An Analytical Look At The Proposed Death Of God - 1649 Words

Paige Medlin Mrs. Powell English 1020 20 April 2015 An Analytical Look at the Proposed Death of God As of 2013, fifty-four percent of Americans still had a belief in God, although in some other minorities, that number was larger (Gallup). Despite this, there was a time when some of the greatest minds of the time felt as if God had no modern purpose in human’s lives. One such example of this was that of Friedrich Nietzsche, who went down in history as the man who declared God â€Å"dead†. Though this might seem like a hypothetical call to atheism, he was instead showing how the people of the world had come to outgrow a need for God with the coming of the renaissance (Lawhead 454). However, the contradictions found within Nietzsche’s argument†¦show more content†¦He hypothesized that this gradual turning away from God would be such a gradual process that people would not realize that it was even happening until the idea had almost been exterminated (Frame 45). Nietzsche then proposed that there are no absol utes or standards for us to live by and therefore, God could not be real since he would have created those very standards into being (Lawhead 454).Because of this, Nietzsche said, people would never be able to take full responsibility for themselves and still leave room for God (Frame 49). Instead, he favored the idea that the true origin of morals could be found in the human flaw to desire a state of being viewed as powerful (Lawhead 456). Although he denied God’s existed and felt that morals came from a thirst for power, Nietzsche was quoted as saying that Jesus came â€Å"not to ‘redeem men’ but to show how one must live (Lawhead 455).† While Nietzsche contends that there is no way to take liability for human actions until the shed themselves of God, it could be reasonably argued that Christianity is, in and of itself, a way of taking on the responsibility for their actions. In today’s society, Christianity is the harder life to live - anyone can do what they want; people do not need justification for what they do and often view good and bad as the difference between what benefits them and