"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him... What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?" Friedrich Nietzsche (In Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882) “I am what I am” God “In Him we live and move and have our being” Apostle Paul It has happened since the birth of time. It happened when the Da Vinci code and the God delusion was published. It happened with Charles Darwin’s evolution theory… In fact, it happens every day in the lives of thousands of Christians and non- Christians: Doubting God. Throughout mankind’s history, faith has been like a delicate butterfly that swirls and twirls amongst us. We see it, and then …show more content…
If we have the power to kill God by not believing in Him… Then He is not really God. Nietzsche is placing the authorship of God into human hands. In this it can clearly be seen that Nietzsche’s statement has one fundamental flaw: He did not know who God is. If God is God: the consequence is that He cannot be killed, and cannot be started or stopped by human actions. Now that I have revealed the flaws in Nietzsche’s view of God, I think it necessary to look to who God really is for my opinion to be successfully conveyed. For all of us, God is a lot of things. He is Lord, Creator, Redeemer, Shepherd, Love, Justice, Holy, Faithful, Master, and for some simply Nature. The universal truth, however, is that we have our origin in God. This is true. Whether He used evolution or Adam and Eve (I do not want to explore that subject right now) - we are because of Him. He is our origin, not we His. And therefore, our lack of faith does not diminish His being. It is a simple principle: When you close your eyes: the world does not cease to exist; you simply don’t acknowledge it for the moment. The other understood characteristic of God… that which makes Him God: is that He is beyond our grasp. The moment we can rationalise Him- He is not God. The very essence, the greatest difference between God and us, is cognisance. This is the heart of my argument today: the moment we can rationalise or understand or prove God: we are denying Him- denying His Godliness. We are
Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher, wrote Parable of a Madman, a writing that explains the ranting’s of a seemingly madman. This madman is running through the streets yelling that “God is dead”. His initial reaction is despair and grief; he is beside himself with the knowledge that we have “killed God”. The madman goes on to realize that he has come too early and that human race isn’t ready to hear something so profound. We cannot even comprehend the magnitude of the death of God and what it means for us. With the death of
He would disagree with what Socrates chose to do in accepting death and would look at the demanor of good and evil and raise the idea that this is all dogmatic, which then should be eradicated. If Socrates’s was to leave and struggle by failing to adhere to his principals he would suffer to a degree, but in his sufferage he would become a man of greatness. Nietzsche’s ideas of good and evil being formed through religion requires for it to be gone because God is “dead” therfore meaning is found at the end of ones
Friedrich Nietzsche’s own skepticism symbolized the secular changes in contemporary Western civilization, in which he details mankind’s break away from faith into a new rule of chaos. In Book 5 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche establishes that “God is dead”, meaning that modern Europe has abandoned religion in favor of rationality and science (Nietzsche 279). From this death, the birth of a ‘new’ infinite blossoms in which the world is open to an unlimited amount of interpretations that do not rely on the solid foundations of faith in religion or science. However, in contrast to the other philosophers of his age such as Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Nietzsche deviates from the omniscient determinism of history towards a
4. The existence of God remains a matter of faith since it’s difficult to "prove" God to someone who does not believe.
Nietzsche admits that the realization that “God is dead” will travel slowly because it is just too “unthinkable”.
Consequently, children in America and around the world grow up believing that faith is God is for the foolish and uneducated. Consequently, we have become a nation of weak believers who have been reluctant to love the Lord their God with all our minds – fearing that an examination of the sciences would challenge our faith. Thus we have deprived our children of the true blessings of loving God fully and completely. This deprivation has not only weakened the faith of many, it has also weakened their commitment to stay faithful, to persevere, to overcome, and to repent. Consequently, they have become spiritual cowards who are unable to provide a reason for their faith and are unable to stand against the wiles of the devil. Perhaps they should be reminded that cowards are the first thrown into the lake of burning fire (Rev. 21:8).
However he does not take back his initial claim stating that “ This deed id still more distant from them that the most distant stars – and yet they have done it themselves.” (Nietzsche 96). This sees to imply that society is not aware of it’s actions and that the realization of the true weight of what has been done will not be realized now but rather in the context of the future. Nietzsche’s claim looks towards the future at the “tremendous event still on its way.” (Nietzsche 96) with an air of fear and guilt for what has been done. Society is not ready to hear about what they have done or accept the true implications, and therefore they are not concerned with what is being said. Nietzsche describes the reaction to the claim “God is Dead” saying that “they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment.” (Nietzsche 96). The 19th century was the start of the movement away from faith and towards other societal norms such as science and the introduction of Darwinism. However, this movement was still very new and therefore such an extreme claim as “God is Dead” was not fully understood or accepted. It can be inferred from Nietzsche’s statements like “the tremendous event is still on it’s way, still wandering- it has not yet reached the ears of man” (Nietzsche 96) that he is primarily concerned with how the death of God will affect those in the future as the full impact has yet to be realized and the degradation of faith will later become a societal
Ever since the inception of his writings, Nietzsche has been pointed to and predominately described as an atheist, however within the work, Beyond Good and Evil, it is revealed otherwise. Nietzsche considers several different roles for religion in past, present, and future polities. The roles that religion play within Nietzsche’s vision of a future creation and establishment of world-affirming values is dependent upon the class of the individual. It is found in the various sections of The religious character within Beyond Good and Evil, that religion can be utilized by different classes of people for different world affirmations. The high ranking officials are able to use religion as a tool to relate and control their subjects, while the middle
Nietzsche points out that morals were not given to humans by God, nor was knowledge or instinct instilled in us by God: we have created morality just as we have decided standards for "truth" and explanations for our "human nature," and so there is no transcendent external standard. If God is dead, there are no objective values and we are free to create our own values. Nietzsche says that although the death of God liberates us, leaving us free to rule ourselves, this results in a cage-like freedom: while no value is objectively "right" or "true", if we can not choose then we are not free. Nietzsche supports the individual who, despite a lack of objective correctness or "truth", makes a decision anyway, accepting responsibility for her self-created values and actions, knowing she is these actions.
God the creator of the universe, earth and ourselves can he really be dead as the madman has proclaimed him to soon be in Nietzsche’s “Madman”. To understand if we have killed God in this postmodern world and become all of his murders we need to analyze religion, technology and what the meaning of belief is. In all honesty we are closer than we were before to understanding what Nietzsche was trying to communicate in “The Madman” and “New Mortality”, this is greatly due to technological advances in the twentieth and twenty first century. Things such as space exploration, computers, general acceptance that anyone can believe anything they choose to, have opened the world up to more things than ever could’ve been imagined in 1882. These
In 1882, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared, “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him” (120). Modern thought and its scientific basis rejected the existence or need of any God, religion, or their accompanying belief in absolute, objective morality. This rejection of the divine preoccupies a greater segment of the population after Nietzsche’s death as humanity seeks redemption from the atrocities of two world wars. However, rejection of God and religion removes the healing potential of faith, resulting in a modern society yearning for meaning among the ashes of Europe’s dead. No answer presents itself easily, but one of modernism’s philosophical responses reveals itself in the devastation. As Wylie Sypher surmised, “we have lived amid the ‘dust and crashes’ of the twentieth century and have learned how the direst calamities that befall man seem to prove that human life at
The “Death” of God that Nietzsche is implying is that we have killed him because we no longer are turning towards God for answers. People are no longer turning toward God for moral principles. When Nietzsche wrote this in The Gay Science this was after the Enlightenment period where society had turned toward science for answers instead of the church. People were moving away from religion as the basis of their lives. Nietzsche describes how we have shifted toward a way of master morality, which seeks power and strength. We no longer seek the slave morality where people find sympathy, patience, humility, and a warm heart. He says that “Christianity is the religion of pity. Pity opposes the noble passions which heighten our vitality. It has a
Intellectual thought since Nietzsche has found itself one way or another addressing the death of God. Most of this thinking, however, has taken place from an atheistic starting point and has not considered its own presuppositions. It strives to find consistent outworking from these presuppositions and to eradicate the shadow of God carried over from the Enlightenment tradition because of its grounding in a theistic worldview. However, the outcome and implications of thinking after the death of God has been found hideous and many attempts have been made to transcend the absurdity there.
The mystery of God's existence has been a crucial element of many religious studies and traditions. Who is God? What is God? Where is God? To effectively discuss the existence of God, it is necessary to illustrate the notion of faith. People of faith believe that God does exist, and that relationship with God gives meaning to their lives. Others who are skeptical point to God as an obsolete hope of an ignorant human race. People today live in a world distinguished by sophisticated technology in which modern science has been a strong agent in questioning the existence of God.
To investigate these similarities, we must first define what Nietzsche means by “God.” If our modern society is seen as an immoral world, and God as morality, then again yes, we have effectually killed God. However, it may be a mistake to think God and Morality entirely synonymous. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche states, “Morality is the herd-instinct of the individual,” () implying that, since morality preserves the abhorrent mass rather than the sainted individual, it is weakness, a reaction rather than a choice. But in the Madman’s tale, God is not described as a reaction, but as a victim. The mass is shamed by the individual