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Once upon a time, long, long ago, one of my favorite philosophical jokes was this one:
Found written in a restroom stall:
"God is dead." -- Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead." -- God
But the joke got spoiled for me. It got spoiled for me when I learned what Nietzsche really meant by "God is dead." You see, the joke no longer makes any sense, then.
Drats!
At any rate, Nietzsche did not really coin the phrase, "God is dead". That was Hegel. He either coined it or he came close to coining it. I don't know which. I only know that Nietzsche's most famous translator, Walter Kaufmann said Hegel buried his "God is dead" in a dense, convoluted and difficult to understand sentence. Hence, not many people noticed him saying it.
So did Hegel and Nietzsche really mean that God had ceased to exist?
No. Heck no! That's the most popular view, but the most popular view does not fit the fact that neither man was dense enough to believe God could die. At least, not if he ever existed in the first place.
To understand what Nietzsche (and most likely Hegel too) meant by "God is dead", consider how the rise of science in their lifetimes was changing the way people looked at the world. And especially focus on the fact that science was offering a very wide audience a way of looking at the world that was both secular and robust. Put differently, for maybe the first time in history, many more than just a few boring philosophers had a tool, means, or lens for looking at things without necessarily seeing them through the lens of a religion.
You could now form a view of the world -- a worldview -- that did not include God.
Now here's the
real key to understanding it. The deeper key.
Even if you were still religious, the rising science was making it impossible for you to simply assume there was no other way to explain things than to explain them through your religion.
Is it becoming clearer now? First, imagine some truth that you have never questioned in your whole life. Imagine how easy it is to act on the basis of that truth. How confident you are that truth will not fail you. How unlikely you are to seek reasons to disbelieve it. Perhaps for many of you, that truth might be, "Sunstone is wickedly handsome."
Now imagine that truth is your religion. If so, wouldn't it be easy for you to shift from simple faith into deep devotion to your religion? Remember, in every direction you look, you see the world through one lens and only one lens. The lens of your religion.
Today, not many of us can honestly say that we are able to look at everything we see day-in-and-day-out and interpret every last thing we see solely and only through the lens of our religion. Today, for most of us, God is no longer our sole lens, but has been reduced, at most, to no more than our favorite lens.
"God" -- God as the sole and only lens through which to see the world -- has died.
In short, Nietzsche was merely pointing out that God, and by extension, the Christian religion was no longer 'real' to people i
n quite the same sense or way that they once had been.
Comments?