Honest Doubt Part 15 - Godless Morality

This episode looks at Dostoyevsky as an answer to Nietzsche. Dostoyevsky features "Nietzschian" characters in his novels, as those who believe themselves to have gone beyond Christianity, and to be the new "over-man" who create their own morals.

In "Crime and Punishment" Raskolnikov tries to enact this new morality but finds he cannot follow through. In "The Brothers Karamazov" the character of Ivan is the bearer of the new morality, but it is his illegitimate brother Smerdyakov who puts his ideas into practise in a way Ivan cannot stomach.

So what is the answer? Train ourselves to ignore the old morality? Perhaps that is what the Nazis tried to do and indeed perhaps that is what any who think violence is a legitimate solution are trying to put into practice?

What is the alternative? To simply will to do the moral act for no reason? Perhaps this is what Kierkegaard was suggesting with his leap of faith, in places it is what Dostoyevsky seems to hint at - there are times that his religious characters speak of being a Christian even in the knowledge that God is dead.

It seems modernists put on glasses that rendered religion invisible. Religion is about stories, about humanity telling itself stories over and over again, round and round in a million variations, to learn about ourselves, to tell us who we are, to discover who we are, to give us hope and inspire us. Modernism seemed to think that because religion wasn't a science it wasn't anything - whereas it was what it had always been -  a tradition of storytelling. We need to keep telling and retelling ourselves the stories to discover the religion that will speak to us today.

Addition
Well of course religion isn't really anything other than religion - it can't simply be storytelling, religion has music and dance and ecstatic experiences and madness and lots of other things, but it is close to storytelling, where we can somehow enter into the story - like Alice going the other side of the looking glass.

But something else religion is like is the idea of the nation. Religions are geographical - you get herds of followers of a religion within a particular area, like members of a nation. In that sense a religion isn't like a philosophy which you choose, but a nationality you are born into.

Different nations tend to choose to stand for some good ideal - for freedom, or liberty, or siding with the underdog, or being stylish or even good food perhaps, or hard work or toleration. Nations often used to imagine they had some divine purpose, a destiny - some even had their own gods, so beating the nation in war was also a sign that your gods were stronger than their gods.

Religions living together can be similar to nations living together. No one particularly wants a super-state, nations will continue with their own identities, but the idea that a nation was special or set-apart or different either can't exist, or can't be allowed to let that nation try to dominate and do battle with other nations. We need to live in peace.