Why does nietzsche think god is dead

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Your comment will be queued in Akismet! We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. This deed is still more remote to them than the remotest stars - and yet they have done it themselves! As an atheist, Nietzsche did not believe in God. Many still throw around the old moral injunctions in secular society, and for the sake of the secular public square, often attempt to justify them with some other foundation—e.

Others oppose gay marriage on the basis that history has shown that reserving marriage for a man and a woman is best for the health of a society. And others say that we should impose regulations on businesses for the apparently self-evident reason that we should protect the environment for future generations. Dan is a former Senior Fellow at Intellectual Takeout. He received his B. Thomas MN , and his M. You can find his academic work at Academia. E-mail Dan. You are currently using the BETA version of our article comments feature.

You may notice some bugs in submission and user experience. Significant improvements are coming soon! Nietzsche was as much a German writer as he was a philosopher. His father, who died when he was four, was a Protestant minister, and Nietzsche was brought up in an atmosphere of gloomy Lutheran piety by his mother and sister. It was against the oppressive weight of Christian moralising on his sensual being that he passionately rebelled; and this rebellion was fired all the more by chronic illness, which further limited his chances to love life.

To this personal rebellion must be added a Nietzschean fury with the condition of a Germany newly united under Bismarck, who was pursuing an official "cultural struggle", a kulturkampf , to unify German culture as Protestant and national. Nietzsche despised the church as an institution and politically and culturally he was a free-thinking European far ahead of his days. So, "God is dead": you, men of power, can't take his name in vain to shore up your institutions.

That would be the political message. So, "God is dead", which means "Reason" with a capital R, the force out there that made possible the philosophy of Plato, of the intertwining of Reason and divinity throughout mainstream Christianity and western philosophy, cannot be used to explain the nature of "man". But that means that man, too, is dead.

In fact, the most serious outcome of Nietzsche's death of God is the death of man, or mankind, as one entity, defined by rational capacity and slotted into a vision of "rational" progress. So, "God is dead", but that means, for Nietzsche, on the plus side, that the body is free.

Here's a taste from the second preface Nietzsche wrote to it:. Book three contains dicta such as "Prayer has been invented for those people who really never have thoughts of their own and who do not know any elevation of the soul …" and "The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad". God is dead now moves towards the idea that each man must reinvent himself as a connoisseur of that very joy in living, which Christianity repressed.

So, God is dead: the awfulness of men killed him — this is a theme, and the spirit of, much of the Zarathustra book.