Time to catch up

It's not that I haven't been finding things to write about, but I have been busy finalizing two publications, playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion obsessively, and getting ready to depart for Australia.

I finished Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals and was very happy with my introduction to his writing. Nietzsche presented some interesting perspectives on atheism which I had no been exposed to through more recent works. A very interesting take came from Nietzsche's thoughts on a possible origin of God. He posited that ancient peoples may have seen themselves as being in debt to their ancestors (ironically this seems rather Darwinian) in that they survived, established societies, and other amenities that modern people enjoy. To that extent, the debt that a people owe to their ancestors may take the form of rules (i.e., I ought to act in such a way, i owe it to my ancestors). After some time, the debt one owes to their ancestors becomes seen as unpayable, the ancestor becoming so powerful they are deified.

Nietzsche goes on to say that with Christianity, the debt people felt they owed to God became so great that the creators of the religion saw that the only one capable of paying the debt was God himself. So he pays himself with a pound of his own flesh.

What Nietzsche does not go on to say is that this act really did not pay off any of the debt that humans owed to God, instead, it made it greater than ever. Like the government bailing out the auto industry, God was then in complete ownership of the actions of mankind. Given the sacrifice* that he had made for humans, they would now have to pay an immense fine for refusing to follow his commands. This is the point (the New Testament) when the concept of hell is introduced.

*As Christopher Hitchens points out, the idea of the crucifixion as being a sacrifice for which I owe God an immense amount is simply ridiculous. The Bible, if it is to be believed, is clear in that Jesus comes back from the dead. Jesus - being the son of God, and presumably sharing some of his powers (i.e., omniscience) - probably knew that he would return to life following his execution. Furthermore, Jesus knew that I would later be an atheist and reject his sacrafice, whether he did it or not. To that extent, I owe him nothing.

Anyways, I enjoyed the book so much that I bought Thus Spoke Zarathustra and will be reading that along with a chuck of Marx's Capital while I am abroad.

For other recent reading, I am almost done with Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Though Kuhn writes mostly about natural science, I am trying to relate what I am reading to social science, specifically criminal justice and criminology. So far, I am not sure that I have found much of use (I am probably missing a ton, I'm still new at this philosophy stuff), mostly because criminal justice is probably in a pre-paradigm stage. I wonder, however, if there could ever be a successful paradigm for studies of human behavior. I wonder if the scope of "laws" of behavior would have to be reduced to capture at least a central tendency.