Is God Dead?

In the late 1800s a famous German philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a piece called, The Parable of the Madman (1882). It began as this. Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers.

http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html

Little did he know the impact this thought would have on Hitler, Stalin and the western world. In the 1930s as American progressives began to embrace these ideas that gave power to eugenics and socialist ideals that began the thought once more that the need for God could be replaced by the people's need for Government.

So in the 1960s as the Sexual revolution and freedom of self was in full swing, Time magazine asked the one question that was silently being portrayed in the culture. Is God dead?

A very popular atheistic book written in 2006 called, The God Delusion by English biologist Richard Dawkins called the belief in God a delusion and in opposition of evidence.

In 2018 research conducted by Pew Research Center shared this statistic The vast majority of Americans (90%) believe in some kind of higher power, with 56% professing faith in God as described in the Bible and another 33% saying they believe in another type of higher power or spiritual force. Only one-in-ten Americans say they don’t believe in God or a higher power of any kind.

Here we are 2019 and the greatest of minds are still in disagreement as belief in God or a higher power is still very much evidently strong among 90% of Americans.

Is God dead? Asking this very question begins with ignorance as God is eternal. People may try and to kill the thought of God but under great persecution the belief in God only spreads like a wildfire that eternally cannot be smothered. The only one who is dead is the one who hasn't responded, believed, repented and followed the only Savior called Christ the Son of God within the trinity of the Godhead. You may try to kill the thought, ban the idea, burn the books, and kill the body but with all truth and devout conviction I can boldly say you will never kill the soul, this action is held by one and only one, God Almighty.

While "God is dead" is clearly an anti-Christian sentiment, it is not atheistic, for it acknowledges the possibility of God's existence. That's a starting point for a conversation with the one who echoes the statement. We might ask, "Tell me about this god whom you believe is dead." As a follow-up, we can reply by telling them about the God in Whom is life itself.

"And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together."

If it was possible for God to be dead, then according to the verse above, (and others) no one would continue to exist to be able to ask that question.

It is atheistic as in a cunning use of words to portray a underlying idea.

In the parable Friedrich Nietzsche had this underlying idea that God had never existed but that mankind had created God as to why he called the man who looks for God mad when the author felt as if mankind outgrew the need for God. And that mankind had finally killed the idea of God. So to him the God in the term God is dead was just a idea, psychological projection, universal neurosis, placebo, crutch, wishful thinking for the oppressed. The idea in his mind had died.

German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach was the first to suggest that God was nothing more than a psychological projection. Religion to him was a universal neurosis. God is merely a placebo, a crutch, a function of religious wishful thinking. Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx (“Religion is the opiate of the people”) all traded on this same theme.

Or as Richard Dawkins believes that religion is a crutch for those who are afraid of blinking out of existence after death. The science fiction author Robert Heinlein wrote that "religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help."

They may have tried to kill the idea but God is more than just a idea and creation will never be able to destroy the creator.