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Originally Posted by awareness
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I'm with you there. But Neitzsche is not the prescription for that. Interesting reading, but no real hope there, and a lot of half truths and deceptions.
Actually, Neitzsche is best read as a revealing example of the mind of someone who is trying to replace God with ego and make it sound virtuous. Ayn Rand was a student of Neitzsche and she did the same thing. A lot of noble-sounding stuff that is meant to lend honor to self-centeredness.
Neitzsche hated religion, which is understandable as far as that goes. Unfortunately he threw out God with religion, which was his dirty little secret--get rid of God by associating him with man's religion. A classic atheist bait-and-switch.
He died in a mental asylum of insanity brought on by syphilis--and unless he somehow found Christ, he didn't experience resurrection. His words could not help him, nor could his hatred of religion.
Here's what G.K. Chesterton said about Neitzsche:
"This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, 'beyond good and evil,' because he had not the courage to say, 'more good than good and evil,' or, 'more evil than good and evil.' Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, 'the purer man,' or 'the happier man,' or 'the sadder man,' for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says 'the upper man.' or 'over man,' a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce."
-- Chapter 7 of Orthodoxy
Neitzsche, it should go without saying, certainly did not believe God cares, so it's really thoughtless advice to recommend him to a brother trying to understand if God cares, unless you believe he doesn't.