totally, totally OT: Re: Governor Hodges mentions HP

[Marvin Long]

No: HPFGUIDX 9575

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, "Caius Marcius" <coriolan at w...>
wrote:

[Not gonna touch the 1st Amendment issue with a 10-ft pole, just not
gonna do it....]
 
> Even the militant athiest Nietzsche declared that "Compared to the 
> Bible, everything else is merely literature."

But being a huge Nietzsche fan, I will tackle this since it seems to
imply that even Nietzshe would grant the Bible special dispensation,
which he most certainly wouldn't.  Everything else is "merely
literature" because of the Bible's *cultural* influence.  It's true
that Nietzsche admired the Jewish patriarchs, lawgivers, and prophets
of the Old Testament for their aggressive personalities and literary
verve; they reminded him of the pre-Socratic Greek heroes whom he also
admired.  And he regarded their *invention* of God as a monumental act
of creative, artistic, and social will (will-to-power, even).

The New Testament part of the Bible, however, he regarded with the
same disgust that he felt for Socrates and for Platonic mysticism. 
For N, both are brilliant but pernicious acts of cultural inversion,
myths that devalue life rather than uplift it.  While he's certainly
impressed by the power of the myths, he deeply hates what he perceives
as the negative consequences of foisting those theologies, both Xtian
and Platonic, on human society.

"Compared to the Bible, everything else is merely literature" because
in N's view, nothing else does so much glorify human life with one
hand (the Jewish) while despising and crushing it with the other (the
Christian).  N's view in no way bears on the state motto of Ohio.

marvin