Nietzsche: God Is Dead

God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?”(Nietzsche 2005). This quote holds a dark truth: mankind brought God to His End.

In reading a Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich you realize that history seems so much less complicated when you are the one standing back and reflecting on the past. You realize how easy it is to often forget that every single new idea, religion and war was a struggle that lasted generations upon generations. History is more than just a page or a story, its our account of the world. That goes to show how short life and history is, you realize that history is always repeating, war after war, peace then war. There are good and bad periods in history and its up to us to learn from them. In a way history is much like a human being it goes through stages, learns about life, and has inner struggles or wars about their ideas and their beliefs.

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

Most people believe that the only way to get they want is to go to war or revolt against those who treat them badly. Some people also fear that good and honest people will turn to this type of violence to get what they want because it worked in the past. Look how the Pueblo Indians dealt with the Spanish, how Thomas Paine believed the only way to get their freedom from Britain was to encourage everyone to join the fight, and how Thoreau was afraid of expanding America because it meant the increase in slavery and in the chance slaves would turn on the United States of America to win their own freedom. History can be used to learn about our past and to see how it has affected the way the world acts today.

For many Nietzsche’s proclamation of God’s death is liberating. No longer shall life be dictated by groundless superstition; we are now free to judge for ourselves what constitutes a good life. The adoption of this idea seems to allow for greater degrees of self-fulfillment. If this is the case, why is it that such a large portion of our population still upholds religion? In book four of Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche addresses one of the central concerns entailed by the abandonment of religion.

Nietzsche's madman allegory represents the current moral situation of society during his time--a growing belief that God does not exist, a movement away from religious values. Nietzsche does not mean literally that God has been murdered, but because mankind created God, we also have the ability to kill God. In Nietzsche’s point of view, mankind created God by also creating a belief in God. By saying that mankind ‘murdered’ God, Nietzsche is proposing that we no longer believe in Him. With the grounding that religion provided in the past, Nietzsche fears that mankind will be left without purpose and virtues to lead them to do the correct thing. The ‘light,’ in Nietzsche’s allegory is belief in God; for this paper, light is a focus because of the implications that follow when there is none. With no light, everything previously known about moral beliefs and the world is overturned. Nietzsche proposes that instead of God guiding people (because people no longer believe in Him), people can follow their own virtues, such as courage, faith in oneself, and patience for the future.

Glover explains that at the end of the century it is hard to be confident about the moral law or about moral progress, he quotes that one reason why there is a decline on morality is because there is a decline in the belief in God (Glover, 2000). “God is dead” is one of Nietzsche famous quotes. Nietzsche is not the first to challenge God authority of morality. Ivan Karamazov was one of the first to question, he question if he was the high power because of all the bad thing that has and was happing in the world ; some examples were rape ,war , poverty, any type of cruelty to humanity (Glover, 2000). Nietzsche also saw the cruelty and believed that human were in danger due to their morality, and also believes that Judeo - Christianity religious beliefs was no longer a serious intellectual option (Glover, 2000, p. 12 to 17).

Churches and religious sites across China became a unifying force for discussion and connections. The foundations of Chinese culture had been stripped away leaving people alone and confused. An personal example in “The Souls of China” that truly exemplifies what religion means to the people of China is the explanation from Wang Yi. Growing up in the Chinese countryside, Wang Yi had little education and money. Wang Yi recounts a group of ants stuck in the rain away from their home, and decides to carry them home over the water. He describes the sensation he got from this action saying “I felt like their savior…I was only seven years old but felt I had done something really meaningful.” (341). After giving hi sermon, Wang Yi asks the Christians

“As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.” Nietzsche was one of the first modern philosophers to rebel against rationalism and when World War I came about, the revolution against religion truly became a legitimate statement. Friedrich Nietzsche strongly believed that many of those that practiced religion were led to the acceptance of slave morality. Religion had always played a fundamental role in society as it sets strict boundaries and standards of what is morally correct and incorrect. However, Nietzsche claims that, “Human nature is always driven by “ ‘the will to power’ ”, but religion will tell one otherwise, saying that one should forbid their bad desires. In Nietzsche’s

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

At the core of any nation’s culture are its religious beliefs. In China there are the “Three Jewels” Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, as described in Lopez (1996). There are small numbers of people practicing other religions such as Christianity and Islam, but these are the three dominant beliefs of the region. While they are separate in content, they have coexisted for several thousand years. Lopez (1996) goes on to say, “Historical precedent and popular parlance attest to the importance of this threefold division for understanding Chinese culture…Buddhism is the sun, Daoism the moon, and Confucianism the five planets…suggesting that although they remain separate, they also coexist as equally indispensable phenomena of the natural world.” Each belief system stands alone, and at the same time needs the other(s).

Josh Wheaton: In God’s Not Dead Josh starts off as a Christian who stands for his faith. He begins to be challenged in one of his classes as his lecturer demands everyone to sign that ‘God is dead’. Josh refuses to sign the paper bringing judgement and trials upon him. Through it all Josh stuck to what he believed and used the opportunity to let the other students make their own choice regarding faith.

The world was changing and he knew this and you can see it in his writings the great thinker, was revolutionizing a new concept without having God deep in it. Nietzsche even though he is writing that God is dead he can’t believe his own writings this is why it sounds like the ramblings of a

I showed hopefully that Nietzsche was trying to show that the church no longer dominates with its dogma morality teachings. I clearly showed that the God concept had been around for thousands of years and most people believed in the church and God. I also showed how the church dominated the world for seventeen hundred years before Nietzsche wrote the Gay Science. I gave this information about the Church and the God concept to show that when Nietzsche wrote his famous words God is dead he was not literally saying God was dead, but that the concept of God believing in him for moral teachings is dead, are is no longer the only way to moral teachings. Nietzsche was brilliant in what he wrote he even wrote that the murder’s are human beings we

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” (Gay Science, 126) This harsh statement remains among Friedrich Nietzsche’s most powerful and disturbing quotes, spoken by a proclaimed Madman to a crowd of disbelievers. After making this claim, the Madman becomes horrified by his audience’s ignorance, noting that “This tremendous event is still on its way.” This has an effect of suspending the Madman’s message in time, expanding its audience infinitely, for the event of God’s death could still be on its way. Therefore, nearly 150 years after these words were written, we must ask ourselves, does God remain dead, and has our modern society killed him? This is a haunting and disturbing question, but in many ways our society does resemble Nietzsche’s masses. However, it also resembles the Madman himself, due to its inherent individualism.