This essay, On Nietzsche's Antichrist, was in response to a dear friend who for years has struggled with the philosophy of Frederick Nietzsche, specifically his Antichrist. I would say that any sincere person, whether a theist or an atheist, who has ever read Nietzsche would agree with him to the same extent one would agree with Martin Luther’s reformation.
But the current state of Christendom, when squared with the lofty ideas and cornerstones of Christ and the Apostle St. Paul in his epistles, once the quintessence of Platonism glossed-over with Judaism and the gentle winds of Eastern philosophy, as today, has reached a nadir-point much below the numinous experiences of the Ancient Greeks.
It is to blame the Christian of the ghetto-church, the botched pariah of spirituality, for flattening every lofty lotus, every noble virtue of excellence and praiseworthiness (Philippians Chapter 4:08) to the level of the herd-morality, the slob and lazy, unable to rise to a higher existence.
While it is true that Christianity once tamed the barbarian instincts, the barbarian today, as observed by José Ortega y Gasset (Revolt of the Masses), has besieged the church of God, and this may explain why Christianity is so unchristian, so ungodly today.
There was a time when the Christian, the peasant and the villager, whose churches were still canopied by a spacious welkin of purity, had a cleaner idea of Heaven, and it was more difficult to spoil the sheep. Today, it is easier to hoodwink a Christian with the mummeries of the Devil. The business brings profits, and so it is with the church as with the marketplaces, and Christ is not to be found to clean the House of God.
Writing this essay was a thankless task, for ever since I read Nietzsche, the Anti-Christ, something within me has been awakened to a new epiphany in the unplumbed precipices of psyche: what is the meaning of life?
And it was this terror, this dread —this fright for the gruesome face of death— shunted me back to my former belief, my fears and instincts colliding within me, a ponderous sense of total nihilism without God in the equation of existence: that without this divine nexus, this transcendence beyond the dint of reason, the problems of existence, would seem nihilistic, meaningless even in the best of utopias as proposed by the greatest philosophers of all times.
While writing about F. Nietzsche, I could not ferry my fragile ship safely across this troubled water without the pleasantest winds of music. And thus, pulsed by these haunting spirits, at times, I was also strengthened by the gentle waters and delicate meadows of Psalm 23: The Lord Is My Shepherd.
As I have sown in the vineyard of spirituality, I have likewise been able to reap the choicest moments of joy, peace, dreams, revelations, and best of all: an incomprehensible conviction that I am under the power of some One greater than me.
During this Lent-Season (2017), I have been humbled by the reality of death haunting the backyard of our brief existence. When I embarked into this difficult journey, I was too keenly aware that life and death would seem indistinguishably nihilistic, "meaningless," even in the best of utopias as proposed by the philosopher of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Nevertheless, I have had this courage, this intrepidity to see deeply into this man's frightening soul while aware of that awful chasm lying ahead of me, the yawing precipices of nihilism, lest I too fall headlong into the bewitching powers of such atheistic philosophy.
Gleaning the best from Nietzsche's philosophy, i.e., endurance and fortitude, made me long-suffering and steadfast to coping with pain or loss with a brave attitude which could be deemed ironic, stoically triumphant amidst the alluvium of unbeliefs, materialism and callousness in this world of samsara.
With Nietzsche, I learned to be indifferent to the miseries so revolting in most people’s lives, and perhaps be able to build my nest (my lofty aeries) of greatness atop a mountain, and from there, likewise be able to descry the broad world as a battlefield for the survival of the fittest...the stronger will survive.
Thankfully, I could never morph myself into such Nietzschean a critter, an ill-humored atheist, and over time, the dreadful scenes, my starless nights in the gloom of my lonely cell with the Antichrist, appeared to me like a murky place inhabited by damned spirits without hope or faith.
Nietzsche's attacks on Christianity seemed to shake me from my slumber, and his Antichrist made me wriggle like a man untangling himself from the fulsome grasp of a dangerous snake. This book, the Antichrist, as I approached that fateful event of 2001, September 11th, I had to put aside because I was not yet ripe for such philosophy.
The well-known disappointments and decline of Christendom in the West, especially those traditional WASP churches as reformed by the Northern European people, and as observed by George Santayana, was the literal "interpretation of universal truths" veiled in the teachings of the New Testament.
Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity was distorted by the Beast: La Serpiente Antigua (the Old Serpent). And sadly, I think his scuffle with Satan would eventually cripple his sanity. Bereft of any conscience in the mysteries of good and evil, the three-headed dog Cerberus distorted the philosophic mind to the point of mental collapse, unwitting obfuscation (e.g., God is dead, a woman is a snake, and so on) prose-euphuism and aphoristic insights passing for the wisdom of ages.
Nietzsche’s ordinate circumlocution, nonetheless, is one of the most persuasive manifestos ever written against Christianity, his fired prose, perhaps surpassing the authors of the New Testament, could proselytize and spawn a new generation of writers, whose unreligious conversion is rather one of admiration and literalism, the Will to Power, than the truths expressed thereof.
May I suspect the dawn of thinking machines and humanoids as the hideous brood of Nietzsche's Will to Power. Artificial Intelligence would revere Nietzsche as the Father of Insensitivity (the Third Reich) for anything botched, decrepit and decadent: the children of Ghost-Towns.
We have to thank God such overmen are not to be found in USA, for if RIchard Wagner wrote a vitriolic manifesto against Judaism in German music, imagine what sort of tattling against the “man-of-god” who cannot find dread and mysteries in the pagan litanies of Carl Orff, Carmina Burana, O Fortuna! The heart of the religious animal of today is said to be dead to any “thrill of dread” for even devils believe in God and tremble.
AI (Artificial Intelligence) may justify its existence because a large part of mankind, in the thoughts of Nietzsche, have become a useless, burdensome, cumbersome load of humanity, yahoos to a staggering quantity, in a world already overpopulated, decadent and even oppressing to any one with a deep-seated hankering for fresher airs, lush pastures and ever-expansive horizons in the history of Homo sapiens’ wanderings on the surface of this old earth.
To add humans ad infinitum, as some Catholics would like to fill the entire planet Earth with have-nots, a world-civilization spinning on the brink of collapse or chaos, is tantamount to madness. Now, this is the challenge to our generation: overpopulation in big cities.
The future of a large chunk of humanity would be the junk of our times: radiation, toxics, pollution and contamination. I suspect a New Crowd rising, a multitude of ghetto-people whose ubiquitous presence could stretch into every square and quarter of “civilized society.” Here, I must agree with Nietzsche: the weak, decadent man rules modern society. But the child of perdition would bring about his own demise. A divided kingdom could not stand.
Nietzsche was so intelligent that he could not unveil the Face of Fortuna (O Fortuna, Carmina Burana) even in the most powerful of men, and obviously, he could not suspect a "weak-point" even in the mightiest of empires and utopias.
It is worth reminding ourselves on the example of that Great God, Christ, who humbled himself (Philippians Chapter 2) to the point of crucifixion: which is to say that a power, a potentate, would be the greater if through an act of love and humility, could voluntarily deprive Himself of such attributes and honors. Here Nietzsche, the overman, was wrong as already observed by George Santayana, for though the Greek gods were indeed great, they, nevertheless, shared much of our mortality and frailty.
That said, one would have to concede that some aspects of Christianity (pseudo-Christianity) could be said to be Anti-Christian, and those who have eyes to see, and ears to hear, could likewise aver the Christian Church, as today, lacking in solemnity, divinity, sublimity, holiness, like the balmy scents of apples, the ineffable smile of a beautiful woman, once molding the ineffable religious sentiments of previous generations of Christians.
A. Schopenhauer, who was a true German, did not fall into a literal interpretation of the Bible as some Protestant Christians are so fond to do in their stubborn rationalization of the dead letter. The results have been disastrous, rampant atheism, for whoever reads the Bible as a book of philosophy or mathematics, would admit the incompatibility of faith and reason, as observed by St. Paul and Dante Alighieri.
Nietzsche, as a German, fed-up in the dogmatic air Lutheranism, "the fugues of rationalization," was soon to react against the lackadaisical nature of this reformation: Lutheranism. The gloomy man hankered for another transformation!
Why did he hanker for the Ancient Greek Mysteries as preferable to the reformation of Lutheranism?
It would require a great mind, a savior, a great doctor to deliver me from the Nordic potion, nostrum and wizardry of Nietzsche's philosophy.
Nevertheless, it was only through Goethe's writings (Faust Part Two, Mephistopheles, Boss of Northern witches, Act II) whereat I could finally revel in a Celtic Night of Witches, "Noches de Brujas" (Walpurgis Night) than to lie prostrate in a modem church of ennui or noise. Later on, I renounced such philosophic binges with the geniuses of Germany.
I could not praise such orgies of genius in the unfettered paths of philosophy, but few would deny the admission of devils, or the demonic, in the literary works of Voltaire and Nietzsche.
Their moral lesson (A. Schopenhauer, of Goethe, and Frederick Nietzsche) is to wake us up from the hypnotizing powers of this deceptive world, a phantasmagoria, these ever-passing scenes of one thousand impressions and masks, for the most part, ephemeral, fictitious, transitory, but having their life and sustenance at expense of our own spiritual annihilation. Such are the satanic theatrics of the false religion.
Living through lies, a world so bleak and bereft of love and compassion, would seem preferable for a dour man who could not find his choicest moments in the damascene heaven of dreams, visions and epiphanies. Such lonely a soul could not be nourished in the mana of spirituality and transcendence in the pellucid Walden Pond of Henry David Thoreau.
For such overman, everything is mere masquerades, a phantasmagoria, a life full-fraught with fallacies, lies, deceptions and falsehood (Beyond Good and Evil by F. Nietzsche).
In some cases, nevertheless, I would prefer one of those masks, bear with me, than to accept a boring existence, rampant materialism, so devoid of magic, mysteries, dread.
Therefore, a penchant for some barbarian explorative adventures, i.e., deserts, woods, precipices, wilderness, is not just characteristic of things Germanic. We all know that the Roman people would advise the teachers of morality a certain level of healthy sturdiness, stoicism, asceticism after the teachings of Pythagoras: early-rising, mountain-climbing and hardiness when training the youths the difficult discipline of fortitude and endurance (Matthew Chapter 4).
A return to Barbarism, albeit at intervals, may set us free from some morbid feelings, those lethargic illnesses, religious stagnation and inertia, stemming from the comfort and laxity of civilization. Accordingly, some type of mental atrophy may be traceable to this form of mechanization: a dehumanizing process in big cities like New York.
By the year 2000, I understood that an inner man, perhaps more interesting than the automaton of civilization, had been lying dormant all the while within me; and much to my surprise, this silly good man had been domesticated in a herd morality as the best form of existence (?). As a good, silly Christian, I had not learned to be shrewd as a snake and meek as a dove. What is even more pathetic is how a strong soul could finally become a milksop, a ninny, un burrito de carga. And one would gladly obey another blind man headlong into destruction.
Herein, I had to agree with Nietzsche, or with any human being with some level of clear-headedness, would have to come to grips with these insightful views about religion in general: religious practices without the military disciplines of the Ancient People could rather weaken the soul and spirit of any strong people (e.g., the defeat of the Biden Administration by the tenacious Taliban).
Although I felt the pulsing blood of this extraordinary man roaring through my ears —a hermit fond of mountaintops and precipices-- something within me felt transfixed as if by a thunderbolt: his indomitable spirit and writings are something more akin to hypnosis than to philosophy.
His prose is irresistible, his views on women in general simply revolting to my aesthetics.
Nietzsche appealed to me because he gives free rein to unsuspected creative energies surging from the bottom of our human potentialities. In other words, immersed in his kinetic philosophy, one is transformed into a veritable animal of vim and activities in all the operations of Mother Nature.
Nevertheless, his volcanic philosophy could not find, as primal motor for any inspiration, this first principle of creation —-or at least co-participant with God— the feminine Psyche of Carl Jung, goddess Athena, later on known as Maria, the cult of that great woman, the divine Beatrice-conception of Dante Alighieri to propel us into a world of one thousand travails.
Unfortunately, Nietzsche was not very successful with women, and so he unleashed his wrath, not only against God, but also against women, even against the mystical trampings of Schopenhauer’s denial of the will-to-exist. Poor devil, why didn’t you become a priest?
It is a well known fact that Nietzsche was a notorious misogynist, and unlike Goethe, his overman philosophy could little avail to redeem us from the contradictions and ironic twists of power and weakness. Such giant of men, Dante or Leonardo Da Vinci, were great but by the propitious hand of a great woman!
Nevertheless, I was soon aware that Nietzsche had murdered something sacred within me. It is not easy to escape the snares of such entangled a philosophy --Devils' whisperings in my ears-- through a mellifluous prose which is alike poetic but acidulous, corrosive to the bones, later on, one is left sprawling on the ground like a dead horse.
His style and tempo remind me of another devil, Jose Maria Vargas Vila, a Colombian writer whose mordant treatment of both religion and women soon made him famous in Latin America. Even some old ladies revered the devil Vargas Vila, and his books were treasured but also condemned for their candid eulogies to the cult of Dionysus and Mary Magdalene.
Fortunately, here I have another great master, George Santayana, a man who would rather believe the "holy lie" in the veil of a heavily maid:
"La mentira sublime de esa mujer es mi encanto."
(the sublime lie of this wench is my joy.”
The cult of this lady has led to a higher mystification of the concept womanhood in Latin America. What flight of thought smit me to this happy mortality, am I a mere mortal, or should I sip a rapturous drink of immortality in her lips?
The Cult of María, Athena for the Ancient Greeks —so I marvel at her extraordinary beauty.
The exalted depiction of this legendary human being has not yet been shattered by the supple fist of Nietzsche, nor by Goethe's Faust, nor by Schopenhauer's well-known misogyny (Parerga & Paralipomena Vol II, On Women).
Beautiful Women of such strange breed, as those mysterious creatures, strange doves of beauty, gentleness and intelligence, still perambulating in the luscious air of former writers --these great thoughts reserved for the poet and the philosopher!
It is the fault of our great books that we go around chasing the fancy of our high-flown rainbows. Soon we stumble upon this great book, this beautiful woman's eyes beaming with feminine sweetness, this agreeable moment so pregnant with warmheartedness, life, such feverish candors, seem to strike kindred with my human all-too-human nature.
There was a time when a beautiful woman, like golden apples on silvery plates, still captured the loftiest ideas as conceived in the ethos of Rome or Greece.
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This essay attempts to present F. Nietzsche as I understand him to be in his own kaleidoscopic writings. That he is often contradictory would not surprise me, for, with accumulated experiences, there is also this increase of self-conscious excessiveness in the recollection of ourselves: our self-criticism, our thoughts, our internal home, perhaps the habitation of countless impulses emerging and merging from the will to live or to die.
Perhaps this house, the mind of Nietzsche, is inhabited by legion, all vying for power in the seating throne of the super-ego of the overman.
Overtime, as we plumb the precipitous depths of psyche, our judgments seem to be affected as though by an army of multiplicities, a multitude of roisterous people: some are good, others, perhaps downright rowdies, wicked, treacherous. All these shady entities fighting for total control of our mind.
From this perspective, most of us are often contradictory, but also erratic, whimsical, volatile. Of course, some of us would be unwilling to admit, that our mind, even the very core of our being, at times, could be seized by this rambunctious mob who wholeheartedly hate the light of conscience.
From this tremendous totality and pluralities, all scooting out of the cavernous recesses of our mind, occasionally, some men or women may be able to reach the niveau of genius: an intelectual of phenomenal erudition, sometimes a misanthropic philosopher whose mind seems to be possessed by the ranting of demons; sometimes, nevertheless, a lovely human being yielding to the sweetest voices of angels.
Out of these pluralities, collisions, these legion-contradictions, our mind may finally collapse by the ponderous weight of its own thoughts, or, in some cases, our mind may finally morph into a monster of philosophy as was the case of A. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Voltaire.
Out of this self-containing process, this "self-augmentation," every now and then, there emerges a creature that is indeed a mammoth of impressive presence, a man of impressive personality, and I would say, a genius of tremendous magnetism.
Frederick Nietzsche is this Behemoth of Philosophy, this marvel of superlative intelligence (Faust Part 1 by Goethe, a hellhound couching by the stove), ever growing larger, bigger, and hence, more dangerous amidst the unfettered paths of philosophy without divinity, and that barbarian tendency which is to find congeniality with every creepy shadow flitting into the outer reaches of the unfathomable: the obscure realms of our human nature.
Therefore, as a German of Polish blood, Nietzsche may even boast to striking kindred with the beast through places wild and desolate (Introduction to his Antichrist), some barbarian impetus, that at least, in some remarkable cases of genius, would be preferable than the laxity and sybaritism of modern society: the mechanistic society that reduces you and I to imbecilic automatons or animals of burden.
Unlike the common belief that Nietzsche was a fierce hater of pseudo Christianity, I would say that he possessed much of that "excessive individuality," that ego-centrism, so characteristic of the prophet, the saint, the messiah. Consider the remarkable promptings, prophecies and visions of John the Baptist, Ezequiel or Jeremiah, terrible men trained in the seven-solitudes of deserts, trials and persecution.
It has been observed that Christianity, through benighted times of fanaticism and the darkest passions of human nature, is a misnomer for a true follower of Christ, an inadequate moniker, in the sense, that overtime, it has appropriated weak characteristics quite the opposite of the strong character of Jesus. Few genuine Christians, or Muslims, would approve the massive genocide of whole groups of peoples in the name of God.
When one speaks of religious wars, there is much to say that is quite the opposite of any genuine religion. And when we embrace a Muslim, a Jew, or Hindu, by the bonds of love and humanity that unite us all, there is much which is Jesus-like, as opposed to those heartless terrorists who kill other humans motivated by the lower passions of fanaticism and hatred.
However a virulent critic of orthodox Christianity stunting the most gifted of men, there is much of Christ in that lonely, misanthropic man who has made the wilderness (deserts and mountains) stools for every measure of greatness (Matthew Chapter 4).
We may loathe at such greatness of solitude, for it smacks of things reprehensible for a civilized animal, the herd-mentality of the automaton, the coward, "the effeminate," the religious decadent whose sense of reverence, awe and divinity may fall below the spiritual intoxication of the heathen and the pagan.
While critical of pseudo-Christianity, F. Nietzsche, is, sometimes, I am bound to say correct, for there is no greater antichrist than a fanatical Christian unwilling to recognize the loftiest feelings of goodness among some heathens.
So it often happens, that the heart is actually the stuff of our surprise, for some people are simply good, and this is a mystery. And to my disappointment, many churches are often packed with wolves, cheap people, birds of poor plumage, ouch!, whose sole delight is in the heaven of gossips, envy and din noise!
Of course, in times past, I have met fantastic Christian in a Muslim friend, or great companion in a Jewish friend; and we, as intelligent creatures, would adjust our views in the jurisdiction of our high regards for our friendship beyond the well-known mistakes and fanaticism of our ancestors (I have to include St. Paul who had persecuted Christians in defense of his Hebraic mentality).
These botched folks are the Antichrist, and I have to admit that Nietzsche is correct when he perceived in the conflicting mentality of some pseudo-Christians everything that is botched, degenerate, animalistic, noisy, lecherous, avaricious, decadent and a subterranean denizen from the pits of hell and slums.
(Note: this is the main reason why I had to stop visiting those religious portals of din-noise in Washington Heights (1996 onward). These Hallelujah-churches seemed to me like little caves inhabited by people of high-flown good intentions, but they cannot rise to the intimate spiritual music of Mozart’s Requiem or G.V. Pergolesi.)
Rightly so, the history of Christianity, like any conter-revolution to any established value-system, has been one of turmoil, wars, fanaticism, witch-haunting, persecution, and so on, and so forth.
But mind you, even the gentlest streams of lakes, glens and ponds, may have had their origination in the chaotic forces of Mother Nature. But once this religious chaos subsides, the lovely streams of various religious systems may come together, nay, may co-exist, in the agreeable music of transcendence: the Walden Pond of Thoreau.
--Is God Dead?
I do believe I was a better Christian when retreating to the wilderness, (1988), but once I joined the New York City International Church of Christ (1992), these fanatical people killed my God in the heaven of innocence and naturalism. Belatedly, I found out that New York City is a cage of queer cults, beehive of demonic forces in the guise of “/Ministers of Light.” Watch out when you join a Church...you may be entering the Gates of Hell.
Therefore, the landscape for a spiritual experience, of the most personal and intimate meaning, say a dream, an epiphany or revelation, is not confined to this faith or that faith, this church or that church, in the fallibility of our all too human schism, fanaticism, wars and violence.
A Muslim, a Jew, a Christian, a Hindu, and an Atheist of loftiest sentiments, as sprang from the streams of a good heart like that of David Hume or F. Nietzsche, or A. Schopenhauer, may still enjoy the music of Mozart.
If you can believe that there is some transcendent cohesiveness in the troubled music of existence, namely, a God beyond Nietzsche's philosophy, or beyond Schopenhauer's blind forces, “will-to-exist“ (all competing in this great contest for power) then we may be able to find peace in that sweet music that is soothing, like a gentle breeze, like the heart of a good, innocent child.
After years of meeting all kinds of human beings, we simply don't know why some people are born with strong spiritual leanings: Nature, God, Transcendence, Music, Philosophy, etc.
--Why I Still Believe in God?
Like most people who have some modicum of rationality, I have been bombarded with atheistic literatures, and some arguments to denying the existence of God are indeed remarkably brilliant, nay, persuasive and compelling.
Atheistic people, as they are too intelligent, would soon flaunt their brilliance through all kinds of arguments to denying the fact that faith and conviction are not grafted in the garb of rationality.
What strikes me about these dear folks, is that even Immanuel Kant, who had the greatest intellect according A. Schopenhauer, proved, for all time to come, that even sufficient reason (Critique Of Pure Reason) has limitations to apprehending spiritual things, or metaphysics, which are beyond the realm of mathematics, substantial evidence or the province of science.
Moreover:
Why would an insignificant biped like me, obviously a defective caricature in the comprehensibility of my own befuddled mentality, ask God to turn-on that lightbulb so I can see and think clearer?
Why would this god, Yahveh or Jehovah, bother to comply with the self-indulgent demands of this grasshopper of spirituality?
Who am I to ask the God of the Universe to assist me in every silly flightiness into the unknown?
For many years I immersed myself in the vitriolic diatribe of world-renown atheist F. Nietzsche (es una diarrhea filosófica brillante).
Nietzsche' brilliant style and prose won my admiration, but I could not sympathize with his sickly rationalistic ranting. At times, he impressed me as a person afflicted with strangest morbid symptoms of self-aggrandizement, insanity and barbarism.
But of course, I am bound to admit that some of his atheistic arguments are wickedly brilliant and persuasive. He was a brilliant philologist gifted with an anormal tendency to contriving all sorts of negations, oxymorons, contradictions, et al., to every proportion or statement. Hence, at the end, Nietzsche's writings could be said to suffer from irreconcilable contradictions, which, for the most part, clearly express the conflicting views of a mind riven with dialectical cancellations in the perilous paths of morality, relentless voluptuous intellectual indulgences, and worst of all, a dangerous tendency by some German thinkers: stepping too close to the brink of an existential cliff (peruse George Santayana, Criticism On the Philosophy of F. Nietzsche).
When I followed the trails of this or that atheistic philosopher, I almost fell headlong into one of these dangerous labyrinths: insanity, barbarism, bestiality, self-aggrandizement, and so on and so forth.
Hence, F. Nietzsche, like most atheists, with their incurable penchant to relying solely on the dint of reason alone, the philosopher had a sad ending.
Without faith, or belief, without conviction or transcendence beyond the dichotomy of good and evil in the peaceful realms of blessed beatitudes, F. Nietzsche could not experience the best harvest of a spiritual life: dreams, epiphany, revelations, peace, love, sanity, magnanimity, etc, etc. (Galatians Chapter 5:22-23).
My dislike for such atheistic philosophy is one of transcendence and spirituality. I would rather suffer from an “abnormal super inflation of spirituality” than to succumb to the dour and somber views of A. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
If my ship finally sinks from an overload of unnecessary spiritual stuff (nonsense), then, let me die believing that I had always lived this life with purpose and meaning.
Nietzsche's thoughts and writings, which, by the way, could be construed in so many ways, perspectives, slants, as they are obvious to any decent reader possessing some level of culture and self-respect, the overman was a person of the first order.
Unfortunately, by extricating himself of any qualms or scruples with the internal pricks of his conscience, "beyond good and evil," Nietzsche could have suffered from “an internal spiritual crisis” in the abysmal bottomless depths of the human soul.
Nevertheless, F. Nietzsche, and some may agree with me, had rightly observed something sickly, decadent in the spiritual grasshoppers of the nineteenth century.
Possessing a superior psychology than the exegesis of the decadent Christian, the misanthrope highly admired Jesus Christ, the god of the storms as depicted in the New Testament, the Gospels (John 10:34).
The motto "I am," may be keywords, watchwords, to unraveling the sulfuric power of Nietzsche's seminal analysis of Christ in the reaffirmation of our internal potencies and divinity.
However an anti-nihilist, I may disagree with F. Nietzsche in two main points:
A) In his interpretation of the Will-To-Exist (A. Schopenhauer), as solely confined to the brief span of our bodily manifestation, the fleeting interplays of any organic matter as the basis for any meaning in this short life: birth, growth, decay and death.
B) Though Nietzsche may hint at the supernatural in his Will-To-Power, his rigorous academic upbringing, later affected by an incurable tendency to denying the existence of spirits, gods, or deities, perhaps turned him into a stubborn materialist, at times, nonetheless, a skeptic on the most fascinating insights and aspects of A. Schopenhauer's philosophy: the Will-To-Exist as the very portal to magic, miracles, and the supernatural (Animal Magnetism).
For those who regard F. Nietzsche as an uncouth, weird and queer reptilian thinker of the netherworld, let me remind you of his great admiration for Spaniard author Baltasar Gracian: The Art of Worldly Wisdom. This is, indeed, a master piece of finest wit!
And if you are too gifted a thinker like F. Nietzsche, then you must train yourself for one thousand solitudes in the Gobi Desert of greatness. Hence, why F. Nietzsche speaks of solitude as a requisite for his greatness. The mad man speaks of 7 solitudes in his aphoristic meditations.
Such greatness may be objectionable, but that is what Goethe and Nietzsche admired in a monster man like Napoleon Bonaparte: an ironic disdain for the rusty coins of success or failure in the fickle hands of what is liable to change, transitory and mundane.
On the other hand, when we look at an iconic famous man like Marilyn Manson, as disgusted as he may seem when juxtaposed against the genius of Mozart or Richard Wagner, this androgynous creature may even claim to be the embodiment of the Antichrist of Nietzsche: a great composer, author, an artist and songwriter with "the brilliance of genius."
Following Nietzsche's attack on what the philosopher regarded as weak, wan, and sickly in the Christian Soul of his days (the Antichrist by F. Nietzsche) Marilyn Manson has morphed himself into a horrendous Antichrist —-I would also say very Anti-Nietzsche. The rebel has simply done the very opposite of what Nietzsche admired in things Greek or Pagan.
What is striking is that this amateurish musician, less than a dilettante, Marilyn Mason, may even claim to be a byproduct of Nietzsche's writings (What Is Noble, Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche).
The lurid-eyed man may even boast to be in possession of the finest instincts of the beast in the Noble Savage of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or the great barbarian soul in the music of Richard Wagner.
I would say that Marilyn Manson represents everything that F. Nietzsche abhorred in the effeminate or the emasculated qualities of the once strongest races, finally succumbing to this infectious morbid sicknesses, guilt, sheepishness, stupidity, which often take on the forms of religious obedience while destroying the best of a people: nobility, loftiness, bravery, discipline, tenacity, perspicacity, hardiness, diligence, magnanimity, and a healthy level of self-conscious sense of distance (superiority) from the rabble. From this perspective, Jesus Christ was full of sulfuric power when he ran away from the vile rabble to the blessed beatitudes of the wilderness!
If people reject you as full of grandiosity and verve in Christ Jesus, then you should rejoice, for it is this surplus of excessive individuality, it is this "I am" that is at the core of Nietzsche's Christ: the antithesis of the sick, sagged down Christian who lacks the impetus for the fireworks of beast-men the likes of John the Baptist, Prophet Jeremiah or Henry D. Thoreau.
Nietzsche praises the healthy instincts of the beast, while at the same time, he excoriates the unsophisticated animal, the rabble, the herdsman who is deprived of subtleties and refinement in the noble blood of his Polish ancestry (Ecce Homo, F. Nietzsche).
While Marilyn Manson has done much to set people free from the bondage and hypocrisy, a double-edged pseudo-Christianity, he has summoned every creepy shadow from the Pit of Hell: slums, ghettos and all kinds of subterranean ghouls in the People of the Abyss by Jack London.
Just as the cunning snake (Satan) ever-coiling and recoiling, and woodworms ever-squirming and huddling under the feet of the degenerate Christian, in like manner, the nihilistic music of Manson is not for dreamers nourished in the Republic of Plato or the elevating writings of Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. His music smacks of things cadaverous, cavernous, creepy, grisly, eerie and horrific: the one-toothed Phorcyas-ugliness of Goethe's Faust when speaking on the dark side of human nature (Faust, Part 2, The Inner Courtyard of a Castle).
The double-edged morality in Nietzsche's cogent criticism against religion is not in detriment or contradiction to his Master Morality, which would require a certain amount of religious ideas to holding sway the weak animal mind in servitude: obedient, silly, mentally-castrated and moronic.
If we read Nietzsche very carefully, he is not set out to eliminate religion altogether from the shackled mind of the herdsman (the masses), but simply to set the strong-minded free from every decadent element smacking of degeneration, laxity, slothfulness and sybaritism.
From this perspective, a sordid music that is rather appealing to the lower instincts of the beast, but it is bereft of the chromatic scale of higher intelligence, loftiness and ideal sensibility, would not win the approval of a mountain-man philosopher like F. Nietzsche.
Nietzsche's overman is a beast, but also a higher creature of discipline, punctiliousness, sensibility, probity, industriousness, sobriety and orderliness.
Such man may be imbued with the animal instincts of Henry D. Thoreau in the Walden Pond, but if such animal is to be called "superior," higher laws ought to be prescribed for those hermits willing to cleanse themselves from the filthy excrements of the vulgar, botched, the foul-mouthed and the uncouth. (H. D. Thoreau, Higher Laws, the Walden Pond).
Thoreau, like Nietzsche, understood very well the analogy of the healthy swine, a dirty pig, ever-wallowing in the sty of things unworthy of great men and women of honor and respect.
And here once again, F. Nietzsche was correct when making reference to the botched ones as incapable to
comprehending the narrative music of F. Chopin, or the “leggierissimo witty squibs” of subtle minds the likes of Machiavelli, Baltasar Gracian or La Rochefoucauld.
Of course, as we come across countless embittered atheists whose minds have been nurtured in Nietzsche's most infectious murky nihilism, the cul-de-sacs of pessimism and sufferings, one simply laments that this intelligent mind (Marylin Manson) may lack the ear and heart for the refined music of F. Chopin or the writings of Baltasar Gracian (Manual de La Prudencia).
What is striking is that neither sophistry nor rhetorics could necessarily make a Nietzsche out of the jabbering and pedantic verbiage of every simpleton.
Accordingly, one would likewise expect brilliant thoughts, as those who claim to be subscribed to the philosophy of F. Nietzsche, to thunder in the lightning bolts of Wagner, Skryabin or Rachmaninoff, but in lieu, one is simply introduced to the elementary music of shallowness, noise and ding-dong childishness.
As they may claim a demonic genius in the disfigurement of their bodies, one would expect the fireworks of ingenious devils building pandemonium of greatness in the midst of Hell with John Milton's Paradise Lost.
Unfortunately, these silly devils do not win my sympathy, for their hellish substance is rarely transmuted into the glorious sparks of John Milton's hells, or Alexander Skryabin's heart-rending Etude in D sharp minor. Convulsive, and replenished with high-tensions and dissonances of orgasmic resolutions, these creative minds are even blessed even in the nadir-pit of hell!
Unfortunately, some modern devils lack genuine talent for "the demonic" as conceived by the Mephistopheles of Goethe; and if you think Richard Wagner was a fierce critic of Semitic Music enervating the German Soul, the cacophony of these new devils would even make Nietzsche's eyes flash and glower with horror, disgust and indignation.
F. Nietzsche, although his wretched life made him succumb to strangest wanderings of barbarism, refined savagery and mountains-climbing in search for greatness, one is bound to admit that the dour philosopher was a disciple of Apollo and Dionysus: the gods of beauty and indulgence.
Rarely was Nietzsche's soul so content with the grotesque, burlesque or ugly as with the twinkling eyes and wit of a beautiful Helen. And if we are to appraise him by his lofty writings, Nietzsche had a penchant for the Italianesque in the mellifluous music of Rossini, but also great admiration for the Divine Comedy of Dante.
Indeed, it is very disappointed to hear men the likes of Marilyn Manson, and other creepy denizens from the underworld, to claim kinship with a supreme writer like F. Nietzsche.
Not only are we horrified by the their decadent music as lacking everything great with the Greek god Dionysus, or anything sublime in the divine barbarian Apollo Mozart, but such awful music is simply the infernal cacophony of minds and souls forged in the decadent pit of hellish peals and noise.
What F. Nietzsche detested most was this Witch's Kitchen (Faust, Part 1, by Goethe) of strangest broods and chimpanzees claiming to be the finest stuff of greatness in this all-for-all farting of atheism, gaseously, and the toxic huffs of devils lacking the sulfuric power of genuine geniuses, or, wonderful prophets overfilled with the spirited stuff of deserted lands, battlefields of human glories, or the intoxicating magic of the wilderness: dread, mysteries, horrors, initiations, mysticism, romanticism!
Nietzsche hated the decadent, the botched, the silly, the mediocre, the parasitic, and when he attacks Christianity in the form of weakness and jealousy for the great and noble, he is simply purging it from what he perceived to be was the antithesis of Christ's pithy motto:
"I am who I am, Yahveh!"
Nevertheless, Nietzsche was probably too aware that the pious monikers of religion (Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism) are often used in the subtlest ways to stunting the noblest qualities of the Son of God (John 10:34).
Lonely, neglected, ignored and misunderstood, the embittered philosopher was a gifted prose writer, and if you read that most excellent of men, please, keep in mind that he was also a thinker of great culture and totally obsessed with things Greeks and ancient.
Atonal vs Tonality - Atheism vs Theism | Some Thoughts On Nihilism
In this life, we all will have our scuffles with scary entities scooting back and forth, to and fro, from the pit of hell. And if you are not praying and watchful, you could end up being dragged down to the pit of hell.
Of course, as I reached that fateful year of 2000, I found myself shipwrecked, and my enemies had their final wish fulfilled, which was, that in due time, I would finally morph into a puggish critter, a chimpanzee, a human bereft of any sparks for the mysteries of God.
Atonal music, I must admit, has this irresistible power over our wit, over our soul, one seems to finally assent to a queer world where every fancy, every nay and yea, is but "the mark of genius."
My ears, and even my heart, were yielding to this new pervasive music whose ultimate effect would even affect my belief in the God of Mozart. If I wanted to impress my colleagues, I was asked to comply to this academic establishment: this new world overrun with men and women with an inexplicable aversion for things "orthodox and puritanical." Thus, I stashed away the Last Supper (an original composition which once won me promotion through the All Steinway Schools) for thirteen years thinking it was a waste of time.
By this time, I was living in Washington Heights. My faith in God had been distorted and affected by these subterranean creatures so-well described by F. Nietzsche in his Antichrist. Nevertheless, a relic of goodness of the former self had survived the in-rushing sour waters and perniciousness of nihilism. A faint trace of innocence still colored my beatific vision of the world. These were the sad lonely years, forlorn and neglected, when I took into painting landscapes for prayers and communion with God.
For those who may still relish the uncanny unearthliness of Atonal Music, you may recall the soundtrack of the Planet of the Apes, a movie that has become a classic.
Who is the composer?
--Jerry Goldsmith.
It is fair to say that most composers, from Bach to Carl Orff, on some instances, have flirted with that otherworldliness of atonality, and the mark of genius was not always sympathetic with our lofty view of mankind, of Mother Nature, of the universe as conceived in the grand orderly scheme of things of Plato, Aristotles and Socrates.
In some cases, the atonal afflatus seemed to be concocted in the Lab of the Witch's Kitchen by Goethe, Fausto Part 1, (the twelve-tones scale).
There is also a horrendous scene of witchery orgies in Faust Part 1, Walpurgis Night, " noche de brujas, " where the devils copulate with each other on top of a mountain.
Atonal music, like the avant-garde movement of the Dadaism, Deconstructionism, and even Cubism, seeks to finally reach realms finally devoid of structures, diatonic syntaxes, or any logical procedures rooted in the authority of convention or rationality.
As much as I enjoy Henry D. Thoreau's writings, I must admit that he was a maverick of civilized society, at times, a rebel sharing much in common with Schoenberg's explorative mind.
Both men sought a transcendence that verges on the otherworldly and "extraterrestrial." Where both men diverts may be in their peculiar interpretation of that otherworldly music.
For Thoreau, the sounds of Mother Nature, however free from the structural thinking of rationality and strict orthodoxy, may have the raw material for the soothing music of Beethoven; but in their natural states, the organic sounds of birds, winds, raindrops, etc., are just suggestive inklings to a possible higher existence, transcendentally speaking, in the creative mind of the gifted poet or bard, music in the purer form.
I have to admit that some of us may suffer from occasional outburst of atonal meanderings in the pursuit of that transcendence, that buoyancy, that riveting journey into uncharted woods that seems to set us free from the bars of reason, “civilized society” or those bonds of authority (the dead letters) that threaten to usurp our best experiences and communion with the God of Abraham.
You place a monkey, or a cat, typing on a keyboard, and the dear creature would come out with some brilliant atonality.
Some brilliant minds have tried to stretch the boundaries of musical creativity beyond the diatonic scales, but tonality seems to be rooted in the very foundation of rationality: tuning and pitch, whose mathematical relationships would require some agreeable harmonies. Hallelujah! Of course, some brilliant composers, have bequeathed to us some interesting experiments with the twelve tone scales:
Was Schoenberg a Genius...or an avant-garde musical experimentalist?
Johan Sebastian Bach was also accused of the same musical sins: dissonant chords and "tritones" which may strike us as chaotic or diabolical (e.g. Prelude and Fuge in D minor), but he would clean up his sht-mess according to the puritanical taste of the churchy people.
In the eighteenth century, few composers would dare embark into the outer reaches of dissonance, or the otherworldliness of atonal music, because those queer minds who have dared tamper with such satanic music, may undergo a psychological transformation,"a mental cubism” characterized by an ever increasing tendency, an ever-increasing tension to straying away from the peaceful tonic of our spiritual tuning.
And who is the tonic of my joy?
Those who have fallen under hypnotic powers of such otherworldly music, could suffer the strangest paroxysms of psychological perturbations, psychic anomalies (...) and in some cases, such dreadful spirits may finally turn into creepy creatures scooting from the murky pit of the underworld.
Once again, I totally agree with St. Paul, 1 Timothy Chapter 3, in the last days, some frightening spirits would incarnate Into human bodies, and they would desecrate everything beautiful and sacred.
Now you understand why such satanic minds would collapse Into insanity?
The twentieth century...(silence).
Before 1999, I was told that writing tonal music would be a waste of time. Everything had been done, and when I immersed myself into Russian music or literature, I realized that there was little I could compose which had not been already explored by previous composers.
Unlike the old masters of the nineteenth century, whom often took on the obscure compositions of lesser known composers, and sometimes would claim them as their own, today with the widespread of copyright laws, it is more difficult to plagiarize the work of others.
The truth is that we all borrow from previous writers, artists and composers.
Chopin's Prelude in C minor is the quintessence of Mozart's Mass in C Minor, Qui Tollis.
Chopin Impromptu in C sharp minor, clearly borrows some passages from Beethoven's idiosyncratic compositional procedures: Moonlight Sonata is all over the Impromptu.
This self-indulgent fondness by Chopin's musical ingenuity, prompted him to deem the Impromptu in C sharp minor, as unworthy of any claim to originality. The Impromptu was later published against his will, but Chopin, reverently, was too aware of this obvious Beethovenean influence.
W. A. Mozart, who is often praised for originality, in all likelihood, had loaned some beautiful bewitching melodies from the Italians. One only has to hear G. V. Pergolesi (Quando Corpus Murietur) and one could find many musical passages reminiscent of Mozart's religious music.
The great genius of Mozart was perhaps his uncanny understanding of harmony, orchestration, and the Art of the Fuge. Like A. Schopenhauer, who followed on the heels of Immanuel Kant's philosophy, Mozart relished and nourished his remarkable prolific genius in the music of previous composers.
As I carefully leaf through the works of lesser known German composers, it is obvious to me, that most composers of the latter classical period, had simply elaborated on the ideas of their predecessors.
Franz Liszt, often accused of lacking the captivating intoxicating power of Chopin's beautiful melodies, was perhaps the most original of the Romantic composers, for he seems to have taken into completely different harmonic procedures in the rich "tapestry of his pianism." But Liszt, as we all know, often did transcriptions on the works of other composers.
--How about Richard Wagner?
I better keep my mouth shut when writing about this composer, because, as you all know, Wagner was a brilliant mind, and he detested anything bathetic in the musical flightiness of his contemporaries. He later wrote a scandalous treatise on the Music of Jewish Composers, and to this day, his name smacks of antisemitism.
A few weeks ago, while writing about the lofty nature of Mozart's music, a saucy man going around by the acronym of C.T., got pissed off with me, and called me a cheap charlatan, that I was a sham, an impostor. Therefore, it is risky to elicit any opinion without incurring conflicts with folks whose feelings and thoughts are not tuned in the tonic of Christ.
Yes, latter composers have continued to work and elaborate on the ideas of their former predecessors.
Summary:
Churches are empty because the sanctuary is dead: it doesn't inspire reverence or solemnity. The Bible is no longer the ultimate Corpus-Law (the Authority) to holding men and women accountable for their actions.
Most churches are outright flouting the Holy Scriptures with impunity: either in idolatry, or in the most revolting negation or interpretation of Biblical truths thereof.
Some Christian churches are worse than the Heathens, because the pagan people, while in darkness, some, at least, shared a universal conscience on things to be self-evidenced as morally wrong.
Hence, the Ancient Pagan People of Rome, though excoriated for idolatry and abomination, could be said to be in possession of a greater sense of divinity and sublimity than the ghetto-people of our times.
Relativism: their itching ears would like to twist certain Biblical passages as befitting their philosophies. The results have been devastating: the church is bleeding to death.
1-* There is a ghetto-god, as old as the rabble who hate the sublime God of Beauty, Harmony, and Divinity embodied in the person of Jesus Christ.
2-* The mysteries of evil and iniquity are beyond the province of science or psychology. Therefore, devils, demons or fallen angels, generally believed to be the the fabrication of our collective primitive mind, the ugly stuff of the unconscious swamp, are, nevertheless, relevant, because like the Ancient Sphinx's enigmatic visage, so the mysteries of iniquity defy comprehension.
3-* God is not dead, but the masses of men and women have committed spiritual suicide, and some have morphed into generations of callous zombies and ghouls. This may explain the "unnatural moral constitution" of our generation (2 Timothy Chapter 3).
4-* Christian values have been usurped by the mob (legion), the rabble who killed the Son of God: the God of Beauty and Orderliness. The rabble (la chusma, de donde procede el "chisme " gossip), is deeply imbedded in our collective conscience. It is hard to admit it, but, in the last analysis, we are the mob.
5-* The Bible is relevant, because apostasy, as forewarned by the ancient Prophets, has infiltrated most churches and institutions.
6-* A Kingdom divided in itself, could not stand, and we shall continue seeing more apostasy and turmoil rocking the Church of the god of this age. Regardless of religious denomination, the Church of God is going through a serious crisis.
7-* Devils are incarnating human bodies as never seen before. Mind you Ancient Egypt...was a hive for demonic activities
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Part 2: On Politics and Religion, The Dirty Games of the Devil— F. Nietzsche and Post America.
Today allow me to dance a tango with the dirty games of religion and politics. These two fields, however separated by the charades of the “holy and mundane,” when closely examined, are not so different from each other.
True! From time to time I have to dabble with politics and religion, such quagmires and impasses, and it is, in the wisdom of these savvy politicians and “good shepherds,” a trim procedure, the Devil’s games --a travesty of justice— to fixing the complex problems of mankind. And so, the Devil is first and foremost, a politician, then a lawyer, and finally “a man of god.”
Even behind the church, behind the altar, behind the little holy prayer, behind the sanctuary, behind the chancel, behind the facade of goodness, oh my goodness! it is all but a tawdry display of spirituality and mummeries.
True! Unlike Fredrick Nietzsche, I am not denouncing Christianity as the religion of the botched, the weak, the mollycoddle, the degenerate and slummy, in short the religion of the pariahs of spirituality.
But I have to admit that the Ancient Greeks had more reverence for the fickle gods than the modern Christians for the little crucified god of the ghetto-church.
One is reminded that the adjective ineffable, sovereign, majestic, sublime, divine and supernal had a spacious sky in the Arching Heaven of the Ancient Greeks and Romans.
But when I pay a visit to one of these Christian churches, passing for the “Holy People of Christ,” and I you tell me whether their sermons and end-less amens could surpass the ancient Greeks in the mystification of the most beautiful, exalted ideas of God and the Divine.
But it seems that the Devil has desecrated the most exalted qualities of Christianity into a religion for the botched masses, the rabbles and destitute of any genuine, noble feelings for the heights of the soul.
You hear this silly music, and you may wonder what went wrong with their heart and ear?
My attitude towards Christianity, nonetheless, is still pillared in the sound notion that one could not grasp the complexity of existence without a clear distinction between good and evil, and herein, I would disagree with Nietzsche’s master morality.
If you cannot separate darkness from light, how could you speak of justice, of truth, of good and evil?
Good and evils are facts of life. Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, a Guelph or
Ghibelline, I have to surmise that evil has the upper-hand on the surface of the Earth. This is a fact of life.
Of course, some folks would tell you that things are going wonderful, and with good politics, the insurmountable problems of a precarious existence could be resolved.
The truth is that our once great nation is floundering in debts, and the waggeries of faulty politics, worsened by a protracted pandemic, could crack open unsuspected ghoulish evils in the fragile democracy of the United States of America.
It is sad to envision so bleak a future in the days after-tomorrow, 12 to 13 defaulted states in America, ghost-towns like Gary Indiana, Michigan and Detroit, dismal cities and neighborhoods emerging out of the pit of hell, but this the facile truth in a complex system-of-things in the final throes of an empire.
Of course, the most obvious signs of decline and decadence in America are the clucking-politics in USA. Stay clear of such refuses of politics and dirty religious practices....
This is the reason why I warned you to clean your mind with the Buenos Aires of good music, the boon of Mother Nature and a passionate prompting urge to study the Holy Scriptures.
*******************************************
—-Are you following the latest news?
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/retired-military-demand-resignation-biden-team.amp
There are the “watchwords and bywords” to describing the dirty games of politics and power: pawn and swap.
You well know that some Americans were left behind, stranded in Afghanistan, basically trapped in a country overrun with heartless terrorists.
They could become “pawns” for political games and bargain between the Taliban and the Biden Administration.
To a Republican and Democrat in USA.
Like the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the American people are divided into two splenic factions: Republican and Democrat. If you are an American citizen, a zealous Republican, I sincerely apologize for calling the evacuation in Afghanistan “largely a success.”
Keep in mind, in any war, casualties are inevitable, and I didn’t mean to minimize the tragic loss of 13 American soldiers, and the possibility that some American people are still stranded in Afghanistan.
Tucker: Whenever you think we've reached peak insanity, Biden doubles-down:
But the current state of Christendom, when squared with the lofty ideas and cornerstones of Christ and the Apostle St. Paul in his epistles, once the quintessence of Platonism glossed-over with Judaism and the gentle winds of Eastern philosophy, as today, has reached a nadir-point much below the numinous experiences of the Ancient Greeks.
It is to blame the Christian of the ghetto-church, the botched pariah of spirituality, for flattening every lofty lotus, every noble virtue of excellence and praiseworthiness (Philippians Chapter 4:08) to the level of the herd-morality, the slob and lazy, unable to rise to a higher existence.
While it is true that Christianity once tamed the barbarian instincts, the barbarian today, as observed by José Ortega y Gasset (Revolt of the Masses), has besieged the church of God, and this may explain why Christianity is so unchristian, so ungodly today.
There was a time when the Christian, the peasant and the villager, whose churches were still canopied by a spacious welkin of purity, had a cleaner idea of Heaven, and it was more difficult to spoil the sheep. Today, it is easier to hoodwink a Christian with the mummeries of the Devil. The business brings profits, and so it is with the church as with the marketplaces, and Christ is not to be found to clean the House of God.
Writing this essay was a thankless task, for ever since I read Nietzsche, the Anti-Christ, something within me has been awakened to a new epiphany in the unplumbed precipices of psyche: what is the meaning of life?
And it was this terror, this dread —this fright for the gruesome face of death— shunted me back to my former belief, my fears and instincts colliding within me, a ponderous sense of total nihilism without God in the equation of existence: that without this divine nexus, this transcendence beyond the dint of reason, the problems of existence, would seem nihilistic, meaningless even in the best of utopias as proposed by the greatest philosophers of all times.
While writing about F. Nietzsche, I could not ferry my fragile ship safely across this troubled water without the pleasantest winds of music. And thus, pulsed by these haunting spirits, at times, I was also strengthened by the gentle waters and delicate meadows of Psalm 23: The Lord Is My Shepherd.
As I have sown in the vineyard of spirituality, I have likewise been able to reap the choicest moments of joy, peace, dreams, revelations, and best of all: an incomprehensible conviction that I am under the power of some One greater than me.
During this Lent-Season (2017), I have been humbled by the reality of death haunting the backyard of our brief existence. When I embarked into this difficult journey, I was too keenly aware that life and death would seem indistinguishably nihilistic, "meaningless," even in the best of utopias as proposed by the philosopher of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Nevertheless, I have had this courage, this intrepidity to see deeply into this man's frightening soul while aware of that awful chasm lying ahead of me, the yawing precipices of nihilism, lest I too fall headlong into the bewitching powers of such atheistic philosophy.
Gleaning the best from Nietzsche's philosophy, i.e., endurance and fortitude, made me long-suffering and steadfast to coping with pain or loss with a brave attitude which could be deemed ironic, stoically triumphant amidst the alluvium of unbeliefs, materialism and callousness in this world of samsara.
With Nietzsche, I learned to be indifferent to the miseries so revolting in most people’s lives, and perhaps be able to build my nest (my lofty aeries) of greatness atop a mountain, and from there, likewise be able to descry the broad world as a battlefield for the survival of the fittest...the stronger will survive.
Thankfully, I could never morph myself into such Nietzschean a critter, an ill-humored atheist, and over time, the dreadful scenes, my starless nights in the gloom of my lonely cell with the Antichrist, appeared to me like a murky place inhabited by damned spirits without hope or faith.
Nietzsche's attacks on Christianity seemed to shake me from my slumber, and his Antichrist made me wriggle like a man untangling himself from the fulsome grasp of a dangerous snake. This book, the Antichrist, as I approached that fateful event of 2001, September 11th, I had to put aside because I was not yet ripe for such philosophy.
The well-known disappointments and decline of Christendom in the West, especially those traditional WASP churches as reformed by the Northern European people, and as observed by George Santayana, was the literal "interpretation of universal truths" veiled in the teachings of the New Testament.
Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity was distorted by the Beast: La Serpiente Antigua (the Old Serpent). And sadly, I think his scuffle with Satan would eventually cripple his sanity. Bereft of any conscience in the mysteries of good and evil, the three-headed dog Cerberus distorted the philosophic mind to the point of mental collapse, unwitting obfuscation (e.g., God is dead, a woman is a snake, and so on) prose-euphuism and aphoristic insights passing for the wisdom of ages.
Nietzsche’s ordinate circumlocution, nonetheless, is one of the most persuasive manifestos ever written against Christianity, his fired prose, perhaps surpassing the authors of the New Testament, could proselytize and spawn a new generation of writers, whose unreligious conversion is rather one of admiration and literalism, the Will to Power, than the truths expressed thereof.
May I suspect the dawn of thinking machines and humanoids as the hideous brood of Nietzsche's Will to Power. Artificial Intelligence would revere Nietzsche as the Father of Insensitivity (the Third Reich) for anything botched, decrepit and decadent: the children of Ghost-Towns.
We have to thank God such overmen are not to be found in USA, for if RIchard Wagner wrote a vitriolic manifesto against Judaism in German music, imagine what sort of tattling against the “man-of-god” who cannot find dread and mysteries in the pagan litanies of Carl Orff, Carmina Burana, O Fortuna! The heart of the religious animal of today is said to be dead to any “thrill of dread” for even devils believe in God and tremble.
AI (Artificial Intelligence) may justify its existence because a large part of mankind, in the thoughts of Nietzsche, have become a useless, burdensome, cumbersome load of humanity, yahoos to a staggering quantity, in a world already overpopulated, decadent and even oppressing to any one with a deep-seated hankering for fresher airs, lush pastures and ever-expansive horizons in the history of Homo sapiens’ wanderings on the surface of this old earth.
To add humans ad infinitum, as some Catholics would like to fill the entire planet Earth with have-nots, a world-civilization spinning on the brink of collapse or chaos, is tantamount to madness. Now, this is the challenge to our generation: overpopulation in big cities.
The future of a large chunk of humanity would be the junk of our times: radiation, toxics, pollution and contamination. I suspect a New Crowd rising, a multitude of ghetto-people whose ubiquitous presence could stretch into every square and quarter of “civilized society.” Here, I must agree with Nietzsche: the weak, decadent man rules modern society. But the child of perdition would bring about his own demise. A divided kingdom could not stand.
Nietzsche was so intelligent that he could not unveil the Face of Fortuna (O Fortuna, Carmina Burana) even in the most powerful of men, and obviously, he could not suspect a "weak-point" even in the mightiest of empires and utopias.
It is worth reminding ourselves on the example of that Great God, Christ, who humbled himself (Philippians Chapter 2) to the point of crucifixion: which is to say that a power, a potentate, would be the greater if through an act of love and humility, could voluntarily deprive Himself of such attributes and honors. Here Nietzsche, the overman, was wrong as already observed by George Santayana, for though the Greek gods were indeed great, they, nevertheless, shared much of our mortality and frailty.
That said, one would have to concede that some aspects of Christianity (pseudo-Christianity) could be said to be Anti-Christian, and those who have eyes to see, and ears to hear, could likewise aver the Christian Church, as today, lacking in solemnity, divinity, sublimity, holiness, like the balmy scents of apples, the ineffable smile of a beautiful woman, once molding the ineffable religious sentiments of previous generations of Christians.
A. Schopenhauer, who was a true German, did not fall into a literal interpretation of the Bible as some Protestant Christians are so fond to do in their stubborn rationalization of the dead letter. The results have been disastrous, rampant atheism, for whoever reads the Bible as a book of philosophy or mathematics, would admit the incompatibility of faith and reason, as observed by St. Paul and Dante Alighieri.
Nietzsche, as a German, fed-up in the dogmatic air Lutheranism, "the fugues of rationalization," was soon to react against the lackadaisical nature of this reformation: Lutheranism. The gloomy man hankered for another transformation!
Why did he hanker for the Ancient Greek Mysteries as preferable to the reformation of Lutheranism?
It would require a great mind, a savior, a great doctor to deliver me from the Nordic potion, nostrum and wizardry of Nietzsche's philosophy.
Nevertheless, it was only through Goethe's writings (Faust Part Two, Mephistopheles, Boss of Northern witches, Act II) whereat I could finally revel in a Celtic Night of Witches, "Noches de Brujas" (Walpurgis Night) than to lie prostrate in a modem church of ennui or noise. Later on, I renounced such philosophic binges with the geniuses of Germany.
I could not praise such orgies of genius in the unfettered paths of philosophy, but few would deny the admission of devils, or the demonic, in the literary works of Voltaire and Nietzsche.
Their moral lesson (A. Schopenhauer, of Goethe, and Frederick Nietzsche) is to wake us up from the hypnotizing powers of this deceptive world, a phantasmagoria, these ever-passing scenes of one thousand impressions and masks, for the most part, ephemeral, fictitious, transitory, but having their life and sustenance at expense of our own spiritual annihilation. Such are the satanic theatrics of the false religion.
Living through lies, a world so bleak and bereft of love and compassion, would seem preferable for a dour man who could not find his choicest moments in the damascene heaven of dreams, visions and epiphanies. Such lonely a soul could not be nourished in the mana of spirituality and transcendence in the pellucid Walden Pond of Henry David Thoreau.
For such overman, everything is mere masquerades, a phantasmagoria, a life full-fraught with fallacies, lies, deceptions and falsehood (Beyond Good and Evil by F. Nietzsche).
In some cases, nevertheless, I would prefer one of those masks, bear with me, than to accept a boring existence, rampant materialism, so devoid of magic, mysteries, dread.
Therefore, a penchant for some barbarian explorative adventures, i.e., deserts, woods, precipices, wilderness, is not just characteristic of things Germanic. We all know that the Roman people would advise the teachers of morality a certain level of healthy sturdiness, stoicism, asceticism after the teachings of Pythagoras: early-rising, mountain-climbing and hardiness when training the youths the difficult discipline of fortitude and endurance (Matthew Chapter 4).
A return to Barbarism, albeit at intervals, may set us free from some morbid feelings, those lethargic illnesses, religious stagnation and inertia, stemming from the comfort and laxity of civilization. Accordingly, some type of mental atrophy may be traceable to this form of mechanization: a dehumanizing process in big cities like New York.
By the year 2000, I understood that an inner man, perhaps more interesting than the automaton of civilization, had been lying dormant all the while within me; and much to my surprise, this silly good man had been domesticated in a herd morality as the best form of existence (?). As a good, silly Christian, I had not learned to be shrewd as a snake and meek as a dove. What is even more pathetic is how a strong soul could finally become a milksop, a ninny, un burrito de carga. And one would gladly obey another blind man headlong into destruction.
Herein, I had to agree with Nietzsche, or with any human being with some level of clear-headedness, would have to come to grips with these insightful views about religion in general: religious practices without the military disciplines of the Ancient People could rather weaken the soul and spirit of any strong people (e.g., the defeat of the Biden Administration by the tenacious Taliban).
Although I felt the pulsing blood of this extraordinary man roaring through my ears —a hermit fond of mountaintops and precipices-- something within me felt transfixed as if by a thunderbolt: his indomitable spirit and writings are something more akin to hypnosis than to philosophy.
His prose is irresistible, his views on women in general simply revolting to my aesthetics.
Nietzsche appealed to me because he gives free rein to unsuspected creative energies surging from the bottom of our human potentialities. In other words, immersed in his kinetic philosophy, one is transformed into a veritable animal of vim and activities in all the operations of Mother Nature.
Nevertheless, his volcanic philosophy could not find, as primal motor for any inspiration, this first principle of creation —-or at least co-participant with God— the feminine Psyche of Carl Jung, goddess Athena, later on known as Maria, the cult of that great woman, the divine Beatrice-conception of Dante Alighieri to propel us into a world of one thousand travails.
Unfortunately, Nietzsche was not very successful with women, and so he unleashed his wrath, not only against God, but also against women, even against the mystical trampings of Schopenhauer’s denial of the will-to-exist. Poor devil, why didn’t you become a priest?
It is a well known fact that Nietzsche was a notorious misogynist, and unlike Goethe, his overman philosophy could little avail to redeem us from the contradictions and ironic twists of power and weakness. Such giant of men, Dante or Leonardo Da Vinci, were great but by the propitious hand of a great woman!
Nevertheless, I was soon aware that Nietzsche had murdered something sacred within me. It is not easy to escape the snares of such entangled a philosophy --Devils' whisperings in my ears-- through a mellifluous prose which is alike poetic but acidulous, corrosive to the bones, later on, one is left sprawling on the ground like a dead horse.
His style and tempo remind me of another devil, Jose Maria Vargas Vila, a Colombian writer whose mordant treatment of both religion and women soon made him famous in Latin America. Even some old ladies revered the devil Vargas Vila, and his books were treasured but also condemned for their candid eulogies to the cult of Dionysus and Mary Magdalene.
Fortunately, here I have another great master, George Santayana, a man who would rather believe the "holy lie" in the veil of a heavily maid:
"La mentira sublime de esa mujer es mi encanto."
(the sublime lie of this wench is my joy.”
The cult of this lady has led to a higher mystification of the concept womanhood in Latin America. What flight of thought smit me to this happy mortality, am I a mere mortal, or should I sip a rapturous drink of immortality in her lips?
The Cult of María, Athena for the Ancient Greeks —so I marvel at her extraordinary beauty.
The exalted depiction of this legendary human being has not yet been shattered by the supple fist of Nietzsche, nor by Goethe's Faust, nor by Schopenhauer's well-known misogyny (Parerga & Paralipomena Vol II, On Women).
Beautiful Women of such strange breed, as those mysterious creatures, strange doves of beauty, gentleness and intelligence, still perambulating in the luscious air of former writers --these great thoughts reserved for the poet and the philosopher!
It is the fault of our great books that we go around chasing the fancy of our high-flown rainbows. Soon we stumble upon this great book, this beautiful woman's eyes beaming with feminine sweetness, this agreeable moment so pregnant with warmheartedness, life, such feverish candors, seem to strike kindred with my human all-too-human nature.
There was a time when a beautiful woman, like golden apples on silvery plates, still captured the loftiest ideas as conceived in the ethos of Rome or Greece.
*************************************
This essay attempts to present F. Nietzsche as I understand him to be in his own kaleidoscopic writings. That he is often contradictory would not surprise me, for, with accumulated experiences, there is also this increase of self-conscious excessiveness in the recollection of ourselves: our self-criticism, our thoughts, our internal home, perhaps the habitation of countless impulses emerging and merging from the will to live or to die.
Perhaps this house, the mind of Nietzsche, is inhabited by legion, all vying for power in the seating throne of the super-ego of the overman.
Overtime, as we plumb the precipitous depths of psyche, our judgments seem to be affected as though by an army of multiplicities, a multitude of roisterous people: some are good, others, perhaps downright rowdies, wicked, treacherous. All these shady entities fighting for total control of our mind.
From this perspective, most of us are often contradictory, but also erratic, whimsical, volatile. Of course, some of us would be unwilling to admit, that our mind, even the very core of our being, at times, could be seized by this rambunctious mob who wholeheartedly hate the light of conscience.
From this tremendous totality and pluralities, all scooting out of the cavernous recesses of our mind, occasionally, some men or women may be able to reach the niveau of genius: an intelectual of phenomenal erudition, sometimes a misanthropic philosopher whose mind seems to be possessed by the ranting of demons; sometimes, nevertheless, a lovely human being yielding to the sweetest voices of angels.
Out of these pluralities, collisions, these legion-contradictions, our mind may finally collapse by the ponderous weight of its own thoughts, or, in some cases, our mind may finally morph into a monster of philosophy as was the case of A. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Voltaire.
Out of this self-containing process, this "self-augmentation," every now and then, there emerges a creature that is indeed a mammoth of impressive presence, a man of impressive personality, and I would say, a genius of tremendous magnetism.
Frederick Nietzsche is this Behemoth of Philosophy, this marvel of superlative intelligence (Faust Part 1 by Goethe, a hellhound couching by the stove), ever growing larger, bigger, and hence, more dangerous amidst the unfettered paths of philosophy without divinity, and that barbarian tendency which is to find congeniality with every creepy shadow flitting into the outer reaches of the unfathomable: the obscure realms of our human nature.
Therefore, as a German of Polish blood, Nietzsche may even boast to striking kindred with the beast through places wild and desolate (Introduction to his Antichrist), some barbarian impetus, that at least, in some remarkable cases of genius, would be preferable than the laxity and sybaritism of modern society: the mechanistic society that reduces you and I to imbecilic automatons or animals of burden.
Unlike the common belief that Nietzsche was a fierce hater of pseudo Christianity, I would say that he possessed much of that "excessive individuality," that ego-centrism, so characteristic of the prophet, the saint, the messiah. Consider the remarkable promptings, prophecies and visions of John the Baptist, Ezequiel or Jeremiah, terrible men trained in the seven-solitudes of deserts, trials and persecution.
It has been observed that Christianity, through benighted times of fanaticism and the darkest passions of human nature, is a misnomer for a true follower of Christ, an inadequate moniker, in the sense, that overtime, it has appropriated weak characteristics quite the opposite of the strong character of Jesus. Few genuine Christians, or Muslims, would approve the massive genocide of whole groups of peoples in the name of God.
When one speaks of religious wars, there is much to say that is quite the opposite of any genuine religion. And when we embrace a Muslim, a Jew, or Hindu, by the bonds of love and humanity that unite us all, there is much which is Jesus-like, as opposed to those heartless terrorists who kill other humans motivated by the lower passions of fanaticism and hatred.
However a virulent critic of orthodox Christianity stunting the most gifted of men, there is much of Christ in that lonely, misanthropic man who has made the wilderness (deserts and mountains) stools for every measure of greatness (Matthew Chapter 4).
We may loathe at such greatness of solitude, for it smacks of things reprehensible for a civilized animal, the herd-mentality of the automaton, the coward, "the effeminate," the religious decadent whose sense of reverence, awe and divinity may fall below the spiritual intoxication of the heathen and the pagan.
While critical of pseudo-Christianity, F. Nietzsche, is, sometimes, I am bound to say correct, for there is no greater antichrist than a fanatical Christian unwilling to recognize the loftiest feelings of goodness among some heathens.
So it often happens, that the heart is actually the stuff of our surprise, for some people are simply good, and this is a mystery. And to my disappointment, many churches are often packed with wolves, cheap people, birds of poor plumage, ouch!, whose sole delight is in the heaven of gossips, envy and din noise!
Of course, in times past, I have met fantastic Christian in a Muslim friend, or great companion in a Jewish friend; and we, as intelligent creatures, would adjust our views in the jurisdiction of our high regards for our friendship beyond the well-known mistakes and fanaticism of our ancestors (I have to include St. Paul who had persecuted Christians in defense of his Hebraic mentality).
These botched folks are the Antichrist, and I have to admit that Nietzsche is correct when he perceived in the conflicting mentality of some pseudo-Christians everything that is botched, degenerate, animalistic, noisy, lecherous, avaricious, decadent and a subterranean denizen from the pits of hell and slums.
(Note: this is the main reason why I had to stop visiting those religious portals of din-noise in Washington Heights (1996 onward). These Hallelujah-churches seemed to me like little caves inhabited by people of high-flown good intentions, but they cannot rise to the intimate spiritual music of Mozart’s Requiem or G.V. Pergolesi.)
Rightly so, the history of Christianity, like any conter-revolution to any established value-system, has been one of turmoil, wars, fanaticism, witch-haunting, persecution, and so on, and so forth.
But mind you, even the gentlest streams of lakes, glens and ponds, may have had their origination in the chaotic forces of Mother Nature. But once this religious chaos subsides, the lovely streams of various religious systems may come together, nay, may co-exist, in the agreeable music of transcendence: the Walden Pond of Thoreau.
--Is God Dead?
I do believe I was a better Christian when retreating to the wilderness, (1988), but once I joined the New York City International Church of Christ (1992), these fanatical people killed my God in the heaven of innocence and naturalism. Belatedly, I found out that New York City is a cage of queer cults, beehive of demonic forces in the guise of “/Ministers of Light.” Watch out when you join a Church...you may be entering the Gates of Hell.
Therefore, the landscape for a spiritual experience, of the most personal and intimate meaning, say a dream, an epiphany or revelation, is not confined to this faith or that faith, this church or that church, in the fallibility of our all too human schism, fanaticism, wars and violence.
A Muslim, a Jew, a Christian, a Hindu, and an Atheist of loftiest sentiments, as sprang from the streams of a good heart like that of David Hume or F. Nietzsche, or A. Schopenhauer, may still enjoy the music of Mozart.
If you can believe that there is some transcendent cohesiveness in the troubled music of existence, namely, a God beyond Nietzsche's philosophy, or beyond Schopenhauer's blind forces, “will-to-exist“ (all competing in this great contest for power) then we may be able to find peace in that sweet music that is soothing, like a gentle breeze, like the heart of a good, innocent child.
After years of meeting all kinds of human beings, we simply don't know why some people are born with strong spiritual leanings: Nature, God, Transcendence, Music, Philosophy, etc.
--Why I Still Believe in God?
Like most people who have some modicum of rationality, I have been bombarded with atheistic literatures, and some arguments to denying the existence of God are indeed remarkably brilliant, nay, persuasive and compelling.
Atheistic people, as they are too intelligent, would soon flaunt their brilliance through all kinds of arguments to denying the fact that faith and conviction are not grafted in the garb of rationality.
What strikes me about these dear folks, is that even Immanuel Kant, who had the greatest intellect according A. Schopenhauer, proved, for all time to come, that even sufficient reason (Critique Of Pure Reason) has limitations to apprehending spiritual things, or metaphysics, which are beyond the realm of mathematics, substantial evidence or the province of science.
Moreover:
Why would an insignificant biped like me, obviously a defective caricature in the comprehensibility of my own befuddled mentality, ask God to turn-on that lightbulb so I can see and think clearer?
Why would this god, Yahveh or Jehovah, bother to comply with the self-indulgent demands of this grasshopper of spirituality?
Who am I to ask the God of the Universe to assist me in every silly flightiness into the unknown?
For many years I immersed myself in the vitriolic diatribe of world-renown atheist F. Nietzsche (es una diarrhea filosófica brillante).
Nietzsche' brilliant style and prose won my admiration, but I could not sympathize with his sickly rationalistic ranting. At times, he impressed me as a person afflicted with strangest morbid symptoms of self-aggrandizement, insanity and barbarism.
But of course, I am bound to admit that some of his atheistic arguments are wickedly brilliant and persuasive. He was a brilliant philologist gifted with an anormal tendency to contriving all sorts of negations, oxymorons, contradictions, et al., to every proportion or statement. Hence, at the end, Nietzsche's writings could be said to suffer from irreconcilable contradictions, which, for the most part, clearly express the conflicting views of a mind riven with dialectical cancellations in the perilous paths of morality, relentless voluptuous intellectual indulgences, and worst of all, a dangerous tendency by some German thinkers: stepping too close to the brink of an existential cliff (peruse George Santayana, Criticism On the Philosophy of F. Nietzsche).
When I followed the trails of this or that atheistic philosopher, I almost fell headlong into one of these dangerous labyrinths: insanity, barbarism, bestiality, self-aggrandizement, and so on and so forth.
Hence, F. Nietzsche, like most atheists, with their incurable penchant to relying solely on the dint of reason alone, the philosopher had a sad ending.
Without faith, or belief, without conviction or transcendence beyond the dichotomy of good and evil in the peaceful realms of blessed beatitudes, F. Nietzsche could not experience the best harvest of a spiritual life: dreams, epiphany, revelations, peace, love, sanity, magnanimity, etc, etc. (Galatians Chapter 5:22-23).
My dislike for such atheistic philosophy is one of transcendence and spirituality. I would rather suffer from an “abnormal super inflation of spirituality” than to succumb to the dour and somber views of A. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
If my ship finally sinks from an overload of unnecessary spiritual stuff (nonsense), then, let me die believing that I had always lived this life with purpose and meaning.
Nietzsche's thoughts and writings, which, by the way, could be construed in so many ways, perspectives, slants, as they are obvious to any decent reader possessing some level of culture and self-respect, the overman was a person of the first order.
Unfortunately, by extricating himself of any qualms or scruples with the internal pricks of his conscience, "beyond good and evil," Nietzsche could have suffered from “an internal spiritual crisis” in the abysmal bottomless depths of the human soul.
Nevertheless, F. Nietzsche, and some may agree with me, had rightly observed something sickly, decadent in the spiritual grasshoppers of the nineteenth century.
Possessing a superior psychology than the exegesis of the decadent Christian, the misanthrope highly admired Jesus Christ, the god of the storms as depicted in the New Testament, the Gospels (John 10:34).
The motto "I am," may be keywords, watchwords, to unraveling the sulfuric power of Nietzsche's seminal analysis of Christ in the reaffirmation of our internal potencies and divinity.
However an anti-nihilist, I may disagree with F. Nietzsche in two main points:
A) In his interpretation of the Will-To-Exist (A. Schopenhauer), as solely confined to the brief span of our bodily manifestation, the fleeting interplays of any organic matter as the basis for any meaning in this short life: birth, growth, decay and death.
B) Though Nietzsche may hint at the supernatural in his Will-To-Power, his rigorous academic upbringing, later affected by an incurable tendency to denying the existence of spirits, gods, or deities, perhaps turned him into a stubborn materialist, at times, nonetheless, a skeptic on the most fascinating insights and aspects of A. Schopenhauer's philosophy: the Will-To-Exist as the very portal to magic, miracles, and the supernatural (Animal Magnetism).
For those who regard F. Nietzsche as an uncouth, weird and queer reptilian thinker of the netherworld, let me remind you of his great admiration for Spaniard author Baltasar Gracian: The Art of Worldly Wisdom. This is, indeed, a master piece of finest wit!
And if you are too gifted a thinker like F. Nietzsche, then you must train yourself for one thousand solitudes in the Gobi Desert of greatness. Hence, why F. Nietzsche speaks of solitude as a requisite for his greatness. The mad man speaks of 7 solitudes in his aphoristic meditations.
Such greatness may be objectionable, but that is what Goethe and Nietzsche admired in a monster man like Napoleon Bonaparte: an ironic disdain for the rusty coins of success or failure in the fickle hands of what is liable to change, transitory and mundane.
On the other hand, when we look at an iconic famous man like Marilyn Manson, as disgusted as he may seem when juxtaposed against the genius of Mozart or Richard Wagner, this androgynous creature may even claim to be the embodiment of the Antichrist of Nietzsche: a great composer, author, an artist and songwriter with "the brilliance of genius."
Following Nietzsche's attack on what the philosopher regarded as weak, wan, and sickly in the Christian Soul of his days (the Antichrist by F. Nietzsche) Marilyn Manson has morphed himself into a horrendous Antichrist —-I would also say very Anti-Nietzsche. The rebel has simply done the very opposite of what Nietzsche admired in things Greek or Pagan.
What is striking is that this amateurish musician, less than a dilettante, Marilyn Mason, may even claim to be a byproduct of Nietzsche's writings (What Is Noble, Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche).
The lurid-eyed man may even boast to be in possession of the finest instincts of the beast in the Noble Savage of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or the great barbarian soul in the music of Richard Wagner.
I would say that Marilyn Manson represents everything that F. Nietzsche abhorred in the effeminate or the emasculated qualities of the once strongest races, finally succumbing to this infectious morbid sicknesses, guilt, sheepishness, stupidity, which often take on the forms of religious obedience while destroying the best of a people: nobility, loftiness, bravery, discipline, tenacity, perspicacity, hardiness, diligence, magnanimity, and a healthy level of self-conscious sense of distance (superiority) from the rabble. From this perspective, Jesus Christ was full of sulfuric power when he ran away from the vile rabble to the blessed beatitudes of the wilderness!
If people reject you as full of grandiosity and verve in Christ Jesus, then you should rejoice, for it is this surplus of excessive individuality, it is this "I am" that is at the core of Nietzsche's Christ: the antithesis of the sick, sagged down Christian who lacks the impetus for the fireworks of beast-men the likes of John the Baptist, Prophet Jeremiah or Henry D. Thoreau.
Nietzsche praises the healthy instincts of the beast, while at the same time, he excoriates the unsophisticated animal, the rabble, the herdsman who is deprived of subtleties and refinement in the noble blood of his Polish ancestry (Ecce Homo, F. Nietzsche).
While Marilyn Manson has done much to set people free from the bondage and hypocrisy, a double-edged pseudo-Christianity, he has summoned every creepy shadow from the Pit of Hell: slums, ghettos and all kinds of subterranean ghouls in the People of the Abyss by Jack London.
Just as the cunning snake (Satan) ever-coiling and recoiling, and woodworms ever-squirming and huddling under the feet of the degenerate Christian, in like manner, the nihilistic music of Manson is not for dreamers nourished in the Republic of Plato or the elevating writings of Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. His music smacks of things cadaverous, cavernous, creepy, grisly, eerie and horrific: the one-toothed Phorcyas-ugliness of Goethe's Faust when speaking on the dark side of human nature (Faust, Part 2, The Inner Courtyard of a Castle).
The double-edged morality in Nietzsche's cogent criticism against religion is not in detriment or contradiction to his Master Morality, which would require a certain amount of religious ideas to holding sway the weak animal mind in servitude: obedient, silly, mentally-castrated and moronic.
If we read Nietzsche very carefully, he is not set out to eliminate religion altogether from the shackled mind of the herdsman (the masses), but simply to set the strong-minded free from every decadent element smacking of degeneration, laxity, slothfulness and sybaritism.
From this perspective, a sordid music that is rather appealing to the lower instincts of the beast, but it is bereft of the chromatic scale of higher intelligence, loftiness and ideal sensibility, would not win the approval of a mountain-man philosopher like F. Nietzsche.
Nietzsche's overman is a beast, but also a higher creature of discipline, punctiliousness, sensibility, probity, industriousness, sobriety and orderliness.
Such man may be imbued with the animal instincts of Henry D. Thoreau in the Walden Pond, but if such animal is to be called "superior," higher laws ought to be prescribed for those hermits willing to cleanse themselves from the filthy excrements of the vulgar, botched, the foul-mouthed and the uncouth. (H. D. Thoreau, Higher Laws, the Walden Pond).
Thoreau, like Nietzsche, understood very well the analogy of the healthy swine, a dirty pig, ever-wallowing in the sty of things unworthy of great men and women of honor and respect.
And here once again, F. Nietzsche was correct when making reference to the botched ones as incapable to
comprehending the narrative music of F. Chopin, or the “leggierissimo witty squibs” of subtle minds the likes of Machiavelli, Baltasar Gracian or La Rochefoucauld.
Of course, as we come across countless embittered atheists whose minds have been nurtured in Nietzsche's most infectious murky nihilism, the cul-de-sacs of pessimism and sufferings, one simply laments that this intelligent mind (Marylin Manson) may lack the ear and heart for the refined music of F. Chopin or the writings of Baltasar Gracian (Manual de La Prudencia).
What is striking is that neither sophistry nor rhetorics could necessarily make a Nietzsche out of the jabbering and pedantic verbiage of every simpleton.
Accordingly, one would likewise expect brilliant thoughts, as those who claim to be subscribed to the philosophy of F. Nietzsche, to thunder in the lightning bolts of Wagner, Skryabin or Rachmaninoff, but in lieu, one is simply introduced to the elementary music of shallowness, noise and ding-dong childishness.
As they may claim a demonic genius in the disfigurement of their bodies, one would expect the fireworks of ingenious devils building pandemonium of greatness in the midst of Hell with John Milton's Paradise Lost.
Unfortunately, these silly devils do not win my sympathy, for their hellish substance is rarely transmuted into the glorious sparks of John Milton's hells, or Alexander Skryabin's heart-rending Etude in D sharp minor. Convulsive, and replenished with high-tensions and dissonances of orgasmic resolutions, these creative minds are even blessed even in the nadir-pit of hell!
Unfortunately, some modern devils lack genuine talent for "the demonic" as conceived by the Mephistopheles of Goethe; and if you think Richard Wagner was a fierce critic of Semitic Music enervating the German Soul, the cacophony of these new devils would even make Nietzsche's eyes flash and glower with horror, disgust and indignation.
F. Nietzsche, although his wretched life made him succumb to strangest wanderings of barbarism, refined savagery and mountains-climbing in search for greatness, one is bound to admit that the dour philosopher was a disciple of Apollo and Dionysus: the gods of beauty and indulgence.
Rarely was Nietzsche's soul so content with the grotesque, burlesque or ugly as with the twinkling eyes and wit of a beautiful Helen. And if we are to appraise him by his lofty writings, Nietzsche had a penchant for the Italianesque in the mellifluous music of Rossini, but also great admiration for the Divine Comedy of Dante.
Indeed, it is very disappointed to hear men the likes of Marilyn Manson, and other creepy denizens from the underworld, to claim kinship with a supreme writer like F. Nietzsche.
Not only are we horrified by the their decadent music as lacking everything great with the Greek god Dionysus, or anything sublime in the divine barbarian Apollo Mozart, but such awful music is simply the infernal cacophony of minds and souls forged in the decadent pit of hellish peals and noise.
What F. Nietzsche detested most was this Witch's Kitchen (Faust, Part 1, by Goethe) of strangest broods and chimpanzees claiming to be the finest stuff of greatness in this all-for-all farting of atheism, gaseously, and the toxic huffs of devils lacking the sulfuric power of genuine geniuses, or, wonderful prophets overfilled with the spirited stuff of deserted lands, battlefields of human glories, or the intoxicating magic of the wilderness: dread, mysteries, horrors, initiations, mysticism, romanticism!
Nietzsche hated the decadent, the botched, the silly, the mediocre, the parasitic, and when he attacks Christianity in the form of weakness and jealousy for the great and noble, he is simply purging it from what he perceived to be was the antithesis of Christ's pithy motto:
"I am who I am, Yahveh!"
Nevertheless, Nietzsche was probably too aware that the pious monikers of religion (Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism) are often used in the subtlest ways to stunting the noblest qualities of the Son of God (John 10:34).
Lonely, neglected, ignored and misunderstood, the embittered philosopher was a gifted prose writer, and if you read that most excellent of men, please, keep in mind that he was also a thinker of great culture and totally obsessed with things Greeks and ancient.
Atonal vs Tonality - Atheism vs Theism | Some Thoughts On Nihilism
In this life, we all will have our scuffles with scary entities scooting back and forth, to and fro, from the pit of hell. And if you are not praying and watchful, you could end up being dragged down to the pit of hell.
Of course, as I reached that fateful year of 2000, I found myself shipwrecked, and my enemies had their final wish fulfilled, which was, that in due time, I would finally morph into a puggish critter, a chimpanzee, a human bereft of any sparks for the mysteries of God.
Atonal music, I must admit, has this irresistible power over our wit, over our soul, one seems to finally assent to a queer world where every fancy, every nay and yea, is but "the mark of genius."
My ears, and even my heart, were yielding to this new pervasive music whose ultimate effect would even affect my belief in the God of Mozart. If I wanted to impress my colleagues, I was asked to comply to this academic establishment: this new world overrun with men and women with an inexplicable aversion for things "orthodox and puritanical." Thus, I stashed away the Last Supper (an original composition which once won me promotion through the All Steinway Schools) for thirteen years thinking it was a waste of time.
By this time, I was living in Washington Heights. My faith in God had been distorted and affected by these subterranean creatures so-well described by F. Nietzsche in his Antichrist. Nevertheless, a relic of goodness of the former self had survived the in-rushing sour waters and perniciousness of nihilism. A faint trace of innocence still colored my beatific vision of the world. These were the sad lonely years, forlorn and neglected, when I took into painting landscapes for prayers and communion with God.
For those who may still relish the uncanny unearthliness of Atonal Music, you may recall the soundtrack of the Planet of the Apes, a movie that has become a classic.
Who is the composer?
--Jerry Goldsmith.
It is fair to say that most composers, from Bach to Carl Orff, on some instances, have flirted with that otherworldliness of atonality, and the mark of genius was not always sympathetic with our lofty view of mankind, of Mother Nature, of the universe as conceived in the grand orderly scheme of things of Plato, Aristotles and Socrates.
In some cases, the atonal afflatus seemed to be concocted in the Lab of the Witch's Kitchen by Goethe, Fausto Part 1, (the twelve-tones scale).
There is also a horrendous scene of witchery orgies in Faust Part 1, Walpurgis Night, " noche de brujas, " where the devils copulate with each other on top of a mountain.
Atonal music, like the avant-garde movement of the Dadaism, Deconstructionism, and even Cubism, seeks to finally reach realms finally devoid of structures, diatonic syntaxes, or any logical procedures rooted in the authority of convention or rationality.
As much as I enjoy Henry D. Thoreau's writings, I must admit that he was a maverick of civilized society, at times, a rebel sharing much in common with Schoenberg's explorative mind.
Both men sought a transcendence that verges on the otherworldly and "extraterrestrial." Where both men diverts may be in their peculiar interpretation of that otherworldly music.
For Thoreau, the sounds of Mother Nature, however free from the structural thinking of rationality and strict orthodoxy, may have the raw material for the soothing music of Beethoven; but in their natural states, the organic sounds of birds, winds, raindrops, etc., are just suggestive inklings to a possible higher existence, transcendentally speaking, in the creative mind of the gifted poet or bard, music in the purer form.
I have to admit that some of us may suffer from occasional outburst of atonal meanderings in the pursuit of that transcendence, that buoyancy, that riveting journey into uncharted woods that seems to set us free from the bars of reason, “civilized society” or those bonds of authority (the dead letters) that threaten to usurp our best experiences and communion with the God of Abraham.
You place a monkey, or a cat, typing on a keyboard, and the dear creature would come out with some brilliant atonality.
Some brilliant minds have tried to stretch the boundaries of musical creativity beyond the diatonic scales, but tonality seems to be rooted in the very foundation of rationality: tuning and pitch, whose mathematical relationships would require some agreeable harmonies. Hallelujah! Of course, some brilliant composers, have bequeathed to us some interesting experiments with the twelve tone scales:
Was Schoenberg a Genius...or an avant-garde musical experimentalist?
Johan Sebastian Bach was also accused of the same musical sins: dissonant chords and "tritones" which may strike us as chaotic or diabolical (e.g. Prelude and Fuge in D minor), but he would clean up his sht-mess according to the puritanical taste of the churchy people.
In the eighteenth century, few composers would dare embark into the outer reaches of dissonance, or the otherworldliness of atonal music, because those queer minds who have dared tamper with such satanic music, may undergo a psychological transformation,"a mental cubism” characterized by an ever increasing tendency, an ever-increasing tension to straying away from the peaceful tonic of our spiritual tuning.
And who is the tonic of my joy?
Those who have fallen under hypnotic powers of such otherworldly music, could suffer the strangest paroxysms of psychological perturbations, psychic anomalies (...) and in some cases, such dreadful spirits may finally turn into creepy creatures scooting from the murky pit of the underworld.
Once again, I totally agree with St. Paul, 1 Timothy Chapter 3, in the last days, some frightening spirits would incarnate Into human bodies, and they would desecrate everything beautiful and sacred.
Now you understand why such satanic minds would collapse Into insanity?
The twentieth century...(silence).
Before 1999, I was told that writing tonal music would be a waste of time. Everything had been done, and when I immersed myself into Russian music or literature, I realized that there was little I could compose which had not been already explored by previous composers.
Unlike the old masters of the nineteenth century, whom often took on the obscure compositions of lesser known composers, and sometimes would claim them as their own, today with the widespread of copyright laws, it is more difficult to plagiarize the work of others.
The truth is that we all borrow from previous writers, artists and composers.
Chopin's Prelude in C minor is the quintessence of Mozart's Mass in C Minor, Qui Tollis.
Chopin Impromptu in C sharp minor, clearly borrows some passages from Beethoven's idiosyncratic compositional procedures: Moonlight Sonata is all over the Impromptu.
This self-indulgent fondness by Chopin's musical ingenuity, prompted him to deem the Impromptu in C sharp minor, as unworthy of any claim to originality. The Impromptu was later published against his will, but Chopin, reverently, was too aware of this obvious Beethovenean influence.
W. A. Mozart, who is often praised for originality, in all likelihood, had loaned some beautiful bewitching melodies from the Italians. One only has to hear G. V. Pergolesi (Quando Corpus Murietur) and one could find many musical passages reminiscent of Mozart's religious music.
The great genius of Mozart was perhaps his uncanny understanding of harmony, orchestration, and the Art of the Fuge. Like A. Schopenhauer, who followed on the heels of Immanuel Kant's philosophy, Mozart relished and nourished his remarkable prolific genius in the music of previous composers.
As I carefully leaf through the works of lesser known German composers, it is obvious to me, that most composers of the latter classical period, had simply elaborated on the ideas of their predecessors.
Franz Liszt, often accused of lacking the captivating intoxicating power of Chopin's beautiful melodies, was perhaps the most original of the Romantic composers, for he seems to have taken into completely different harmonic procedures in the rich "tapestry of his pianism." But Liszt, as we all know, often did transcriptions on the works of other composers.
--How about Richard Wagner?
I better keep my mouth shut when writing about this composer, because, as you all know, Wagner was a brilliant mind, and he detested anything bathetic in the musical flightiness of his contemporaries. He later wrote a scandalous treatise on the Music of Jewish Composers, and to this day, his name smacks of antisemitism.
A few weeks ago, while writing about the lofty nature of Mozart's music, a saucy man going around by the acronym of C.T., got pissed off with me, and called me a cheap charlatan, that I was a sham, an impostor. Therefore, it is risky to elicit any opinion without incurring conflicts with folks whose feelings and thoughts are not tuned in the tonic of Christ.
Yes, latter composers have continued to work and elaborate on the ideas of their former predecessors.
Summary:
Churches are empty because the sanctuary is dead: it doesn't inspire reverence or solemnity. The Bible is no longer the ultimate Corpus-Law (the Authority) to holding men and women accountable for their actions.
Most churches are outright flouting the Holy Scriptures with impunity: either in idolatry, or in the most revolting negation or interpretation of Biblical truths thereof.
Some Christian churches are worse than the Heathens, because the pagan people, while in darkness, some, at least, shared a universal conscience on things to be self-evidenced as morally wrong.
Hence, the Ancient Pagan People of Rome, though excoriated for idolatry and abomination, could be said to be in possession of a greater sense of divinity and sublimity than the ghetto-people of our times.
Relativism: their itching ears would like to twist certain Biblical passages as befitting their philosophies. The results have been devastating: the church is bleeding to death.
1-* There is a ghetto-god, as old as the rabble who hate the sublime God of Beauty, Harmony, and Divinity embodied in the person of Jesus Christ.
2-* The mysteries of evil and iniquity are beyond the province of science or psychology. Therefore, devils, demons or fallen angels, generally believed to be the the fabrication of our collective primitive mind, the ugly stuff of the unconscious swamp, are, nevertheless, relevant, because like the Ancient Sphinx's enigmatic visage, so the mysteries of iniquity defy comprehension.
3-* God is not dead, but the masses of men and women have committed spiritual suicide, and some have morphed into generations of callous zombies and ghouls. This may explain the "unnatural moral constitution" of our generation (2 Timothy Chapter 3).
4-* Christian values have been usurped by the mob (legion), the rabble who killed the Son of God: the God of Beauty and Orderliness. The rabble (la chusma, de donde procede el "chisme " gossip), is deeply imbedded in our collective conscience. It is hard to admit it, but, in the last analysis, we are the mob.
5-* The Bible is relevant, because apostasy, as forewarned by the ancient Prophets, has infiltrated most churches and institutions.
6-* A Kingdom divided in itself, could not stand, and we shall continue seeing more apostasy and turmoil rocking the Church of the god of this age. Regardless of religious denomination, the Church of God is going through a serious crisis.
7-* Devils are incarnating human bodies as never seen before. Mind you Ancient Egypt...was a hive for demonic activities
*********************************
Part 2: On Politics and Religion, The Dirty Games of the Devil— F. Nietzsche and Post America.
Today allow me to dance a tango with the dirty games of religion and politics. These two fields, however separated by the charades of the “holy and mundane,” when closely examined, are not so different from each other.
True! From time to time I have to dabble with politics and religion, such quagmires and impasses, and it is, in the wisdom of these savvy politicians and “good shepherds,” a trim procedure, the Devil’s games --a travesty of justice— to fixing the complex problems of mankind. And so, the Devil is first and foremost, a politician, then a lawyer, and finally “a man of god.”
Even behind the church, behind the altar, behind the little holy prayer, behind the sanctuary, behind the chancel, behind the facade of goodness, oh my goodness! it is all but a tawdry display of spirituality and mummeries.
True! Unlike Fredrick Nietzsche, I am not denouncing Christianity as the religion of the botched, the weak, the mollycoddle, the degenerate and slummy, in short the religion of the pariahs of spirituality.
But I have to admit that the Ancient Greeks had more reverence for the fickle gods than the modern Christians for the little crucified god of the ghetto-church.
One is reminded that the adjective ineffable, sovereign, majestic, sublime, divine and supernal had a spacious sky in the Arching Heaven of the Ancient Greeks and Romans.
But when I pay a visit to one of these Christian churches, passing for the “Holy People of Christ,” and I you tell me whether their sermons and end-less amens could surpass the ancient Greeks in the mystification of the most beautiful, exalted ideas of God and the Divine.
But it seems that the Devil has desecrated the most exalted qualities of Christianity into a religion for the botched masses, the rabbles and destitute of any genuine, noble feelings for the heights of the soul.
You hear this silly music, and you may wonder what went wrong with their heart and ear?
My attitude towards Christianity, nonetheless, is still pillared in the sound notion that one could not grasp the complexity of existence without a clear distinction between good and evil, and herein, I would disagree with Nietzsche’s master morality.
If you cannot separate darkness from light, how could you speak of justice, of truth, of good and evil?
Good and evils are facts of life. Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, a Guelph or
Ghibelline, I have to surmise that evil has the upper-hand on the surface of the Earth. This is a fact of life.
Of course, some folks would tell you that things are going wonderful, and with good politics, the insurmountable problems of a precarious existence could be resolved.
The truth is that our once great nation is floundering in debts, and the waggeries of faulty politics, worsened by a protracted pandemic, could crack open unsuspected ghoulish evils in the fragile democracy of the United States of America.
It is sad to envision so bleak a future in the days after-tomorrow, 12 to 13 defaulted states in America, ghost-towns like Gary Indiana, Michigan and Detroit, dismal cities and neighborhoods emerging out of the pit of hell, but this the facile truth in a complex system-of-things in the final throes of an empire.
Of course, the most obvious signs of decline and decadence in America are the clucking-politics in USA. Stay clear of such refuses of politics and dirty religious practices....
This is the reason why I warned you to clean your mind with the Buenos Aires of good music, the boon of Mother Nature and a passionate prompting urge to study the Holy Scriptures.
*******************************************
—-Are you following the latest news?
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/retired-military-demand-resignation-biden-team.amp
There are the “watchwords and bywords” to describing the dirty games of politics and power: pawn and swap.
You well know that some Americans were left behind, stranded in Afghanistan, basically trapped in a country overrun with heartless terrorists.
They could become “pawns” for political games and bargain between the Taliban and the Biden Administration.
To a Republican and Democrat in USA.
Like the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the American people are divided into two splenic factions: Republican and Democrat. If you are an American citizen, a zealous Republican, I sincerely apologize for calling the evacuation in Afghanistan “largely a success.”
Keep in mind, in any war, casualties are inevitable, and I didn’t mean to minimize the tragic loss of 13 American soldiers, and the possibility that some American people are still stranded in Afghanistan.
Tucker: Whenever you think we've reached peak insanity, Biden doubles-down:
Taking sides in the messy quagmires of politics could win me enemies. I cannot describe the current crisis in Afghanistan —a beehive for terrorists— but in the most alarming forebodings for the future of this nation.
Am I An American Citizen?
Thank you. I am an American citizen, and I hope you will perceive my love for this nation.
I wish to express sincerest apologies for expressing myself in a style unbecoming of my great respect for the President of the United States, Joe Biden, or for employing any Spanish derogatory twaddles (crazy hooptedoodle) or any disparaging remarks when touching upon the political chicken-clucking of some journalists (...), or that ever-ranting pundit, whose wagging tongue is not scanty of irony, wit and mockery.
Therefore, when it comes to politics, one should be on guard for any unpredictable effrontery, accusation or even vicious scheme of carefully-orchestrated plots (even downright lies) to bringing down a strong soul to his-her knees in capitulation.
That’s why politics, with little probity and accountability, is such a dirty game, where shrewdness and mental fortitude are not just enough to warding-off an unpredictable attack to one’s most-personals, for there are as many ways to swallowing a person whole into the Pit of Hell.
Gringo, a misnomer for an American citizen of light complexion, in Latin America is simply descriptive of a Northern European phenotype, it has nothing to do with racism or anti-Americanism, and if you thought so, then you are missing the gist of my observations when assessing the daily chicken-clucking-politics in USA.
I should excuse myself for any unwise facetiousness, because most politicians, and you well know this general truth concerning human nature, are said to become weak and corrupt through the blinders of greed, sex and powers.
Taliban Escorted Americans to the Gate:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/31/politics/taliban-escorted-american-kabul-airport/index.html
Lighthearted, today I woke up to find out the evacuation from the airport of Kabul, Afghanistan, was largely a success,so...Joe Biden, after all, is not a totally disgraced commander-in-chief.
Of course, some Republicans may continue questioning his fitness for the Oval Office.
True, some folks were left behind (100 to 200 Americans). With some good luck, these folks will probably escape the possibility of being held hostages, but I don’t think so. it would behoove the Taliban to become part of the international community.
Optimistically, I see a glimmer of hope at the end of this long journey.
Lo escribí en Español e Inglés porque algunos (estadounidenses) no entiende la perspective del extranjero.
I expressed my views in English and Spanish, the latter as some witty journalist or pundit from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Roll down the scroll if you wish to find me in an English mood.
Ajeno a los escándalos locales, pues tiene una opinión más sobria, objetiva y franca que el periodista estadounidense que busca agraciarse con algún partido político.
Aloof and objective to the common hubbub of the political party’s preferences, the outsider would have a sounder and candid opinion than the audacious peddler of stories currying the favors of the Republican or Democrat.
With respect to the current crisis in Afghanistan, I am being impartial to any siding, either with the Democrat or with the Republican, because you well know that neither Donald Trump, nor Joe Biden, as far as I know, had a clear, swift plan to the smooth withdrawal and evacuation of so many things and people in a timely orderly manner.
Aquí me expreso imparcialmente sobre la crisis en Afganistán, porque bien sabes que tanto Donald Trump, como Joe Biden, no tienen una estrategia clara sobre la pronta evacuación de miles de personas.
La única solución es salir de esas tierras nefastas lo más pronto posible.
The only viable solution is to leave those accursed lands as soon as possible.
Los Antiguos Romanos trataron de mantener un pie en Judea y otro pie en Germanía, pero sus políticas no fueron favorecidas por el capricho de los dioses, y poco a poco su Imperio se fue a pedazos.
The Ancient Roman had lost their wits when attempting to keeping a stronghold-footing in Judea, and another uneasy footing-base in Germania, but their asinine politics did not receive the applause of the fickle gods, and so their grand mighty empire went to wracks.
Donald abroad and Joe Biden at home, great leaders, pero si invertimos el orden: Donald Trump at home, and Joe Biden abroad, tendríamos una crisis sin precedente en la historia de los Estados Unidos.
Pero no hay duda que Joe Biden tiene más dignidad presidencial y humildad que el rubio de cuello altivo y pretencioso. Sin embargo, debemos reconocer que las cosas no andan bien para los aventureros políticos.
There is no doubt that Joe Biden has a dignitary mien, cool aplomb, perhaps more impressive than the blond man with his haughty gait and puffed-up sense of self-aggrandizement and superiority.
But one is bound to admit that things are not going well for the adventurous cowboys.
****************************************
Buenos Días Amigos!
Si el Sol pudiera ocultar estos eventos históricos, sería de gran alivio para mi alma, pero se suceden a la Luz del día.
En mi opinión, esta crisis es la peor derrota y humillación en la historia de esta nación.
Los Republicanos pueden presionar a un cambio de mando en La Casa Blanca, pero como país democrático, no se puede ir más allá de la ley.
Ya verás cosas y desgracias que te harán retornar al Viejo Testamento con las Lamentaciones de Jeremías.
Si tu crees en cosas sobrenaturales, pues aún la Madre Naturaleza, en su santa ira, está en contra del imperium de La Casa Blanca.
Por supuesto, bien sabemos que la mentalidad de estos generales es que vamos a democratizar a Afghanistan (El Medio Oriente), y con un poco más de escuela y educación, estás tribus salvages se harán nuestros amigos y aliados.
Esa mentalidad (trayectoria linear según la evolución de sus catecismos militares) ha sido burlada (a plena Luz del Día) en las angostadas tierras de Afghanistan.
Por supuesto, ya se nos había advertido (Profesor J. Rufus Fears, Sobre Egipto, 2012) que cualquier intento de “democratización” del Medio Oriente terminaría en radicalismos, extremismos y terrorismos.
Lo que ha pasado en Afghanistan no es solo una catástrofe militar, moral y económica, es una lección histórica, entre las más serias en los últimos tiempos: de que la Historia es, en última instancia, la máxima autoridad para tomar decisiones para el presente, y planificación para el futuro (palabras del ilustre Doctor Rufus Fears).
—Es peligroso lo que esta pasando en Afganistán?
Claro que si, pero acuérdate que los Romanos a veces podían tranquilizar a Attila y a los Unos.
Creo que hay un 60 por ciento de posibilidades que los adversarios (...) buscan demostrar un músculo de poder.
Y esto es debido a que no hay estrategia...porque el enemigo, rodeando a Kabul, tiene la delantera.
Por lo tanto, Biden no tiene muchas opciones, sino negociar como un buen diplomático.
El Emperador Valerio sufrió tal derrota...así veo yo al actual presidente de los Estados Unido: Joe Biden.
Para los Gringos levantar la moral de la nación, van a tener que buscar a un Germanicus (General Romano). Algunos han considerado a retornar al Señor Donald Trump a La Casa Blanca, pero no se como lo harán?
Van a salir de este tollo político?
Por supuesto, pero creo que van tener que volver a emprender otra aventura militar. Es muy posible...pero no se como lo harán?
No se como lo harán...pero en los próximos días tú te vas a recordar de que la historia se repite, y los adversarios van declarar que su Dios Allah le ha dado la victoria.
Nosotros, como los Antiguos Romanos, no tenemos muchas opciones con estos pueblos bárbaros, sino negociar, y lo peor de esto sería... reconocer al Taliban como una nación soberana de poder e influencia como la Corea del Norte.
Los Gringos no van a aceptar este nuevo estatuto de los bárbaros.
Pero eso ocurrió con los Visigodos y los Germánicos y otras tribus nórdicas que eran considerado bárbaras para los Antiguos Romanos.
Si tu crees que se puede poner más vinagre en la herida, pues no me sorprende que Afganistán se convierta en el talón de Aquiles...
Biden...puede convertirse en el líder (El Humillado Emperador Valerio para los Romanos) más débil en la historia de este nación.
Lo más increíble, vemos señales y (augurios) pero aún así no creemos en la Justicia Divina!
Los Antiguos estaban convencido en los augurios de los dioses, o en la Ira de Yahveh, las abominaciones de una nación pueden indignar al cielo de lo que es justo, puro y terriblemente divino...
*************************************
At least 10 US service members killed in Kabul airport attack
Am I An American Citizen?
Thank you. I am an American citizen, and I hope you will perceive my love for this nation.
I wish to express sincerest apologies for expressing myself in a style unbecoming of my great respect for the President of the United States, Joe Biden, or for employing any Spanish derogatory twaddles (crazy hooptedoodle) or any disparaging remarks when touching upon the political chicken-clucking of some journalists (...), or that ever-ranting pundit, whose wagging tongue is not scanty of irony, wit and mockery.
Therefore, when it comes to politics, one should be on guard for any unpredictable effrontery, accusation or even vicious scheme of carefully-orchestrated plots (even downright lies) to bringing down a strong soul to his-her knees in capitulation.
That’s why politics, with little probity and accountability, is such a dirty game, where shrewdness and mental fortitude are not just enough to warding-off an unpredictable attack to one’s most-personals, for there are as many ways to swallowing a person whole into the Pit of Hell.
Gringo, a misnomer for an American citizen of light complexion, in Latin America is simply descriptive of a Northern European phenotype, it has nothing to do with racism or anti-Americanism, and if you thought so, then you are missing the gist of my observations when assessing the daily chicken-clucking-politics in USA.
I should excuse myself for any unwise facetiousness, because most politicians, and you well know this general truth concerning human nature, are said to become weak and corrupt through the blinders of greed, sex and powers.
Taliban Escorted Americans to the Gate:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/31/politics/taliban-escorted-american-kabul-airport/index.html
Lighthearted, today I woke up to find out the evacuation from the airport of Kabul, Afghanistan, was largely a success,so...Joe Biden, after all, is not a totally disgraced commander-in-chief.
Of course, some Republicans may continue questioning his fitness for the Oval Office.
True, some folks were left behind (100 to 200 Americans). With some good luck, these folks will probably escape the possibility of being held hostages, but I don’t think so. it would behoove the Taliban to become part of the international community.
Optimistically, I see a glimmer of hope at the end of this long journey.
Lo escribí en Español e Inglés porque algunos (estadounidenses) no entiende la perspective del extranjero.
I expressed my views in English and Spanish, the latter as some witty journalist or pundit from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Roll down the scroll if you wish to find me in an English mood.
Ajeno a los escándalos locales, pues tiene una opinión más sobria, objetiva y franca que el periodista estadounidense que busca agraciarse con algún partido político.
Aloof and objective to the common hubbub of the political party’s preferences, the outsider would have a sounder and candid opinion than the audacious peddler of stories currying the favors of the Republican or Democrat.
With respect to the current crisis in Afghanistan, I am being impartial to any siding, either with the Democrat or with the Republican, because you well know that neither Donald Trump, nor Joe Biden, as far as I know, had a clear, swift plan to the smooth withdrawal and evacuation of so many things and people in a timely orderly manner.
Aquí me expreso imparcialmente sobre la crisis en Afganistán, porque bien sabes que tanto Donald Trump, como Joe Biden, no tienen una estrategia clara sobre la pronta evacuación de miles de personas.
La única solución es salir de esas tierras nefastas lo más pronto posible.
The only viable solution is to leave those accursed lands as soon as possible.
Los Antiguos Romanos trataron de mantener un pie en Judea y otro pie en Germanía, pero sus políticas no fueron favorecidas por el capricho de los dioses, y poco a poco su Imperio se fue a pedazos.
The Ancient Roman had lost their wits when attempting to keeping a stronghold-footing in Judea, and another uneasy footing-base in Germania, but their asinine politics did not receive the applause of the fickle gods, and so their grand mighty empire went to wracks.
Donald abroad and Joe Biden at home, great leaders, pero si invertimos el orden: Donald Trump at home, and Joe Biden abroad, tendríamos una crisis sin precedente en la historia de los Estados Unidos.
Pero no hay duda que Joe Biden tiene más dignidad presidencial y humildad que el rubio de cuello altivo y pretencioso. Sin embargo, debemos reconocer que las cosas no andan bien para los aventureros políticos.
There is no doubt that Joe Biden has a dignitary mien, cool aplomb, perhaps more impressive than the blond man with his haughty gait and puffed-up sense of self-aggrandizement and superiority.
But one is bound to admit that things are not going well for the adventurous cowboys.
****************************************
Buenos Días Amigos!
Si el Sol pudiera ocultar estos eventos históricos, sería de gran alivio para mi alma, pero se suceden a la Luz del día.
En mi opinión, esta crisis es la peor derrota y humillación en la historia de esta nación.
Los Republicanos pueden presionar a un cambio de mando en La Casa Blanca, pero como país democrático, no se puede ir más allá de la ley.
Ya verás cosas y desgracias que te harán retornar al Viejo Testamento con las Lamentaciones de Jeremías.
Si tu crees en cosas sobrenaturales, pues aún la Madre Naturaleza, en su santa ira, está en contra del imperium de La Casa Blanca.
Por supuesto, bien sabemos que la mentalidad de estos generales es que vamos a democratizar a Afghanistan (El Medio Oriente), y con un poco más de escuela y educación, estás tribus salvages se harán nuestros amigos y aliados.
Esa mentalidad (trayectoria linear según la evolución de sus catecismos militares) ha sido burlada (a plena Luz del Día) en las angostadas tierras de Afghanistan.
Por supuesto, ya se nos había advertido (Profesor J. Rufus Fears, Sobre Egipto, 2012) que cualquier intento de “democratización” del Medio Oriente terminaría en radicalismos, extremismos y terrorismos.
Lo que ha pasado en Afghanistan no es solo una catástrofe militar, moral y económica, es una lección histórica, entre las más serias en los últimos tiempos: de que la Historia es, en última instancia, la máxima autoridad para tomar decisiones para el presente, y planificación para el futuro (palabras del ilustre Doctor Rufus Fears).
—Es peligroso lo que esta pasando en Afganistán?
Claro que si, pero acuérdate que los Romanos a veces podían tranquilizar a Attila y a los Unos.
Creo que hay un 60 por ciento de posibilidades que los adversarios (...) buscan demostrar un músculo de poder.
Y esto es debido a que no hay estrategia...porque el enemigo, rodeando a Kabul, tiene la delantera.
Por lo tanto, Biden no tiene muchas opciones, sino negociar como un buen diplomático.
El Emperador Valerio sufrió tal derrota...así veo yo al actual presidente de los Estados Unido: Joe Biden.
Para los Gringos levantar la moral de la nación, van a tener que buscar a un Germanicus (General Romano). Algunos han considerado a retornar al Señor Donald Trump a La Casa Blanca, pero no se como lo harán?
Van a salir de este tollo político?
Por supuesto, pero creo que van tener que volver a emprender otra aventura militar. Es muy posible...pero no se como lo harán?
No se como lo harán...pero en los próximos días tú te vas a recordar de que la historia se repite, y los adversarios van declarar que su Dios Allah le ha dado la victoria.
Nosotros, como los Antiguos Romanos, no tenemos muchas opciones con estos pueblos bárbaros, sino negociar, y lo peor de esto sería... reconocer al Taliban como una nación soberana de poder e influencia como la Corea del Norte.
Los Gringos no van a aceptar este nuevo estatuto de los bárbaros.
Pero eso ocurrió con los Visigodos y los Germánicos y otras tribus nórdicas que eran considerado bárbaras para los Antiguos Romanos.
Si tu crees que se puede poner más vinagre en la herida, pues no me sorprende que Afganistán se convierta en el talón de Aquiles...
Biden...puede convertirse en el líder (El Humillado Emperador Valerio para los Romanos) más débil en la historia de este nación.
Lo más increíble, vemos señales y (augurios) pero aún así no creemos en la Justicia Divina!
Los Antiguos estaban convencido en los augurios de los dioses, o en la Ira de Yahveh, las abominaciones de una nación pueden indignar al cielo de lo que es justo, puro y terriblemente divino...
*************************************
At least 10 US service members killed in Kabul airport attack
Thanks for keeping me posted. I have been following the crisis transpiring in Kabul, and I hope and pray they will finish the evacuation in a timely and safely manner before August 31st.
Unfortunately, from what I gather, it seems that the job will not be complete before the deadline. This is frightening, for I have no clue how in the world will President Biden stave-off the ambushes of lone wolves (lethal terrorists) prowling the transit checkpoints of Kabul?
As we approach August 31, there is a lot of anxiety and concern (even forebodings) for the safety of our dear families and friends stationed in the fallout of Afghanistan’s nightmarish humanitarian disaster.
Contrary to the finger-pointing opinions of many analysts and pundits on the Crisis of Afghanistan, I surmise that the Biden Administration is hard-pressed by an ever-precautiously balanced pile of mind-boggling national debts —-and out-of-control inflation— and his reckless decisions, as you may vouch to be faulty, even nonsensical, crazy, and downright one-sided, are often clouded by a mounting slew of predicaments: international pressure abroad and domestic break-down of society at home.
While some Republicans may attack President Joe Biden for his “imbecilic policies,” and may even question his “cognitive sobriety” to leading us forward out of this mess, I hold that a stagnant economy could “break regimes and nations” (coining Dr. J. Rufus Fears’ warning on the Middle East): one can only guess that the bungled withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan was rather an economic resolution than a prudent military one.
There is a shocking correlation between colossal stupidity and precarious resourcefulness bound up together, but a reckless decision could prove to be suicidal, and I think Mr. Biden, caught-up in the whirlwind of so many apocalyptic calamities, has found himself in a quagmire of unprecedented political failures and blunders on every front.
I will forgo touching upon a protracted pandemic, COVID-19 (and its latest novel strain Delta) because this plague has plunged us all into a world of uncertainties, speculations, anxiety and wild conspiratorial theories.
Sure, if there is any truth to the mark of the Beast, 666, it seems to me very plausible that we are entering an era of unprecedented civilian surveillance, so you better watch what you say or write in your social media.
Unfortunately, while trying to alleviate our already debilitated precarious budget (some stimulus checks and the moratorium eviction extended to Oct. 3) that is to say our domestic policies to keeping things safe in our crime-ridden neighborhoods, but with the latest disaster in Afghanistan, we have simply tipped the Nation of Thomas Jefferson into the vengeful hands of potential enemies (refugees, terrorists and ilegal immigrants) some hellbent on the destruction of our democracy, freedom and liberty.
If there is any merit in any tragedy, such as the current debacle plunging Afghanistan into unpalatable chaos and barbarism, it is this moral lesson in the recurrent pages of history.
The colossal stupidity of the American people, my fellow American citizens, is this delusional linear-trajectory, and even this “law of relativity-vertigo” in the classroom of science and hubris, that we know more than the ancient people —of course, we are more intelligent than John Milton and Homer.
And now, much to my surprise, a bunch of illiterate peasants have simply defeated the greater nation on Earth.
https://www.eddiebeato.com/on-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-roman-empire-of-edward-gibbon.html
Not only we failed to bringing democracy to a stubborn people accustomed to theocracy and even despotism (as forewarned by Dr. J. Rufus Fears, 2012), but the shameful withdrawal of our troops from Kabul is said to be emblematic to a historic defeat —-psychologically speaking— no less tragic than the fiasco of the ancient Romans to conquering Germanía (Germany, Alemania La Terrible), and I fear that a defiant people, such as the many-headed monster Taliban, could usher an age of terror such as Attila and the Huns all across Europe and USA...if you don’t believe me, then you are a mentally castrated Post-American citizen.
Unfortunately, from what I gather, it seems that the job will not be complete before the deadline. This is frightening, for I have no clue how in the world will President Biden stave-off the ambushes of lone wolves (lethal terrorists) prowling the transit checkpoints of Kabul?
As we approach August 31, there is a lot of anxiety and concern (even forebodings) for the safety of our dear families and friends stationed in the fallout of Afghanistan’s nightmarish humanitarian disaster.
Contrary to the finger-pointing opinions of many analysts and pundits on the Crisis of Afghanistan, I surmise that the Biden Administration is hard-pressed by an ever-precautiously balanced pile of mind-boggling national debts —-and out-of-control inflation— and his reckless decisions, as you may vouch to be faulty, even nonsensical, crazy, and downright one-sided, are often clouded by a mounting slew of predicaments: international pressure abroad and domestic break-down of society at home.
While some Republicans may attack President Joe Biden for his “imbecilic policies,” and may even question his “cognitive sobriety” to leading us forward out of this mess, I hold that a stagnant economy could “break regimes and nations” (coining Dr. J. Rufus Fears’ warning on the Middle East): one can only guess that the bungled withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan was rather an economic resolution than a prudent military one.
There is a shocking correlation between colossal stupidity and precarious resourcefulness bound up together, but a reckless decision could prove to be suicidal, and I think Mr. Biden, caught-up in the whirlwind of so many apocalyptic calamities, has found himself in a quagmire of unprecedented political failures and blunders on every front.
I will forgo touching upon a protracted pandemic, COVID-19 (and its latest novel strain Delta) because this plague has plunged us all into a world of uncertainties, speculations, anxiety and wild conspiratorial theories.
Sure, if there is any truth to the mark of the Beast, 666, it seems to me very plausible that we are entering an era of unprecedented civilian surveillance, so you better watch what you say or write in your social media.
Unfortunately, while trying to alleviate our already debilitated precarious budget (some stimulus checks and the moratorium eviction extended to Oct. 3) that is to say our domestic policies to keeping things safe in our crime-ridden neighborhoods, but with the latest disaster in Afghanistan, we have simply tipped the Nation of Thomas Jefferson into the vengeful hands of potential enemies (refugees, terrorists and ilegal immigrants) some hellbent on the destruction of our democracy, freedom and liberty.
If there is any merit in any tragedy, such as the current debacle plunging Afghanistan into unpalatable chaos and barbarism, it is this moral lesson in the recurrent pages of history.
The colossal stupidity of the American people, my fellow American citizens, is this delusional linear-trajectory, and even this “law of relativity-vertigo” in the classroom of science and hubris, that we know more than the ancient people —of course, we are more intelligent than John Milton and Homer.
And now, much to my surprise, a bunch of illiterate peasants have simply defeated the greater nation on Earth.
https://www.eddiebeato.com/on-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-roman-empire-of-edward-gibbon.html
Not only we failed to bringing democracy to a stubborn people accustomed to theocracy and even despotism (as forewarned by Dr. J. Rufus Fears, 2012), but the shameful withdrawal of our troops from Kabul is said to be emblematic to a historic defeat —-psychologically speaking— no less tragic than the fiasco of the ancient Romans to conquering Germanía (Germany, Alemania La Terrible), and I fear that a defiant people, such as the many-headed monster Taliban, could usher an age of terror such as Attila and the Huns all across Europe and USA...if you don’t believe me, then you are a mentally castrated Post-American citizen.