Dave asked:

How good or bad a case does Nietzsche make for the Death of God?

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I believe he makes an excellent case. Although existentialism is much more than just proving that
God is dead. Existentialism is about freeing man so that with personal freedom the issues of personal
responsibility and conscious choices can be discussed. Actually there is an old preconception about
the death of God in Nietzsche. He never meant to kill God so he could be free of God and so be able
to free man itself. His vision is beyond atheism. He does not ask that we do not believe in God —
atheism — but we should feel how dangerous it would be to believe, we should feel this danger as a
threat against life itself. In theAnti-Christhe says: "if someone demonstrated to us the existence of
the Christian God, then we would believe in Him even less". The so called case of the death of God is
so a much complex affair. Nietzsche has much higher goals than killing God. He wanted to kill of any
possibility of an ideal world being the world that focused the attention of human minds. In a way it was
so, since Plato, and mainly Hegel. The new man, the Super-man, is free from having to believe in the
ideal world, and in that way is free from superstition and believes only in the natural body and forces
of nature.

It's the end of a cycle. Before religion, man was alone, after religion man is once again alone.
Nietzsche says: "there no longer is a God". This sentence confirms what I just said. The new man
should never forget his past of struggles. The "lies of the church" play an import role in the new
destiny of man, as his dark past and as the start of the "noon" of the new age. Man is alone, as a
clean slate, ready for a new beginning.

The final warning of Nietzsche was that a new idol could replace religion, and that idol would be
technology. One can only wonder if sometime in the near future someone can dare to kill technology.

Nuno Hipolito

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