Notes on the death of God

Keith Woods is a Traditionalist and (perhaps) Third Positionist who does extensive commentary on YouTube. In this clip, he discusses "the death of God" from a broadly Traditionalist perspective. 

Woods argues that while it´s true that the crisis of modern man (or Western man) is at bottom metaphysical and spiritual, not simply political or cultural, simply going back to whatever brand of "traditional" Christianity suits your fancy best is *not* a solution. Rather, Christianity itself led to the "death of God", Protestant Christianity in particular. 

Christianity has strong affinities with materialism, individualism and a progressive-evolutionary mode of thinking. "God" is simply another being in the universe, albeit the strongest and most important one, indeed he is really a kind of human individual magnified into infinity. This infinity is interpreted as eternal time, rather than as a state outside time and space altogether. Immortality is seen as individual and somehow "physical", making it a materialist concept. Woods even likens the resurrection of the body to trans-humanism! There is also a progression in time and space to constantly better individual states, a concept similar to modern evolutionism. 

Woods believes that Christianity got these ideas from Judaism, the first materialist religion. It´s most consistently expressed in Protestantism, which is really explicit materialism plus God as a kind of cosmic ruler on top of the material world. It was easy for the Enlightenment materialists and scientists to simply do away with God as a "unnecessary hypothesis", while keeping the materialist side of the equation. Further, Protestantism lacks an esoteric dimension, due to its "literalist" approach to the Bible and the creeds. It´s pure exotericism. Its view of faith is not based on a supersensible intuition of higher spiritual truths and realities, but rather a completely blind faith in a series of exoteric propositions. The German romantics tried to return to a more authentic spiritual worldview by the route of pantheism, but in the end, they lost to the positivists and other materialists. Since most Western people today accept the materialist worldview on a deep level, converting to Christianity simply won´t change much. It won´t be a qualitatively different perspective.

What is the alternative? Woods points to Traditionalist writers Guénon and Schuon, and also to Advaita Vedanta. God isn´t a "person" but the very ground or principle of Being. Truth, Goodness and Beauty are direct emanations from the Divine, making the entire universe "organic" and united with God on a very fundamental level. Our existence is meaningful and completely dependent on God. The afterlife isn´t a state of eternal individuality (which Woods identifies with individualism), but rather a mystical merger with the Divine outside the categories of time and space altogether. Presumably, this "organic" view of the world also has other implications, since Woods in other clips talks positively about deep ecology, attacks overpopulation, believes in the reality of "race", etc. 

The Catholic Church fused the organic view of God with "pagan superstition" during the Middle Ages, when Thomas Aquinas attempted a synthesis of Aristotle, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Bible (with its Jewish errors). With the Reformation, the Jewish-materialist aspect once again became predominant, and its implied at several times that modern Catholicism isn´t much better than its Protestant competitors. 

Presented here for discussion purposes only.