tothesource has gone to some length to cover the seemingly endless rash of atheist books by contemporary authors such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and so on. Besides having a shared creed of unbelief, they have something else in common, an embarrassing lack of depth.

This Ash Wednesday as we enter the season of contemplation about Jesus' journey to the cross, we believe it might prove instructive to reintroduce a real atheist, someone who had the intelligence and steely will to swim atheism to the bottom, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Sometimes honest atheism can awaken us to the hope of the Christian gospel.

The son of a Lutheran pastor, Friedrich Nietzsche hated Christianity with a passion that could only come from understanding what it really demanded. The problem with Christianity is that it posited a God Who, instead of lording it over humanity in august tyranny, became a man in utter obscurity. The incarnate God did not radiate power like a despot, but embraced humility like a slave. This God chose to reveal His love, not His power, and hence to manifest goodness, not greatness. When Jesus bid his followers to take up their crosses, it was likewise so that they become good not great.

Nietzsche desired greatness more than anything. Indeed, greatness was so much better than goodness, that the truly great should never hesitate to go “beyond” notions of good and evil. Beyond Good and Evil was, in fact, the title of one of his most famous books.

To go far beyond and above the crowd; to squeeze the life from oneself and others for the sake of producing a great political state, great art, great literature; to be as pitiless as Pharaoh in using human slaves to build one’s glorious tomb—that was life. If this demanded cruelty, then let it be magnificent cruelty. “Almost everything we call ‘higher culture’” declared Nietzsche, “is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound: this is my proposition.”

For Nietzsche, putting a premium on greatness was the naturally aristocratic thing to do. The Christian focus on goodness undermined the necessary brutality entailed in greatness. Christian charity toward the weak bent society to the demands of the weak. By contrast, the aristocratic rule of the strong for the sake of the strong lifted culture ever higher, and this rule entails a kind of brutal indifference and contempt toward the weak. Thus, true human cultural greatness demands that we return to the beast, a lesson Nietzsche claims that we learn from history.

Let us admit to ourselves…how every higher culture on earth so far has begun. Human beings whose nature was still natural, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey who were still in possession of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, hurled themselves upon weaker, more civilized, more peaceful races.…In the beginning [therefore], the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their predominance did not lie mainly in physical strength but in strength of the soul—they were more whole human beings (which also means, at every level, “more whole beasts”).

To be a “whole beast” is, for Nietzsche a return to nature. It is an expression of a natural inner drive to live and dominate called the “will-to-power,” the will to be great no matter what the cost to others. The will-to-power over others is life. “A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power,” so that “life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation…”

It is perhaps in witnessing Nietzsche’s celebration of greatness at all costs, that we can see most clearly what it means to contrast greatness with goodness.

For Nietzsche, Christianity was a slave religion precisely because Christ demanded that we choose goodness over greatness, even to the point of choosing goodness over life itself. But since life is will-to-power, then Christianity amounted to self-destruction.

For Christians, Nietzsche’s call to cast away goodness for great power is the essence of the Satanic rebellion. This is an important point. In God, as contrasted with mere creatures, goodness and greatness of power cannot be distinguished. They are one in God because God is one. He chose to reveal his goodness fully in Christ, not his power. No doubt Nietzsche would have respected a divine display of raw destructive power as a self-revelation, but God chose instead goodness without power, the form of an infant, a child who would grow to be a man and who would mount the cross rather than a throne. In Christ, God’s power was fully hidden, only to be revealed in the resurrection, the lesson from God being that, if we chose goodness even unto death, we will receive eternal greatness. Christianity does indeed, as Nietzsche feared, lead to self-destruction, but only so that the self may be recreated.

But where did Nietzsche lead? By the time he was forty years old, he started signing his letters “The Anti-Christ,” soon thereafter penning a book by the same name. Within a year after writing The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche started losing his powerful mind. The last decade of his life was spent in the darkest corners of madness, deteriorating in every way, at one stretch keeping everyone in the house awake repeating like a hideous drum, “I am dead because I am stupid…I am stupid because I am dead.” This is greatness?

Today Christians around the world attend Ash Wednesday services marking the beginning the Lenten season

Lent is the period of forty days which comes before Easter in the Christian calendar. Beginning on Ash Wednesday, Lent is a season of reflection and preparation before the celebrations of Easter. By observing the forty days of Lent, Christians replicate Jesus Christ's sacrifice and withdrawal into the desert for forty days. Lent is marked by fasting, both from food and festivities.

Whereas Easter celebrates the resurrection of Jesus after his death on the cross, Lent recalls the events leading up to and including Jesus' crucifixion by Rome. This is believed to have taken place in Roman occupied Jerusalem.

The Christian churches that observe Lent in the 21st century (and not all do significantly) use it as a time for prayer and penance. Only a small number of people today fast for the whole of Lent, although some maintain the practice on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. It is more common these days for believers to surrender a particular vice such as favourite foods or smoking. Whatever the sacrifice it is a reflection of Jesus' deprivation in the wilderness and a test of self-discipline.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/holydays/lent_1.shtml

For collegians some students "fast" from favorite Internet sites for Lent

"It's a form of spiritual awareness that allows you to reconnect with God," said Jocelyn Chiu, an Emory University sophomore and active member of her Presbyterian church. "By giving up something that used up so much of my time, I realized that I had been leaving my spiritual life behind."

Chiu gave up Facebook for Lent in 2006 and went one step further this year -- vowing to avoid the Internet altogether. She has only allowed herself to check Emory's internal e-mail for school-related messages.

"I realized how much time I was spending on the Internet," said Chiu. "I needed to make myself focus on schoolwork more."

CNN.com

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/internet/03/29/no.facebook.lent/index.html

While some young people are "giving up" Internet social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook to enhance spiritual reflection during lent, Church leaders in Britain are using the popular sites to reach young people with spiritual messages in preparation for the celebration of Easter.

"The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, Dr Rowan Williams and Dr John Sentamu, are calling for ‘good neighbours’ - online and offline - to try out daily suggestions that will help create a safer and more pleasant environment in the real world this Lent.

The innovative campaign will use popular social networking websites and blogs to share actions to make the world a better place in small and simple ways. These range from leaving a thank-you note for the postie to going a whole day without gossiping.

Last year, more than 130,000 people joined in with Love Life Live Lent, launched by the Church of England to inspire, by text message, simple acts of service that spread happiness in our communities."
Christianity.com

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/archbishops.encourage.christians.to.be.good.neighbours.this.lent/16624.htm

What Nietzsche hated most of all about Christianity, was its charity to the weak, the poor, the forgotten, the lowly. For him, this not only lowered mankind to the level of slaves serving slaves, but even worse, was built upon the belief that before the grandeur of God, all human abilities are humbled.

"Christianity has been the most calamitous kind of arrogance yet. Men, not high and hard enough to have any right to form man as artists; men, not strong and farsighted enough to let the foreground law of thousandfold failure and ruin prevail, though it cost them sublime self-conquest; men, not noble enough to see the abysmally different order of rank, chasm of rank, between man and man—such men have so far held sway over the fate of Europe, with their “equal before God,” until finally a smaller, almost ridiculous type, a herd animal, something eager to please, sickly, and mediocre has been bred, the European of today."

Beyond Good and Evil, section 62.

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