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? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?" —Nietzsche

Nietzsche is incredibly brilliant. What better way to sum up the outcomes of modernist thinking, the enlightenment, the scientific revolution, the whole period that lost its zeal for the divine and replaced it with the self. His statement is so profound, that God is dead, but not just that God is dead, its that we have killed him. We have killed the one who gives us purpose, who gives us justice and morality. When we lose the source of morality, when we lose God, then we are thrust into a vacuum, we live in a lifeless devoid. Because mankind cannot live in a vacuum, we immediately begin trying to fill it. That is the way the human brain functions, we fill gaps, we close holes, we like things neatly categorized and arranged. With God dead, with the moral holes gaping open, we need to fill them, we have to take care of them. We usurp the throne from God, we begin to impart morality, enforce our own new kind of morality. We have "killed" the one that directs out life, began our life, and gives us morality, the one that all our understanding stems from. With that being gone, with that wound created, we need to fill it, and we do so with the only thing that we could have filled it with, Darwinism. It was the perfect escape, or rather quickly and poorly reached answers we had, and we latched too it. The logical outcomes of this sort of belief system never played a part in the thinking. Darwin gave quick answers to questions that needed to be quickly answered. That is the last part of Nietzsche's statement here. To take the mantle of Morality-giver, we need to become gods ourselves. This is one path we can take to reach the current state we are in today, in the postmodern west.

 

What are your thoughts on this quote? What are the effects of this quote? What are the intentions of this quote? 

another interesting thing to think about, Do Atheists have a god, and if so, who or what is it, and explain your argument.