#ultimate being

The Angel of the Day is...

Purple Hair, Three Horns, Can Fly

“There is no Truth as the Word of a dominant authority, but there is truth revealed in the motion — now haphazard and seemingly unconscious, now patient, now ‘inspired’ with flashes of power and insight — toward Ultimate Being. The ‘death of God’ is not the denial of Ultimate Being, but only of that conception of God which directly extends human propensities and characteristics into the heavens. In other words, Nietzsche killed off the theistic God who was worshipped as a separate and special being. And to this I would say, good riddance! — because such a God has been an essential feature of the splitting and spiritual pride which have dogged history. As bitter a blow as it must be to narcissism, we are better off entirely without an Ultimate Being* who is dedicated to the advancement of any one of us, either as individuals or nations. It may gall one to no longer have a God who is there to bless one’s own side in war, or justify whatever form of domination happens to be in fashion. But we should celebrate the demystification and hasten the demise of this cruel, brutal, and superannuated idol. Its influence still unhappily abounds — in the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s brand of Islam, in Shamir’s Zionism, and in the crusading Protestantism of American ideology. I think we could even recognize it in the fascist meditations on Being of Martin Heidegger. Such a God is not the omega point of history. He is Moloch, the Old Testament deity who demanded bloody sacrifice of the young.