RomanJoe wrote:

I do think most people have a very common sense metaphysics, that universals exist, essences are real, there aren't brute facts

I don't think most people have any opinion about universals or essences (by which you presumably mean substantial forms rather than self-identity) at all. They think that things exist, and have properties; but they don't have a view about whether property means tropes or a universal or a resemblance class including primitively similar things (or whatever). I think something similar can be said about substantial forms (which are, after all, just a species of property in the sense opposed to substance). These are all entities that philosophers posit to deal with problems men like Socrates raised.

RomanJoe wrote:

Or maybe classical theism is forever constrained to an academic niche.

Do you mean "forever hereafter"? Classical theism was the majority view of the West for almost two thousand years. So clearly it can exist outside of the academy.

119 wrote:

The South is the one place that treats the Bible seriously, as the literal Word of G-d. They'd actually be more likely than any other place to go Noachide. 

Alas, I suspect that says more about how unlikely the world is to go Noahide than how likely the South is to.

This is counterintuitive to those of us who frequent philosophy forums. We're in the Turing machine wing of the building and we project our approach to others: it's all about philosophy & theology. Who would change his affiliation for any other reason? Most folks, it seems.

Nietzsche would have agreed. He thought that by the time one got to giving arguments one had already basically lost their listeners. Aquinas might have disagreed. (I used to think: How could anyone who actually goes outside think that people are fundamentally rational and can be convinced by complex philosophical arguments? Now, I'm not so sure. I've gradually shifted my position over the last year.)

Do any of you really think that there is going to be a sort of revival of Christianity in the West or, for that matter, that Noahidism will actually sweep across Europe? I realize that this is a rather negative question.

119 wrote:

He's such a great writer one overlooks eternal recurrence and his rejection of Theism [...] He really believed in the former.

I'm not so sure about that. Nietzsche clearly believes in eternal recurrence as a sort of thought experiment. He thinks that we should try to live our lives so that, when considering them on the whole, we would be willing to live them over and over again. He, however, may have only ever entertained it as a cosmological doctrine (e.g. he wrote but never published an argument for it). The evidence is inconclusive.

At the very least we can say that (regardless of what Nietzsche himself actually thought) we can accept what he's trying to get at with the doctrine of eternal recurrence in his works without accepting it as a cosmological doctrine.

his rejection of Theism sans argument.

He didn't so much reject theism without argument as start from the assumption that Kant's arguments against it succeed.

And again, he can be taken as exploring the consequences of the death of God (i.e. that God has become “impossible to believe in” and the consequences of Christianity losing its power over men's minds), so that one can still get a lot out of what he says without necessarily adopting his views.