Is God Really Dead?
If Nietzsche is correct, then who’s in charge now?
This is our true predicament. Together with the fear of man we have lost the love of man, the affirmation of man, THE WILL TO MAN.
At the end of the 19th century, Nietzsche had a lot to say about this subject because he is the author of that famous quote that has stirred the pot of many college roundtables. God Is Dead. He continued, God remains Dead. And we have killed him.
The way in which he finishes this thought acknowledges the question, how did we kill him? Was this a choice mankind made 150 years ago? This was not a theological discussion about the existence of God. This was a commentary about the cultural shakeup at that time.
Nietzsche formulated his theories about God from the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution, in which there was a migration of people from rural towns to big cities in order to supply the needs of assembly lines and mass production. Simply put, man decided on his own to uproot from centuries of agrarian living to the faceless, God-less life of factory work. Nietzsche, an atheist, believed that man created the idea of God to alleviate suffering. Therefore, man could just as easily kill him off.
What’s the Lesson For Us?
