“Like an unskilled doctor, fallen ill, you lose heart and cannot discover by which remedies to cure your own disease.” (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound)

How can you have a great life? One strategy is to study and emulate the lives of great people like Martin Luther King Junior. Every padawan benefits from having a mentor, like Luke Skywalker was Yoda’s student.

Where can you find such highly successful people? Some places to look are sports, politics, and of course the history of ideas. One such person was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Renowned Nietzsche Scholar Yunus Tuncel points out:

“Nietzsche dealt with the problems of life as a child and a teenager. He lost his father at a young age and then they had to move to the nearest town. In his early teen years, he started having health problems. And yet, he struggled and did not give up. He always confronted his sufferings rather than surrender and pursued his studies and learning. There is much to learn from all of that.”

Nietzsche had many great and interesting ideas. One was about morality. For instance, if we look at the terms “good” and “evil,” they seem to have a religious sense, such as our word “good-bye,” which originally meant “God-be-with-you.” Things were good because God liked them, and evil if God hated them. Nietzsche pointed out that things can be good and yet morally wrong, for instance “good” means “effective” if we speak of a good bird of prey – though a human doing what a good bird of prey does would be a problem for society. Moreover, one event can generate multiple contradictory ethical interpretations, such as the western reaction to 9’11 vs the Palestinian celebration of it at the time.

Nietzsche reasoned that we were asking the wrong question when it comes to judging events, since evaluation at some level is arbitrary and based on taste (eg, a rubric of criteria judging fine wine may be objective, but meaningless if you hate the taste of wine as I do). And, determining things as good and evil can identify “good” things which could be diagnosed as “unhealthy,” such as what Nietzsche called “slave morality.” For example, accumulating wealth was evil to the original Christians (Matt 19:21, and esp Mark 10:25). Nietzsche said we should go beyond asking what is good and evil to the diagnosis of whether a particular society or action are healthy or sick. Nietzsche referred to himself as a cultural physician.

There are many examples of how Nietzsche’s thoughts have informed modern ideas, such as cognitive behavioral psychology and therapy, commonly known as CBT. For instance, consider these strategies for challenging bad, which is to say unhealthy, thinking patterns:

Part of Nietzsche’s genius was seeing that events and actions are not inherently good or bad, but can be interpreted in different ways. The question is whether your experience of something as good or bad is a healthy or sickly one. This is not a relativism where everything is equally desirable or undesirable. For example, a child bride and her family may see her marriage as “good,” but we can still say it’s objectively “unhealthy” because twelve year old brains are not old enough to rationally judge whether or not to be in such a relationship.

What we see from the current war between Russia and Ukraine, is that the closer someone gets to being a dictator, the more dangerous it becomes that he/she will use the position to lie to his/her people and increase power. But if it is obvious to us that a free democracy is the way to go, why do religious people so often want an absolute dictator, eg. returning King Jesus?

Part of the reason is that religious and secular people have different interpretations of the person. For instance, do you think parents/guardians would want for their adult children that they completely depend on the parents/guardians and never leave the childhood home and obsess over the parent/guardian’s every opinion – or would the grownups’ wish for the child be that he/she grows up, become independent, and learns to have his/her own life?

Certain faiths view the individual as a servant, and the goal is not being free, but going from one kind of servant to another, being a slave to a better master. For instance, we read in the Hebrew Scriptures:

O Lord, I am your servant;
    I am your servant, the child of your serving girl.
    You have loosed my bonds. (Psalm 116:16)

For Paul in the New Testament, we have an inner principle of goodness, God wrote the law on our hearts (Rom 2:12-16), but Satan is in control of the “fleshly” part of us. But Jesus, the great resister of Satan, because he was resurrected, could take over a believer (if welcomed) in angelic possession, and so there is a transition from being a slave to Satan, to being a slave to God through Christ whose death, so to speak, paid the “ransom” to Satan to free the slaves. Jesus’ death didn’t, as is commonly interpreted, “pay a sin debt” to God, since obviously God wasn’t holding anyone hostage for a “ransom (Mark 10:45),” but Jesus’s death paid the price it took to free the slaves from Satan’s grasp. Paul says:

But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. ¹⁸ Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. ¹⁹ Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? ²⁰ For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body (1 Cor 6:16-20)

The argument is we go from being a slave to Satan to a slave to God. With Paul above we see that the point is, in his words, that “you are not your own,” and so we are meant to be a slave to an extreme sense: rejecting yourself and becoming simply Jesus incarnate, Christ in you (Colossians 1:27).

The question is, do you want to go from being one kind of slave to another? Usually, if someone comes and wants to be a politician, we would expect them to be democratically elected, have limits in terms of their power, and voluntarily step down from office when their term ends. Should we not expect the same of Jesus if he returns, and is elected? Don’t let titles fool you. Padme in Star Wars was queen, but she was also democratically elected, and had term limits.

ACTIVITY: Watch the Star Wars clip below: “Anakin and Padme: Dictatorship and Democracy.” Consider the figure of Palpatine/Darth Sidious in Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. Write and illustrate a dystopian comic about how a democratic society might will their own repression and come to elect a dictator.

Reflection Question: Does Star Wars reflect a Utopia or a Dystopia when the Jedi are in charge?

Consider this. In making water as necessary for life, God could have ensured water is abundant and all clean. Did God bother to do this? No:

The World Health Organization says that every year more than 3.4 million people die as a result of water related diseases, making it the leading cause of disease and death around the world. Most of the victims are young children, the vast majority of whom die of illnesses caused by organisms that thrive in water sources contaminated by raw sewage.

A report published recently in the medical journal The Lancet concluded that poor water sanitation and a lack of safe drinking water take a greater human toll than war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction combined.

According to an assessment commissioned by the United Nations, 4,000 children die each day as a result of diseases caused by ingestion of filthy water. The report says four out of every 10 people in the world, particularly those in Africa and Asia, do not have clean water to drink. see https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2005-03-17-voa34-67381152/274768.html

But, what if it would have been too difficult for God to make available lots of clean water? This doesn’t help, since surely God could have created a world without earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, childhood cancer, etc.

We often hear that God is to be thanked for all the good things in life, but never blamed for any of the bad stuff. This is not how Justice works. If God is not Evil, but merely Indifferent, how would we hold such an absentee landlord accountable if He was a human? According to the law:

In United States law, depraved-heart murder, also known as depraved-indifference murder, is a type of murder where an individual acts with a “depraved indifference” to human life and where such act results in a death, despite that individual not explicitly intending to kill. In a depraved-heart murder, defendants commit an act even though they know their act runs an unusually high risk of causing death or serious bodily harm to a person. If the risk of death or bodily harm is great enough, ignoring it demonstrates a “depraved indifference” to human life and the resulting death is considered to have been committed with malice aforethought. In some states, depraved-heart killings constitute second-degree murder, while in others, the act would be charged with “wanton murder,” varying degrees of manslaughter, or third-degree murder. (Wiki)

It’s amazing how people respond to God in a way utterly foreign to how they would treat a human, such as hoping Jesus will come back and be a political dictator, or getting promoted to heaven for the special privilege of praising and feeding God’s ego constantly for all eternity!