Wow - does that sound familiar or what? Here's what I've said about this in my Fourth of July 2009 Tea Party Speech:
Friedrich Nietzsche was also an atheist. But he saw God not as an invention, but as a casualty. He wrote in 1886: "The greatest event in recent times - that 'God is Dead,' that the belief in the Christian God is no longer tenable - is beginning to cast its first shadows upon Europe." Did it ever. The Christian God, he wrote, would no longer stand in the way of the development of the New Man who he said would be ‘beyond good and evil’.Nietzsche knew that in Europe, the decline of religion as a guide to conscience and morality would leave a huge vacuum.
Who or what would fill that vacuum?
Nietzsche thought that the most likely candidate would be what he called the 'Will to Power,' which offered a better and more persuasive explanation of human behavior than either Marx or Freud.
In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology.
The very concept of good and evil would be discarded as the product of weak and inferior minds.
But above all, Nietzsche believed that the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by religious sanctions, without moral restraint of any kind, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind.
Let's say that again: the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by religious sanctions, without moral restraint of any kind, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind.
And how did that 'will to power' express itself in our times? Jean Francois-Revel, writing over a century after Nietzsche, said of the Europeans in particular,
"It was they, after all, who made the twentieth century the darkest in history; it was they who brought about the two unprecedented cataclysms of two World Wars; and it was they who invented and put into place the two most criminal regimes ever inflicted on the human race - the pinnacles of evil and imbecility achieved in a space of less that thirty years."
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