Author - © Matija Jaksekovic
Yes, let's talk about God! Who is God, is God some external, imaginary and all-powerful being playing with human lives, as some thinks, or is God, something much more intimate, private, what defines us as human beings?! Do we encounter God exclusively in the church, mosque or synagogue, or God is all around us?! These questions today have the same importance as they had through our entire civilization history. These are philosophical questions, but more importantly, these are questions about our survival!
When Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher of the late 19th century, said that God is dead and people are killed him, many of his critics interpret that statement as a result of his lifelong struggle with religion. We can say that Nietzsche was a nihilist, perhaps even egocentric and that his death of God, and turn to man as the only one who can transcend that death, is just a consequence. But what if Nietzsche was not a nihilist, but visionary man?! What if he tried to warn us what will happen to the world that rejected God?! Well, if we look at the world in the first half of the 21st century, especially the western world, we cannot help but wonder what happened to us. How we drown ourselves in nihilism and despair, and at the same time we are living in a technological and human most prosperous period in our history. Our civilization is in a period of decadence, what until yesterday we have regard as necessary for civil and advanced life, such as reason, morality or even science today we reject that without a thought. We live in times of great sociological and cultural changes, and we lost our identity. how we will adjust to the changes that are coming if we don't know who we are and from where we come from?! Oblivion is stalking us, and we don't care.
The world is unknown, chaotic and insuperable for us and our limited mind. If there is nothing before today, if the knowledge is relative and unreliable, if there is no reason, morality or empathy, then our life is reduced to animal survival. This unbearable ease of existence is a state that man cannot bear. Man will always seek for meaning, although that comprehension may not be possible, we will seek for it. That is why our human story finds its nucleus in philosophy from which all the disciplines we use today are derived. The Ancient Greek gave us these disciplines in order to have the tools to cultivate unknown, and with this tool we have built this incredible world in which we live today.
Rejection of God, means rejecting of ourselves, of our reason, because God is reflected in our understanding of the world, God is reflected in the aesthetics of our art, and art is the most faithful representation of the state of the human spirit. Art devoid of aesthetics is art devoid of the human spirit, and today we have such an art, cynical, brutal and critical art as a result of nihilism and decadence. Humanity seeks through their entire history, the meaning in God, now when we lost the need to pursue it, maybe now we realize that God was in front of our eyes all the time.
