Stranger on Earth

Link to Part 1:  http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2012/11/the-thinking-mans-bible-and-messiah.html Of all the accusations Nietzsche hurls at Christianity, it is the sanctification of untruths concerning earthly matters that is the gravest: God is a thought that makes all that is straight crooked and all that stands giddy. What? Would time be gone and all that is transitory only a lie? … I call it evil and misanthropic, all this teaching about the one and the perfect and the unmoved and the sufficient and the intransitory. All that is intransitory – that is but an image! ( On the Blissful Islands , 110-11) Nietzsche claims that Christian belief inculcates the wrong perception of reality in the believer. The belief in an unchanging, perfect God is philosophically false, since nothing in the universe we inhabit is “intransitory.” Everything is always in flux, and divine constancy can be nothing but a deception. For Nietzsche (or Zarathustra), co...

The traditional reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is that of the Icarus legend: fly too high and too close to the sun, you will lose your wings and plunge to your death. Victor Frankenstein’s attempt to play God gives birth to a “monster” that will stop at nothing to destroy his loved ones. Its hideousness is an affront to civilised society and to godliness. Shelley’s novel does indeed lend itself fully to this reading, but a contemporary reading, one that bears in mind Man’s alienation in modern times, can reveal a new element or two. Doctor Frankenstein is referred to as “the Creator” on numerous occasions. His intellectual pursuit is entirely of a divine nature, as is evidenced in the following passage: It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things, or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my enquiries were directed to the metaphysical, o...