no singular source of modern morality. To misunderstand or deny this is a path to nothing but evil. No single tradition, not even the Judeo-Christian tradition with the bible can claim to have a stranglehold on modern moral thought. The bible itself is not the source of any beliefs - what people take from the bible, how they interpret it morally - this is a subjective act. The morality that people claim originated within the bible really finds its source in human moral intuition. Nothing else.

The atheists morality tends in large part to be the same as the reasonable Christian's morality. This is the case because the reasonable Christian looks to the bible and discards that which is clearly nonsense and preserves only that which makes sense. When something is unclear, the reasonable Christian withholds judgment and defers to his moral sensibilities. Ultimately, these moral sensibilities are the source of morality - the bible is just a convenient mirror.

But it is a broken mirror, the fundamentalist movement has proved this if nothing else.

The Begining

Here again.

My name is, as perhaps you guess, Genial Goethe. Not the Goethe of the past, a distant relative whom you have perhaps been acquainted with, certainly not him. Rather a new character, a new form of dissent meant to either resound eternally or echo once and vanish.

So we begin.

What has happened to college today? What is actually being learned, what is being taught in these strange purgatory between childhood and the world as it really is. We come away from this place only with the knowledge that it is all meaningless. Over four years we learn to drink and obsess, nothing more. I saw this trend almost too late, saw myself be slowly consumed, slowly boiled like the ill-fated frog, by my own desires and proficiencies.

When a student leaves home they lose there old value system. It is not a sudden thing, not a gruesome amputation; it a a gradual, scarcely noticeable trend that directs the student slowly and surely away from everything that once held meaning. This guiding hand leads students through both academia and hedonism, through petty -ism's and powerless causes, through alcohol, always through alcohol, into a new nihilism - an American nihilism.

What is this nihilism you ask? Isn't it obvious? Ask yourself, what direction does a graduating senior have when they leave the gates of academia. What purpose is left? Good grades have been achieved - or they haven't. Grades are done now, excepting for the few individuals who remain in the academic world, the American nihilism will find them surely enough, just a few years later. No, those who are thrust into the world with a degree and a tassel are the one bought face to face with the true shape of this nihilism, the shape of which may be discerned through a simple commandment, one which inexorably pushed the establishment of this nation:

"Write when you find work!"

But alas, work for what? A modern student might ask.