"God is Dead"

[Sunstone]

PLEASE NOTE: This is a discussion thread, not a debate thread. State your views. Provide your reasons for them. Ask respectful questions of other posters. Discuss your views with them. Even compare and contrast your views with other positions purely for the sake of clarification. BUT DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PROVE OTHER POSITIONS FALSE OR WRONG! Moreover, please report to the Mods any posts that engage in debate, or attempt to.​

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 in quite the same sense or way that they once had been.

Comments?

 

[Guitar's Cry]

I imagine that among certain communities where they still DO filter out anything that doesn't have to do with God, Neitzche--through his ideas that influence human thought--truly is dead. That becomes less a joke and more a tragic statement, I suppose since it encompasses all the progress made in human understanding Neitzche was alluding to.

Another interpretation of the phrase I like--another flavor of the OP's interpretation--is that God has become something of a platitude, an overused, overdefined thing manipulated as a tool. Such a thing could be "dead" in the sense that it doesn't live for itself (I am forgetting Heidegger's term for this which relates back to Hegel).

Ironically, this dead God is likely the more lively one if someone uses the tool correctly--wielded by an Ubermensche, if you will. Many folks attempt this in Evangelical circles, but do so without the adequate philosophy to wield it appropriately.

 

[Polymath257]

PLEASE NOTE: This is a discussion thread, not a debate thread. State your views. Provide your reasons for them. Ask respectful questions of other posters. Discuss your views with them. Even compare and contrast your views with other positions purely for the sake of clarification. BUT DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PROVE OTHER POSITIONS FALSE OR WRONG! Moreover, please report to the Mods any posts that engage in debate, or attempt to.​

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
​

Neitzsche is God--The Dead​

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 in quite the same sense or way that they once had been.

Comments?

At least one point where Neitzsce said 'God is Dead', he went on to say 'and we have killed him' and talk about how we will have to deal with the rotten corpse for a long time to come.

In other words, we will have to deal with the fact that there is more than one possible explanation and there is no turning back.

 

[Samael_Khan]

PLEASE NOTE: This is a discussion thread, not a debate thread. State your views. Provide your reasons for them. Ask respectful questions of other posters. Discuss your views with them. Even compare and contrast your views with other positions purely for the sake of clarification. BUT DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PROVE OTHER POSITIONS FALSE OR WRONG! Moreover, please report to the Mods any posts that engage in debate, or attempt to.​

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 in quite the same sense or way that they once had been.

Comments?

As a former believer who has stopped believing, I have seen Nietzche's point play out in real life by seeing the struggle that local believers have trying to keep their complete devotion to God, looking at things from his perspective only, when they are very aware of the alternative viewpoints and the natural explanations for many things, to the point that they try their best to debunk certain scientific findings that counter their core beliefs, no matter how unsound their reasoning. It is often like the battle between God and Satan, or between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, their natural compulsion is to combine the "light" with the "dark". And this was in a fundamentalist group.

God, furthermore, is not as real to them as in previous generations, due to the fact that the world is filled with more opportunities than before, and it seems like we live in a world where science fiction has become more prophetic than religion, as many of its predictions have become reality. These predictions are tangible, like the hologram and touch screen. They are real. We know they exist. Whereas religious prophecy leaves a lot to be interpreted and is like a vague mist.

 

[Harel13]

You could now form a view of the world -- a worldview -- that did not include God.

Reminds me of a personal misunderstanding I had in high school. We were told to get for history class a book called (in Hebrew) "El-mul olam chadash", which really means: "In face of a new world" - and discussed the effects of modernization (from the Industrial Revolution and onward) on Jewish communities around the world. I originally thought it meant "God against a new world" (I thought the "El" word in Hebrew referred to God")...the two meanings do have similarities, though, especially considering that that is what happened in the world.

 

[Samael_Khan]

Neitzsche is God--The Dead​

At least one point where Neitzsce said 'God is Dead', he went on to say 'and we have killed him' and talk about how we will have to deal with the rotten corpse for a long time to come.

In other words, we will have to deal with the fact that there is more than one possible explanation and there is no turning back.

Reminds me of the Emperor of Mankind, the Corpse Emperor, in Warhammer 40,000.

 

[Sunstone]

Neitzsche is God--The Dead​

​

That cracked me up!

At least one point where Neitzsce said 'God is Dead', he went on to say 'and we have killed him' and talk about how we will have to deal with the rotten corpse for a long time to come.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It was the book he in which first mentioned "God is dead".

The book was also the inspiration for the music that ended up the theme for 2001: A Space Odyssey. The music was intended to express Nietzsche's concept of humanity's potential, as expressed in the book.

In other words, we will have to deal with the fact that there is more than one possible explanation and there is no turning back.

Exactly.

 

[Thief]

too many copies of a learning device ( the human body)
and then say it all ends in dust

so....I lean to say …..Spirit is a real thing
you ask ….no proof
ok

you won't get any

you just have to wait for that last breath

 

[Brickjectivity]

"God" -- God as the sole and only lens through which to see the world -- has died.

For how long did people see God in this way? Did they start around 5th century or when?

 

[Sunstone]

For how long did people see God in this way? Did they start around 5th century or when?

As far back as I've gone in recorded history, it has seemed to me that most people must have seen the world more or less through one lens. The lens of their own religion and culture. Likely exceptions would be long distance traders and merchants, travelers of most other sorts (possibly excluding pilgrims), maybe armies invading foreign lands, etc. In addition to those, philosophers and many other intellectuals.

In other words, from ancient Sumer up until the rise and popularization of science, it's a pretty sure bet that most people on the planet only had one lens through which they saw the world. The exceptions would have been groups like those I listed above.

 

[sun rise]

This is a bit of a digression, to be sure, but the OP brought a short scene to me from one of my all time favorite spiritual movies: "They Might Be Giants":

I think if God is dead he laughed himself to death.

The rest of that scene plus the first part of the finale:

 

[DagonVarunaMitraApolloZan]

If Nietzche was getting to the idea that humanism and materialism through industrialization, liberties, new labor, science, and further "enlightenment" have reduced and will reduce the importance and impact of religion and superstitions in the minds of people, he was totally right. The "God is Dead and We Have Killed Him" theme is a strongly Christian one related to the image of the death of Jesus and the destructive impulse of people to even non-sensically lead to the destruction or corruption to what might be present to "help them" or "save them". The idea that "killers kill just because" seems to appear in Nietzche and generally some German thinking repeatedly around the period, and ideas like the Death Impulse and self destructive motivations.

In interviewing and speaking with lots of people in the world, God does seem more dead among post-industrialized nations and people, even the religious, to the point where it seems just a word bandied about and fought over without any real fear or power attached to it or sense of awe or the deeply sacred, which can mainly only be imagined since it was unknown how people really seemed to feel about the ideas in the past if they were to have been interviewed at large. I think superstitious thought was likely to be more frequent than it is today, but that God as sort of dead in the minds of people isn't really a new way of dealing with God who was often made somewhat remote to people in order that they mostly function in the usual worldly ways, and this general and repeated (and probably necessary) impiety is brought up by writers throughout the ages who indicate how people tend to forget about religion while they are busy with other things or in the midst of some more immediate seeming events, and come crawling back to God only when the other options seem exhausted and great suffering is overcoming them and they try their hand at supernatural assistance for things they can't control. It still happens, I don't think the human reasoning faculty of the mind or brain (which used to be called the "heart") has changed much!

 

[Heyo]

​

That cracked me up!

"God is dead." -- Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead." -- God
"Dead men don't talk." -- Django

Also Spoke Zarathustra. It was the book he in which first mentioned "God is dead".

Iirc it was in "The Gay Science" where the addition of "and we killed him" appeared, uttered by the scientists. (But I could be wrong, it's been some time.)
And it makes sense in the context of science, more than in the "Übermensch" ideology of Zarathustra.

 

[DagonVarunaMitraApolloZan]

Lets be clear, the inventor of the super man, was insane.

You make certain assumptions that are not necessarily valid.

Science in all of it's applications can only display what God has accomplished.

Where there appears to be a conflict between science, and God, time and more science has sorted them out. As an example, Christians for 2,000 years, and Jews for close to 4,000 have believed the universe had a beginning.

Scientists of the 19th and early 20th century scoffed at this concept, believing and teaching a steady state static universe.

However, more science like the work of Hubble, ultimately brought to fruition the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe.

The most important and elegant scientific theory to date, relativity, in no way precludes God, and can in a number of ways, offer support for him.

Certainly the concept of first causes requires that the astute person should at least consider God, as the ultimate first cause.

You are right however in your observation that science has become an excuse to question faith.

Using your analogy, if one chooses a single lens to view the world, instead of two, then one can feel free to act without concern for right and wrong as defined by the faith.

One can think that one is a super man.

For a second I was like woah, Jerry Siegel and/or Joe Shuster were insane?

 

[DagonVarunaMitraApolloZan]

This is a bit of a digression, to be sure, but the OP brought a short scene to me from one of my all time favorite spiritual movies: "They Might Be Giants":

I think if God is dead he laughed himself to death.

The rest of that scene plus the first part of the finale:

This is the full movie and its very entertaining and profound, I watched the whole thing thanks to you and was amazed by the powerful symbols, especially the final one which was not likely intended but was a mark I knew from other things as a sign of the "Prince/King of the Air".

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

PLEASE NOTE: This is a discussion thread, not a debate thread. State your views. Provide your reasons for them. Ask respectful questions of other posters. Discuss your views with them. Even compare and contrast your views with other positions purely for the sake of clarification. BUT DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PROVE OTHER POSITIONS FALSE OR WRONG! Moreover, please report to the Mods any posts that engage in debate, or attempt to.​

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 in quite the same sense or way that they once had been.

Comments?

In some ways, this is quite connected to something I was trying to say in another thread about the "future of humans."

But as I tried to suggest in that other post, while science can give us another lens through which to see the world, and while that may very well supercede the pseudo-science which I think is theology, I do not think that it will cause "the death of God" for the majority of human beings. And I know, everybody will think it's very weird that an atheist should be saying so.

But I think it's a good point: science can now show just how the power of the religious impulse manifests in the human consciousness -- but it cannot, itself, actually wield that power. Science cannot (at least not yet) give human consciousness what it most truly wants, for so many people: its (or their) own continuation. Nor can it give our species that true uniqueness it so craves, but rather makes it just an existential part of a larger reality that isn't, after all, all about us.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

Also Spoke Zarathustra.

Just a little translation hint: In German, the title is "Also Sprach Zarathustra." The word "also" in German means "thus" or "so," so in English, this should be rendered as, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra."

 

[Sunstone]

Just a little translation hint: In German, the title is "Also Sprach Zarathustra." The word "also" in German means "thus" or "so," so in English, this should be rendered as, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra."

Thanks! I should have remembered. Much appreciated.

 

[Sunstone]

Iirc it was in "The Gay Science" where the addition of "and we killed him" appeared, uttered by the scientists. (But I could be wrong, it's been some time.)

You could be right about that. It's been a long time for me too. Almost 50 years since I first read The Gay Science and Zarathustra. Zarathustra was published first, but I read the books in reverse order. I was only 15, and The Gay Science was my first philosophy book. Perhaps you can imagine how hard the going was for me until I got the hang of Nietzsche's style (in translation). When I came to "God is dead", I was jolted. No one -- no one! -- in my small, backwater hometown would ever in a hundred years think up such words! Of course, I did not fully grasp what Nietzsche meant by the phrase.

Now I could be very wrong about this, but I recall in Zarathustra, the concept is introduced in a parable at the end of the book. A madman enters a town carrying a lantern and crying out something about God. I think he was crying out "Where is God?", but don't quote me on that. At the end of the parable, the madman is disappointed that no one knows where God is, and he resigns himself to saying something along the lines of "God is dead, but_____________." That is, I can't recall all the words. Maybe those were the words @Polymath257 quoted. Again, it's been 50 years. If what I told you is accurate, then God really is alive, because we have just witnessed a miracle.

And it makes sense in the context of science, more than in the "Übermensch" ideology of Zarathustra.

That's a very good observation, very astute. Thank you for that!

 

[Sunstone]

"God is dead." -- Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead." -- God
"Dead men don't talk." -- Django

LMAO!