Fucking Hell! My wireless battery powered keyboard just went apeshit on me and devoured a big long post that I had put together about how I was discovering that Nietzsche was really into Dionysus and even towards the end of his life signed letters as the god. That’s nuts. I don’t really know hardly anything about the man, but I’d like to learn more.

Anyway, I’ll just go grab all the quotes I was gonna paste in, without all the stunningly witty and insightful commentary which originally accompanied them… oh well.

From a course description at Villanova:

“In both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the figure of the God torn to pieces holds center stage. For Nietzsche, ‘Dionysus’ is not a god governing over the world but a god of the world and its life-cycles, the god of the vine cut back to the stem every fall only to be reborn in the spring, the god of the festival, of cyclical rebirth, of the endless circle of life and death. For Kierkegaard, the god torn to pieces is Christ, a transcendent God who has come down into the world.”

From a page called “The Pillars of Unbelief” at a site, CatholicEducation.org, which is calling itself (dubiously) the “Catholic Educator’s Resource” (incidentally, they are fucking morons). I am so angry over this article that I am going to highlight in bold the parts that really cheese me off.

…Nietzsche existed, was an atheist and died insane — a fate which may well await anyone who looks too long into his books.

…Nietzsche instead exalted tragedy, chaos, disorder and irrationality, symbolized by the god Dionysus, god of growth and drunken orgies. He claimed that Socrates had turned the world instead to the worship of Apollo, god of the sun, light, order and reason. But the fate of Nietzsche’s god Dionysus was soon to overtake Nietzsche himself; as Dionysus was literally torn apart by the Titans, supernatural monsters of the underworld, Nietzsche’s mind was to be cracked asunder by his own inner Titans.

… Nietzsche call “Zarathustra” the new Bible, and told the world to “throw away all other books; you have my “Zarathustra.” It is intoxicating rhetoric, and it has captivated adolescents for generations. It was written in only a few days, in a frenzy, perhaps of literally demon-inspired “automatic writing.” No book ever written contains more Jungian archetypes, like a fireworks display of images from the unconscious.

Its essential message is the condemnation of present-day man as a weakling and the announcement of the next species, the Superman, who lives by “master morality” instead of “slave morality.” God is dead, long live the new god!

…..We are now in a position to see why Nietzsche is such a crucially important thinker, not despite but because of his insanity. No one in history, except possibly the Marquis de Sade, has ever so clearly, candidly and consistently formulated the complete alternative to Christianity.

Pre-Christian (i.e., pagan) societies and philosophies were like virgins. Post-Christian (i.e., modern) societies and philosophies are like divorcees. Nietzsche is no pagan pre-Christian, but the essential, modern post-Christian and anti-Christian. He rightly saw Christ as his chief enemy and rival. The spirit of Anti-Christ has never received such complete formulation. Nietzsche was not only the favorite philosopher of Nazi Germany, he is the favorite philosopher of hell.

We can thank Satan’s own foolishness in “blowing his cover” in this man. Like Nazism, Nietzsche may scare the hell out of us and help save our civilization or even our souls by turning us away in terror before it’s too late.

Favorite philosopher of HELL?? My god! How dare these people even use the word “education” in the title of this site. A greater affront to education, I would be hard pressed to find than this absurd piece of steaming festering putrid monkey poop.