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Comparing Nietzsche's Views On Catechism And Free Will

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Unlike Nietzsche, the Catechism views God’s free will as a positive entity if used correctly. One of the most important connections can be made through Chapter II, section 1740 of this article of the Catechism: “By deviating from the moral law man violates his own freedom, becomes imprisoned within himself, disrupts neighborly fellowship…” The Catholic Church views morality not as one of slavery and suffering, but of freedom and comradery. The imprisonment within oneself is precisely what Nietzsche had discussed when he accused Christianity of promoting the “painful” subject of the spirit (Nietzsche 62), but the Catechism also seems to reject this notion altogether. It promotes finding morality through God, but also by finding it through political, …show more content…

While Nietzsche once accused Christians of lamenting in their social positions, the current Catechism encourages Christians to explore and embrace the world around them. Nietzsche may have a rightful argument and problem with the Church’s grasp on God and a universal truth, but his search for the truth is much like the Christian’s exercise of free will, by happily using one’s intuition and research to arrive at a philosophical conclusion.
This brings into question the master, and with it the political and philosophical views of master morality. Nietzsche criticized Europeans at the time for striving for “mediocrity,” and that those in political power best exemplified master morality due to their wealth and usually optimal health (Nietzsche 201). While Nietzsche says that the concept of religion can promote structure and order of its subjects through its hierarchies, Christianity specifically aims to keep the lowliest in power by idolizing the absence of all possessions and instead making …show more content…

This is even more evident in America today, and it is not in the church’s favor. The number of Christians in the U.S. has gone down 7% since 2007, and the number of Catholics has dwindled by three million members. Conversely, the number of Americans who identify as “unaffiliated” with any religious group has shot up 7% to 23%. This suggests a shift from searching for an individual truth from God to searching for an individual truth within oneself. This is especially true of the young millennial population: 1/3 claim no religious affiliation and only 16% identify as Catholic (O’Laughlin 1). Many of today’s political issues revolve around choice, including the issues of abortion and gay marriage. The separation of church and state is still pressing, and even printing the words “In God We Trust” on American currency is being debated. The growing generation is tired of solely finding truth in God and sacrifice, tired of slave morality. They want to be independent; they want to be masters of their own lives and find truth through their experiences and research. In this way, Nietzsche would be right there, another “unaffiliated” statistic with a big

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343 Words | 2 Pages

In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche first opens up by claiming his dissatisfaction of previous philosopher’s attempts of describing morality. Nietzsche claims that the idea of morality of being of no value is simply wrong; as people with higher morality are often worth more than people with low morality. He also goes on the explain the people of the lowest morality are priests- as they have created the most hate in the world. He then goes to say “Priests make everything more dangerous, not just medicaments and healing arts but pride, revenge, acumen, debauchery, love, lust for power, virtue, sickness” (16). Since different religions have different Gods who have different stances and moral on life, these beliefs cause a division between humans.

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1271 Words | 6 Pages

Nietzsche talks about the problem of morality and how religious historians believe that their own morals and values relate to everyone around them. He gives an example of historians with morals of Christianity, which includes selflessness and self-sacrifice. These historians believe that everyone else relate to their morals of selflessness and self-sacrifice. And if these morals are different among the people around them, these historians believe that there is no connection between them and the people. However, Nietzsche disagrees with this generalization of religious historians because their way of thinking is closed-minded and do not seem to have any aspect of secularism.

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1096 Words | 5 Pages

“34 percent of American adults identify with a faith different from their childhood faith — up from just 28 percent in 2007’’ (Pew research center).While people may believe in less formal, organized religion there has been an increase in private spirituals Church members are attending less frequently. This development is potentially the greatest contributor to attendance decline. Three decades ago, active church member attended three times or more a week. Today attendance is less than

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1175 Words | 5 Pages

Nietzsche prefaces this claim by explaining “the Christian faith from the beginning is sacrifice” (Beyond Good and Evil 33). He illustrates that Christianity commands one to give up multiple unnecessary things, and requires “solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence” seemingly so that they may devote themselves to false things such as the hopes of an afterlife (Beyond Good and Evil 34). His claims invoke the idea that Christianity is the main perpetrator of regression because these rules prevent an individual from establishing new philosophies and ideas, contributing to the conformity of society. Restraint from natural instincts and inhibits their education. Instead of encouraging thought, Christianity teaches the “narrowing of perspectives”, which results in the amount of leaders that rise above the many to be almost nonexistent (53).

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323 Words | 2 Pages

Throughout Nietzsche’s “Morality as Anti-Nature,” he is constantly slandering organized religion, to make the point that it inhibits his idea of morality. He claims that “church is hostile to life,” because Christianity aims to turn one against passions, which is natural to humans, religion is forcing one to become anti-natural. An example he uses is ascetics, people who live without any traces of the passions in their life, due to their supposedly higher sense of religious morality. Furthermore, he goes on to speculate more about the nature of man, saying “how naïve it is altogether to say: “Man ought to be such and such!” Since organized religion is demanding for man to change, they are asking for everything to change; man is going against

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1382 Words | 6 Pages

Nietzsche believes that religion was created by the less fortunate in order to eventually, in the afterlife, attain the same greatness as those with money and power. As a result, morals in religion from Nietzsche’s perspective was created to inhibit the lower classes from becoming too great.

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1175 Words | 5 Pages

He states “the slave revolt begins when resentment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values”. Resentment is a driving force of the slaves that lead them to revolt against the noble class. In many excerpts of the Bible, having riches can lead one to be condemned. Mark 10:23 states "How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!”. Christians believe that money should be utilized for the common good which differentiates immensely from the ideas of Nietzsche who believes in nobility, powerful, warriors etc.

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887 Words | 4 Pages

Statistics from the 2016 Census revealed that over the past 50 years there has been a 36% decline in Australians who associate themselves with the Catholic faith (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017). David Briggs, a writer for Association of Religion Data Archives indicated in a recent blog that “Just 1 percent of teens ages 15 to 17 raised by parents who attached little importance to religion were highly religious in their mid-to-late 20s” and that “In contrast, 82 percent of children raised by parents who talked about faith at home, attached great importance to their beliefs” (Briggs, D., 2014). This is an indication of why belief in faith is declining in youth as generations before them elected to abandon faith and religion, thereby demonstrating to current youth how they believe that religion is not valued and can be lived without. Furthermore, a survey of 22 people conducted asked participants to suggest what they believe would encourage youth to attend church, revealing that 95.5% believed that a family’s/parent’s beliefs encourages youth to attend church (Matthews, M., 2017).

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1022 Words | 5 Pages

On the contrary, according to Nietzsche, it was the “good” themselves – those carrying high power – who subsequently held control to define the term “good” and the value it

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542 Words | 3 Pages

Priestly morality poisoned humanity to make us sick and unhealthy, but it also made us interesting. From priestly morality spawns slave morality. The values that were good in master morality become bad in slave morality, they take pleasure in the simple things. The aristocratic equation of good equaling noble, powerful, beautiful, happy, blessed is rejected by Christians, who Nietzsche was actually referring to when he said Jews. “It was the Jews who, rejecting the aristocratic value equation ventured, with awe-inspiring consistency, to bring about a reversal and held it in the teeth of the most unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless” (Nietzsche, 2007, p.17).

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1322 Words | 6 Pages

To German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, the concept of free will is of relevance just as it is to all other existentialist philosophers alike. In understanding Nietzsche’s account against free will, it is of utmost importance to first be aware of his theory on human nature in general as the two are interconnected. For a strong believer in free will, Nietzsche’s philosophy might simply be regarded as the ‘other’ or the opposite view, that is, a determinist view on human nature. Nietzsche’s philosophy, however, is not necessarily deterministic per se and it is wrong to label him as such since he goes beyond the belief that all our actions are pre-determined. For the purposes of this paper, the focus will be on Nietzsche’s view on what free

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1487 Words | 6 Pages

The centre has been plotting the religious landscape of the country since 2004 and their findings indicate a -7.8% decrease in the number of citizens declaring to be Christian between the years 2007 and 2014. While the number of participants that claim to be unaffiliated (Atheist, Agnostic or ‘nothing in particular’) has increased

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294 Words | 2 Pages

Nietzsche would be suspicious of more traditional conceptions of freedom because he would recognize that freedom can be defined by who is in power. He states that “It is much more the case that the "good people" themselves, that is, the noble, powerful, higher-ranking and higher-thinking people felt and set themselves and their actions up as good, that is to say, of the first rank, in contrast to everything low, low-minded, common, and vulgar” (3). If freedom is considered as being part of the “good,” then its definition can also change depending on the form of morality it is defined by. If a person following slave morality believes that freedom is found in God, Nietzsche would argue that they are not free. In fact, Nietzsche would argue that

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986 Words | 4 Pages

The thesis of Weber’s essay argues that certain religions that follow capitalism will prosper since the individuals change how they confront the problems they may face (Swatos Jr, 656). Weber’s essentialist definition recognizes religion as something that gives meaning to life. In Weber’s essay I believe that individuals of the protestant, work rather than work to live. Morality becomes significant when Durkheim analyzes religion in the context of the patterning of social relationships on the belief of supernatural powers (Swatos Jr, 656). A key point Swatos Jr presents focuses on whether or not they are studying a single religion or multiple.

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2461 Words | 10 Pages

Back in the day around the1960’s Church was the most important day of the week, the town was shut down until 12, no shows were on, the only thing to do basically was go to Church and the numbers of people at church was staggering. Slowly over the years since then Church has slowly been declining and Churches are dying, around 3,700 Church’s close their doors every year (Lipka). Politics have been also been slowly trying to get rid of Christianity in the past couple decades. Hillary Clinton said “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”.

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