Factions Among the Godless

The dispute is endless and pointless; the participants are joyless and lifeless and merciless.

Anti-theists have exhibited two major opposing styles of rebellion. This deep dichotomy began with the musings of Arthur Schopenhauer & his former enthusiast Friedrich Nietzsche. This fundamental intra-atheist conflict pits those who rebel outside His Creation against those who rebel inside His Creation

1) Rebellion outside His Creation –These rebels avoid reality as much as possible. They cocoon themselves off from reality. Even that is not enough. Some of them search for a fantasy world to inhabit. They feel trapped in a world created by their enemy and wish to truly escape. They might build their own highly original universe, ruled by their own law, and dedicated to their glory, their apotheosis. They can assume God’s role in an alternate reality.

· Arthur Schopenhauer was a devout pessimist who saw himself surrounded by clashing and frustrated wills. He advocated for a state of detached contemplation. Schopenhauer valued music because while “it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being” it is also “entirely without reality and remote from its pain."

See also: The World as Will and Representation Third Book

· The decadent poet Charles Baudelaire appreciated the cacophony of urban crowds, but he also disparaged the new art of photography ”Each day art further diminishes its self-respect by bowing down be­fore external reality; each day the painter becomes more and more given to painting not what he dreams but what he sees.” In his poem L' Invitation Au Voyage Baudelaire tells us that art is superior to nature. Art is nature "transformed by dream, corrected, remodeled and adorned." In Any Where Out Of The World Baudelaire's soul tells him to live "Anywhere! Just so it is out of the world!"

· Des Esseintes, the hero of Joris-Karl Huysmans's À Rebours (Against Nature) felt that “imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things.”

Can anti-theists ever be truly independent of God? Suppose they ignore the real world and live in a world of their imagination – maybe inside some tropical paradise screensaver. Aren’t they still devoted to the natural world created by God? Suppose they forget about the natural world and create an alternate world of, for example, beautiful mathematical shapes. Aren’t they using the tools God gave them to create this alternate world? Their tragedy is: They can’t ever actually leave His dominion. Whatever fantasy realms they flee to their physical selves are still stuck in His foundational reality. Whatever their efforts they will end up lost with vacant eyes and a remote expression.

See also: James Joyce & Aesthetic Gnosticism

Joyce, Aquinas, and Nietzsche

This rebellion outside of Creation has received a powerful boost from technology. Many moderns are entirely immersed in artificial worlds, ensconced behind some kind of screen. In the future we will dwell within virtual worlds and truly soar above pedestrian reality in a consequences-free environment. Within these worlds we will lounge & play with determination. We might rage against plants & stage a revolt (sappy not bloody) against the plant kingdom. We might embrace solipsism and cavort in personal pleasure domes. We will (seemingly) be free of all physical limitations.

2) Rebellion inside His Creation – While these rebels may be angry at the current set-up, they accept the universe He created. However, they defy His plan for said universe. They delight in all behaviors classified as twisted or depraved or unnatural or perverted. These rebels work to make such behaviors widespread, turn such behaviors into movements. These rebels want to kill as many as possible, consume nature, wreck His Creation. They yearn to set themselves up as tyrants, as the first Earth Emperor if possible. In the end they will command an irradiated desert, worshipped as god by a few remaining peons.

· Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed himself “the first to see the actual contrast: the degenerate instinct which turns upon life with a subterranean lust of vengeance (Christianity, Schopenhauer's philosophy, and in some respects too even Plato's philosophy — in short, the whole of idealism in its typical forms), as opposed to a formula of the highest yea-saying to life, born of an abundance and a superabundance of life — a yea-saying free from all reserve, applying even to suffering, and guilt, and all that is questionable and strange in existence." Nietzsche also wrote “Cruelty belongs to the most ancient festive joys of mankind.” He celebrated the brutality of supposed noble races: “One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast, prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness: the Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings-- they all shared this need."

· Heaps of empire builders and autocrats followed Nietzsche and reveled in savagery: Communists, Nazis, Fascists, Young Turks, etc.

The two styles of atheism have much in common. Both sets of atheists despise women. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were united by their hatred of women. Both sets embrace pessimism & elitism. Both sets mock His Creation. They are bored or irritated by Nature, by forests and fields. They are disappointed or even disgusted by the world.

Giacomo Leopardi

· The decadent poet Charles Baudelaire was once asked to contribute to what he called a “little book” containing “poems on Nature” “on woods, great oaks, greenery, insects,—and presumably the sun”. He responded by saying he would class his “own soul at a much higher value than the soul of sanctified vegetables. He also “thought that there was in Nature, flourishing and reborn, something impudent and distressing.”

· Artifice, seemed to Des Esseintes “the final distinctive mark of man's genius. Nature had had her day, as he put it. By the disgusting sameness of her landscapes and skies, she had once for all wearied the considerate patience of aesthetes. Really, what dullness! the dullness of the specialist confined to his narrow work. What manners! the manners of the tradesman offering one particular ware to the exclusion of all others. What a monotonous storehouse of fields and trees! What a banal agency of mountains and seas!”

· Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who engaged in numerous sinister political activities, hated Nature and existence in general. In Sartre’s 1938 novel La Nausee he wrote: “I shouted “filth! what rotten filth!” and shook myself to get rid of this sticky filth, but it held fast and there was so much, tons and tons of existence, endless: I stifled at the depths of this immense weariness.” And also “I sank down on the bench, stupefied, stunned by this profusion of beings without origin: everywhere blossomings, hatchings out, my ears buzzed with existence, my very flesh throbbed and opened, abandoned itself to the universal burgeoning. It was repugnant. But why, I thought, why so many existences, since they all look alike? What good are so many duplicates of trees? So many existences missed, obstinately begun again and again missed—like the awkward efforts of an insect fallen on its back?”

The two styles may also be combined. For example, ennui may blossom in the heart of a decadent activist deviant and he may resolve to seal himself off from the outside world within a sort of hothouse. Our lisping listless deviant may find corrupting the innocent or even lifting a glass of absinthe too taxing. For another example, a tyrant, enraged that his repulsive vision for society remains unrealized despite his best efforts, may end up alone contemplating his foul dream.

The fundamental dichotomy endures. Enervated atheists will continue to frustrate themselves: imitating God’s act of creation even as they oppose Him. Those atheists with all too much energy, full of passionate intensity, will watch in despair as God turns their evil to good.

We might wonder which style of rebellion represents the purest rebellion against God.