Well, let me respond in a typically Nietzschean manner then and insert the disclaimer that such is merely "my truth." ;)
The Abyss to me is a liberating realization, the conception that Man is wholly responsible for his own destiny, Radically Responsible in a Sartrean kinda way. Although I honestly believe that science has made God the Creator moot, I also grudgingly believe that for most of humanity God the Moral Lawgiver is still a necessity.
As a species, we may not be ready for the full wide eyed stare into empty eternity. Kant argued that belief in God was a necessity, irregardless of the truth of such belief, since it preserves hope and maintains the stake in the moral life. That still holds true, although IMHO God may be substituted with hope in the progress and survival of the species. But until a satisfactory Ethics can replace God as Lawgiver with Man the Rational Agent, God must do. Similiarly until such an ethics, and possibly the horrors of history, can enshrine in humanity the fear of violation of our own natural ethics, with equivelant force of eternal damnation, the "anything is possible" of the Nazis is a real danger, humanity's own true self-made eternal damnation: extinction.
Derek |
