Good luck turning something so conservative as religion on its head though heh.
One will have better luck doing that than fighting it head-on. You don't attack the passive; then they cry and mobilize the crowd against you. Then you taste the dick of the revengeful.
I also don't think religion is conservative. I think it's a language that is used to express an ongoing dialogue. After all, even Christianity has extreme liberal and extreme conservative aspects together; it's a battlefield, not a declaration of victory.
In his attacks on Christianity, Nietzsche cherry picks the worst parts and ignores everything else.
Are you sure? Nietzsche said that if Christianity had not existed, someone would have mentioned it. Remember he spoke in cryptogram to avoid being misinterpreted, quite successfully, because a bullshit Nietzschean stands out quite clearly.
I'm rather flummoxed by this idea as well. It is true that liberalism and egalitarianism, for instance, have certainly made inroads into greater Christianity where once it was decidedly unwelcome, at least in many denomenations. But both those overriding ideas, once you alter or repackage a few aspects here and there(such as the secular "tolerance and human rights" orthodoxy being "moralized" to make homosexuality or feminism more palatable) they actually align themselves with Christian teaching quite nicely. Alas, Judeo-Christianity is the first real fully-codified liberalism to be unleashed upon the world.
Good point. Yet, like Nietzsche, it encodes both extremes in itself. One of the best ways to subvert an enemy is to redefine his argument; one of the best ways to gain power is to neutralize both extremes, and redefine the language of argument.
For example, if a third party arose that had both left and right aspects, but interpreted the left as a rightist and the right as a leftist, it would bring both groups together, wouldn't it?
Although I would give my vote to rock and rebellion over Christianity, I see the normals' form of atheism as the rejection of the "numinous", multiple subconscious symbols and even parts of the psychology and the brain itself. In other words, being Christian is much preferable (and more "metal") to being a blind follower of the crowd, that much is obvious.
The big secret is that Christianity is a big house; most Christians follow Crowdism, because most people follow Crowdism.
99% of people follow Crowdism = 99% of Christians are Crowdists
I'm rather flummoxed by this idea as well. It is true that liberalism and egalitarianism, for instance, have certainly made inroads into greater Christianity where once it was decidedly unwelcome, at least in many denomenations.
I think it's the other way around: Jesus Christ was half-educated, kind of a dipshit hippie, and so about half of what he said was Crowdist blather to market himself, and the rest was anti-Roman revolutionary rhetoric.
Christianity was always liberal.
But the philosophical ideas of Christianity -- borrowed from Greeks, Hindus and Europeans -- remain the same without Christ. In fact, I don't think anyone in Christianity really gives a damn about Christ. Half of them turn to his liberal side, half turn to his judgmental side. Christ himself probably considered himself a devout Jew of the Kahanist type, and designed a superior meme to fight the Romans. His liberalism is the marketing. His message is the revolution.
And that brings us back to liberalism. Who invented it? It invented itself. When people reach a certain intelligence, they start doing things in public to convince others they're good -- while hiding their real motives. At that point, they discover the superior meme: inclusiveness, or competitive altruism. They say, "I don't want good for myself, I want good for ALL people so EVERYONE can have EQUAL justice." What does that sentence mean? It means they want to use the Crowd, to motivate the Crowd, and to have that gang of halfwit monkeys carry out their bidding under the justification of innocence, peace, fraternity, equality, etc. It's just marketing. No one invented liberalism. It's as inherent as lying or murder. It's an idea that at a certain point seems like a shortcut to getting what you want, while minimizing risk to yourself.
So then we turn to religion... do I have Christianity? When it is camouflage for Crowdism, yes. But the real enemy is Crowdism. How do I fight Crowdism? By taking to all social institutions, government and religion and science, and uniting them around an idea that is anti-Crowdism -- a difficult meme to construct, because Crowdism is anti-reality; how do you be anti-anti-reality? You make reality have a sexier meme, which is that of adventure and fantasy, a selfless exploration of the great and beautiful. This is why Nietzsche turned to aesthetics, Schopenhauer spoke of the contemplative infinite, and Johannes Eckhart saw God in death and the mundane more than in visions of Heaven. Kant, although he made some brutal noumenal mistakes, also tried with his concept of radical evil.
The point is, gents and ladies, if you really want to cut through the bullshit -- get to the root of the Hydra: denial of reality so the self can refuse to challenge itself. Know its method: inclusivity, as a means to guaranteeing by rule of law that the individual can secede from reality. Know its manifestations -- liberalism, populist Christianity, and oversocialization. It's all the same evil, because evil is simply anti-good. And if adaptation to reality -- the one inherent good for all organisms -- is good, then evil is anti-reality. The people who call themselves "good" call reality "evil." And that is all you need to know.
So whether you adopt the vocabulary of science or philosophy, Christianity or Buddhism, finance or heavy metal... it's all the same struggle: escape social illusion and get back to reality, by finding a way to make reality an adventure of greatness.
Although I would give my vote to rock and rebellion over Christianity,
Ah, but that's the thing. Rock and rebellion is a kept mistress. It presents no threat because it is an anti-philosophy completely compatible with liberalism and hence Crowdism.
Nietzsche's point about Christianity being nihilistic: moving past fatalism for a moment, think of it this way -- if no values exist, one must choose what values one desires -- this fits into his aestheticism. In doing so, one determines the content of one's soul. That alone tells us where an individual stands, and what he or she is made of. Nihilism is necessary for choice.
Keep in mind also that metal sensu Black Sabbath was against rock 'n roll and its quest for personal convenience and hedonism. While all the hippies were preaching free love, equality, and peace, and using that justification as a cover for callow intoxication, reckless sexual behavior and subversion of rule of law to make the individual more important than ever before -- hippies invented the real consumerism -- Black Sabbath were preaching horror movies: the individual as helpless until he gets aggressive and vicious, society as useless and parasitic, and nature as competition for supremacy, the real adventure being in conquering fear and neurosis to find the simplest possible solution to something technology and religion can't fix for us.
If anything, metal is about this view, and it's bigger than the callow Christian-versus-unChristian debate: assert reality, the bigger non-anthrocentric picture, and history as a laboratory of science, and nihilism as a means to choosing -- not justifying, not proving -- the type of future we need. After all, smarter people will pick a different future than idiots, and the two will never convince each other through arguments, because the dummies will just falsify the argumentative process.
Metal will never be Christian; metal's truth can be spoken through Christianity. Per Romanticism, the genre is nationalistic, naturalism, holistic, idealistic, occultist and aestheticist. But if Christianity is one language, and heavy music another, they can speak the same truth. I believe Schopenhauer and Eckhart found a way to express that truth in Christianity. Boycott Christian metal; support subversive, anti-liberal, anti-Crowdist Christianity.