Nihilism and European Civilization

Perhaps the reason why Christianity is dying down in Europe isn't because people are 'enlightened' by science. In fact, I seriously doubt it. I'm betting it's because there aren't too many variations of Christianity to choose from over there. You have Catholicism and Protestant, but that's about it.

Give the Europeans more choices like here in the US and I'd bet Christianity would grow like wild fire.

Church attendance is down? You just made my night.

How exactly does this equal a decline in Christianity?

I'll be the first to throw a party if Churchianity ever dies but please, for crying out loud, don't equate church attendance with a belief in Christ. I'd guess that a lot of believers have wised up to the scam that is the church system, at least I can hope.

Church attendance is down? You just made my night.

How exactly does this equal a decline in Christianity?

I'll be the first to throw a party if Churchianity ever dies but please, for crying out loud, don't equate church attendance with a belief in Christ. I'd guess that a lot of believers have wised up to the scam that is the church system, at least I can hope.

Besides the personal meaningless individual lives trying to satisfy the hole with consumer goods, sexual activity, and thrill seeking...

...Civilizational Collapse and a new order being imposed most likely via colonization under open borders, mass immigration, non-discrimination, diversity promotion, multicutluralism). Europe is currently being colonized by Muslims and facing a future Islamic order....in place of the Hedonism that now dominates.

Give the Europeans more choices like here in the US and I'd bet Christianity would grow like wild fire.

You are aware the Protestant pretty much means all the 'variations' that aren't Catholic, right. Protestant + Catholic > 2.

Um...who's stopping them? Heck, church-sponsored schools and organizations even get state funding there. The problem isn't that people disagree on the finer points of theology - it's that many already think the established religions are bunk. This doesn't make them any more likely to embrace the wackier variants we came up with in the US. In case you don't know, US religiosity is a big joke to the rest of the western world.

“It is questionable whether Europeans ever had a fundamental grasp of the grace of Jesus Christ,” said Bill Bennett, director of communications for Greater Europe Mission, to The Christian Post in a recent interview.

Bennett explained that the church to Europeans is seen as an economic and political power representing the religion of the rich world. Europeans have a more formal, ritualistic view of Christianity partially because in its history, a person’s landlord decided whether he would be Catholic or Protestant rather than any personal conviction.

In Europe, it is not unusual for a person to describe themself as a Catholic-Atheist, or someone born and raised in a Catholic family but who does not personally believe in God. Typically, the person would be baptized, married, and have their funeral held in a church, but would not be able to explain the meaning of Easter.

Nope! Never knew that. Never gave it that much thought. I was just trying to figure out the reason Christianity is failing in Europe and that seemed like a possibility.

Well, obviously, something's stopping them.

Here's an interesting article I found that may highlight what's really happening:

http://www.christianpost.com/news/u-s-christians-ignorant-of-europe-s-spiritual-state-says-mission-group-spokesman-26757/

So it seems like Christianity is failing in Europe mostly because the Churches are not teaching Christ. It's just a matter of going through the motions for them.

Is that just incredibly dry sarcasm, or did you really not know what Protestant meant? That would be like saying Galileo's ideas were quickly embraced by the Catholic church.

Oh I see. Something 'must' be stopping the rise of Evangelical religion in Europe. Perhaps that 'something' is a better-educated populous with a long history of fundamentalist religions. It's like a cultural vaccine. That isn't to say they don't have their own wacky notions (ala homeopathy).

Nietzsche


Nihilism is often associated with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who provided a detailed diagnosis of nihilism as a widespread phenomenon of Western culture. Though the notion appears frequently throughout Nietzsche's work, he uses the term in a variety of ways, with different meanings and connotations, both positive and negative. Karen Carr describes Nietzsche's characterization of nihilism "as a condition of tension, as a disproportion between what we want to value (or need) and how the world appears to operate."[17] When we find out that the world does not possess the objective value or meaning that we want it to have or have long since believed it to have, we find ourselves in a crisis.[18] Nietzsche asserts that with the decline of Christianity and the rise of physiological decadence, nihilism is in fact characteristic of the modern age,[19] though he implies that the rise of nihilism is still incomplete and that it has yet to be overcome.[20] Though the problem of nihilism becomes especially explicit in Nietzsche's notebooks (published posthumously), it is mentioned repeatedly in his published works and is closely connected to many of the problems mentioned there.

Nietzsche characterized nihilism as emptying the world and especially human existence of meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. This observation stems in part from Nietzsche's perspectivism, or his notion that "knowledge" is always by someone of some thing: it is always bound by perspective, and it is never mere fact.[21] Rather, there are interpretations through which we understand the world and give it meaning. Interpreting is something we can not go without; in fact, it is something we need. One way of interpreting the world is through morality, as one of the fundamental ways in which people make sense of the world, especially in regard to their own thoughts and actions. Nietzsche distinguishes a morality that is strong or healthy, meaning that the person in question is aware that he constructs it himself, from weak morality, where the interpretation is projected on to something external. Regardless of its strength, morality presents us with meaning, whether this is created or 'implanted,' which helps us get through life.[22] This is exactly why Nietzsche states that nihilism as "absolute valuelessness" or "nothing has meaning"[23] is dangerous, or even "the danger of dangers"[24]: it is through valuation that people survive and endure the danger, pain and hardships they face in life. The complete destruction of all meaning and all values would lead to an existence of apathy and stillness, where positive actions, affirmative actions, would be replaced by a state of reaction and destruction. This is the prophecy of "der letzte Mensch", the last man [25], the most despicable man, devoid of values, incapable of self-realization through creation of his own good and evil, devoid of any "will to power" (Wille zur Macht).

Nietzsche discusses Christianity, one of the major topics in his work, at length in the context of the problem of nihilism in his notebooks, in a chapter entitled 'European Nihilism'.[26] Here he states that the Christian moral doctrine provides people with intrinsic value, belief in God (which justifies the evil in the world) and a basis for objective knowledge. In this sense, in constructing a world where objective knowledge is possible, Christianity is an antidote against a primal form of nihilism, against the despair of meaninglessness. However, it is exactly the element of truthfulness in Christian doctrine that is its undoing: in its drive towards truth, Christianity eventually finds itself to be a construct, which leads to its own dissolution. It is therefore that Nietzsche states that we have outgrown Christianity "not because we lived too far from it, rather because we lived too close."[27] As such, the self-dissolution of Christianity constitutes yet another form of nihilism. Because Christianity was an interpretation that posited itself as the interpretation, Nietzsche states that this dissolution leads beyond skepticism to a distrust of all meaning.[28][29]

Stanley Rosen identifies Nietzsche's concept of nihilism with this situation of meaninglessness, where "everything is permitted." According to him, the loss of higher metaphysical values which existed in contrast with the base reality of the world or merely human ideas give rise to the idea that all human ideas are therefore valueless. Rejection of idealism thus results in nihilism, because only similarly transcendent ideals would live up to the previous standards that the nihilist still implicitly holds.[30] The inability for Christianity to serve as a source of valuating the world is reflected in Nietzsche's famous aphorism of the madman in the Gay Science.[31] The death of God, in particular the statement that "we killed him", is similar to the self-dissolution of Christian doctrine: due to the advances of the sciences, which for Nietzsche show that man is the product of evolution, that earth has no special place among the stars and that history is not progressive, the Christian notion of God can no longer serve as a basis for a morality.

One such reaction to the loss of meaning is what Nietzsche calls 'passive nihilism', which he recognises in the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer's doctrine, which Nietzsche also refers to as Western Buddhism, advocates a separating oneself of will and desires in order to reduce suffering. Nietzsche characterises this ascetic attitude as a "will to nothingness," whereby life turns away from itself, as there is nothing of value to be found in the world. This mowing away of all value in the world is characteristic of the nihilist, although in this, the nihilist appears to be inconsistent[32]:
A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos — at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, KSA 12:9 [60], taken from The Will to Power, section 585, translated by Walter Kaufmann

Nietzsche's relation to the problem of nihilism is a complex one. He approaches the problem of nihilism as a deeply personal one, stating that this problem of the modern world is a problem that has "become conscious" in him.[33] Furthermore, he emphasises both the danger of nihilism and the possibilities it offers, as seen in his statement that "I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength!"[34] According to Nietzsche, it is only when nihilism is overcome that a culture can have a true foundation upon which to thrive. He wished to hasten its coming only so that he could also hasten its ultimate departure.[19]

He states that there is at least the possibility of another type of nihilist in the wake of Christianity's self-dissolution, one that does not stop after the destruction of all value and meaning and succumb to the following nothingness. This alternate, 'active' nihilism on the other hand destroys to level the field for constructing something new. This form of nihilism is characterized by Nietzsche as "a sign of strength,"[35] a wilful destruction of the old values to wipe the slate clean and lay down one's own beliefs and interpretations, contrary to the passive nihilism that resigns itself with the decomposition of the old values. This wilful destruction of values and the overcoming of the condition of nihilism by the constructing of new meaning, this active nihilism could be related to what Nietzsche elsewhere calls a 'free spirit'[36] or the Übermensch from Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Antichrist, the model of the strong individual who posits his own values and lives his life as if it were his own work of art.

Postmodernism

Postmodern and poststructuralist thought question the very grounds on which Western cultures have based their 'truths': absolute knowledge and meaning, a 'decentralization' of authorship, the accumulation of positive knowledge, historical progress, and certain ideals and practices of humanism and the Enlightenment.

Jacques Derrida, whose deconstruction is perhaps most commonly labeled nihilistic, did not himself make the nihilistic move that others have claimed. Derridean deconstructionists argue that this approach rather frees texts, individuals or organizations from a restrictive truth, and that deconstruction opens up the possibility of other ways of being.[48] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, for example, uses deconstruction to create an ethics of opening up Western scholarship to the voice of the subaltern and to philosophies outside of the canon of western texts.[49] Derrida himself built a philosophy based upon a 'responsibility to the other'.[50] Deconstruction can thus be seen not as a denial of truth, but as a denial of our ability to know truth (it makes an epistemological claim compared to nihilism's ontological claim).

Lyotard argues that, rather than relying on an objective truth or method to prove their claims, philosophers legitimize their truths by reference to a story about the world which is inseparable from the age and system the stories belong to, referred to by Lyotard as meta-narratives. He then goes on to define the postmodern condition as one characterized by a rejection both of these meta-narratives and of the process of legitimation by meta-narratives. "In lieu of meta-narratives we have created new language-games in order to legitimize our claims which rely on changing relationships and mutable truths, none of which is privileged over the other to speak to ultimate truth." This concept of the instability of truth and meaning leads in the direction of nihilism, though Lyotard stops short of embracing the latter.

Postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote briefly of nihilism from the postmodern viewpoint in Simulacra and Simulation. He stuck mainly to topics of interpretations of the real world over the simulations of which the real world is composed. The uses of meaning was an important subject in Baudrillard's discussion of nihilism:

Quote : The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference…all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us. Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency. —Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, "On Nihilism", trans. 1995

Really? How's that?

Well, that's possible too, but it's a far more remote possibility than you might think. European Christianity not being 'Christian' is more likely.

Because for someone to be debating on a topic of religion, if would be ridiculous not to know these things.

Precisely the point. On any study of developed nations, higher education corresponds strongly with lower religious fundamentalism. And Europeans are far better versed in the history of the Western world than we are in the US. Ask any English schoolchild about the early US Republic, and they would trounce most US kids. They tend to avoid religious fundamentalism precisely because they know its influence too well.