points out in The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism (New York: Bloomsbury), 2013.
36. For Nietzsche it was question of how much one values life. Do we love life enough to will it to repeat itself over and over, nothing changed, with all the joys but also the sufferings. He did. Yet even he saw change as inevitable, so that the only choice is whether we will change for the “better,” that is, by “overcoming” the self by our “will to power.” It is strange that many construed this as “nihilism.”
37. See Lawrence Kohlberg, “The Claim to Moral Authority of a Highest Stage of Moral Judgment,” Journal of Philosophy 70 (18): 630–46; Essays in Moral Development, 2 vols. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981, 1984).
38. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Robert Paul Wolff, tr. by Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1969), pp. 34–37.
39. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, tr. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1960).
40. See Tracy at note 33 above, in his chapter “On the Origin of the Philosophy of Religion, pp. 20–21. Here, Tracy builds his case for Kant’s interest in religion on his distinction of Kant’s three questions (What can I know? What ought I do? and What may I hope for?). Tracy italicizes “may” to suggest that a “moral theism” may enable one to hope for that “virtue worthy of happiness.” Tracy says that this moral theism lays open the hope of one’s experiencing the Summum Bonum, of attaining what cannot be attained in this finite life, a “teleological unity of nature and freedom.” However, this seems ironically to violate Kant’s opposition to a teleological ethic justifying one’s life. It ignores his insistence that any belief in God can be no more than a “postulate,” which is not needed when one recognizes the “categorical imperative” as truly “categorical”—which means being considered by the person as having the power (though now autonomous rather than heteronomous) equal to (or “as if” it were) a “divine command.” But his “as if” does appear to raise an unresolved problem of whether he ends up absolutizing a principle since the “categorical” quality of it brooks no exceptions.
41. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. 54–72.
42. John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), pp. xxi, xxvii, xxx, 2, 17, 25, 29, 40, 46, 68, 208, 305, 584–86, and esp. xxxv where he distinguishes the easy work of “theology” with the difficult work of the “historian”: “The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.” He, in any case, asserts he is trying to be honest with history and faithful to the church. We will analyze that in chapter 8.
43. This is a quote from Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2006), p. 228. He shows how a variety of different parts of the brain are necessary for it to develop a “schema” through its selectivity, preferences, emotions, and so on, and therefore be able to anticipate and have familiarity, which in turn supplies meaning. This description is almost identical to William James’ description of pragmatism’s view of the accumulation of knowledge, which the new encounters and insights must be tested over against the cumulated whole schema at any given time and will either be discovered to fit into that web of understanding or be rejected when they do not. See James, Pragmatism and Four Essays from the Meaning of Truth (New York: Meridian Books, 1955).
44. Hans Küng, Christianity: Essence, History, and Future (New York: Continuum, 1998). He nevertheless thinks somehow, despite all this negative stuff, the “essence” of Christianity, the inspiration of the life of the Christ, has continued to attract, convict, and motivate people to lives of service to each other.
45. That opposition to describe their status as “religious” traces back Karl Barth in his opposition to nineteenth-century Christian Idealism, especially against Schleiermacher. In his early years, he was appreciative of Schleiermacher and published articles on his theology. But when World War I occurred, Barth and several other colleagues repudiated their former teachers including Adolf Harnack, and painted the Idealism as simply a form of “anthropology” rather than “theology.” Karl Barth, Protestant Thought: From Rousseau to Ritschl, tr. Brian Cozens (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969), and in a less direct attack against “religion” in Barth’s Epistle to the Romans, tr. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1963).
46. On the surface, Hinduism seems an exception to this, tolerating beliefs in different gods or ways of finding the better life. But the more one hears the fundamentalist Hindus, the exclusivism so blatant in Christianity and other religions is found even in parts of Hinduism. Even the great Bhagavad Gita seems to present two views, one that says any of the margas or yogas can suffice, but also that bhakti yoga is best.
47. In Soren Kierkegaard’s Attack on Christendom, tr. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), he included a pointed story to this effect entitled, “An Eternity in Which to Repent.” It is beautifully written, quite imaginative, but logically, hideously sadistic.
48. The abandonment of an individual’s private moral morality to espouse a contradictory morality of his group, was articulated in Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), nearly a century ago.
49. It is more blatant in Protestant thought than most other religious doctrine, exaggerating the absoluteness of God and God’s goodness with the inherent sinfulness of humans, so much so that within the leading Protestant churches, the official doctrine for centuries has been that even if one has faith, one’s only hope for a better life is not that one will truly become more moral, but only that God will “count” one as “righteous” though one never is.
50. Jack Sanders, Ethics in the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1986).
51. Soelle, Political Theology.
52. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (New York: Harper & Bros., 1951), pp. 20–48.
53. Harvey Cox, Turning East: The Promise and Peril of the New Orientalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977).
54. It is fairly significant that Stephen Hawking suggested that we need, however, to be looking for another planet to live on since within a century or so, we may need to begin such immigration for homo sapiens to continue to exist. Recent discoveries suggest that we may find some “exoplanet” such as “Ross 128b” as an answer, as an “Earth 2.0.”
55. Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Contemporary Jesus (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997). Altizer accepted Schweitzer’s analysis of the historical Jesus, from which he emphasized the “new.”
56. They usually get labeled “radical theologians.” Robert P. Scharlemann’s The Reason of Following: Christology and the Ecstatic I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), was a brilliant attempt to open up the possibility of Christology while preserving autonomy. Thomas J. J. Altizer’s refusal to cite “authorities” in some of his later works is also a methodological reinforcement of the value of autonomy. But these are exceptional books from exceptional people.
57. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Books, 1954). Nietzsche (1844–1900), is remembered by those who only heard of him, but never read him, for his “nihilism,” his idea of the “death of God,” and for succumbing
