A question from class today...

[_Bond...James Bond]

We've been doing Nietzsche and we finally got to the (in)famous "God is Dead" section of the material. So an interesting question was asked that goes:

"How would you feel upon hearing that God is Dead?"---and went along the class and asked people. I, having dealt with this issue in depth through my loss of faith knew my answer. I would be pissed off that I'd been lied to and betrayed. Probably not so much pissed off at my family (who been fed the lie same as me) but pissed off at the self perpetuating myth that's created the false construct of an ideal God with ideal morals and values.

So anyway: How would you feel upon hearing God is Dead?

(I'll post a whole list of the classes answers later, gotta run....also probably want to talk about Nietzche's views of a falsely constructed metaphysical/material world and lack of ability by Western Thought to deal with the world as it is, rather than as we project and hope it to be.)

And please....no cop outs. Give an answer. Suspend your version of reality for a moment and think.

[_Scottie]

This is a hard one for me, because the loss of my religion was the same point at which I lost my beleif in God. It's very difficult to seperate the emotions of my betrayal by the church vs God.

[_Sethbag]

I'd wonder if he's going to Heaven. :-)

Seriously though, finding out that there's really no God was quite a shock, and it's still reverberating in my life. When one's entire cosmology and worldview include at the most fundemental level the assumption that life goes on after this mortal existence, and that we're really eternal beings and won't just cease to exist when we die, learning that that's almost certainly not true is very disruptive. It's very difficult even to wrap my mind around what it means that death will bring a cessation of my existence both physically, as well as of my consciousness and "being" as a person. I think in a lot of ways I've reconciled to it, but it's still a very foreign idea, and is still mind-boggling.

To a lot of people, discovering (and believing) that God doesn't really exist would so shatter and warp the foundations of their lifelong view of reality that it would be incredibly life-altering, or at least mindset altering. It would be like getting to graduate school in Mathematics and the teacher takes you aside and tells you that you're being inducted into the secret world of advanced mathematics that the peons can't understand and know, and then tells you that 2 + 2 doesn't really equal 4. You'd just stand there blinking your eyes, trying to wrap your mind around that concept, and seeing your entire previous mathematical life swirling around before your eyes, like some kind of Twilight Zone thing.

[_The Nehor]

I would use ancient Enochian magics to transcend mortality and hunt all of creation until I found the bastard who killed him. I would do many might deeds including tossing a gorgon into a supernova, tricking Satan into telling me what happened, wrestling with a hundred-handed giant, killing the black wyrm of death, and then catch up to the killer. I will then come up to him and say, "My name is Nehor. You killed my father....prepare to die."

As a side-note if he then says, "No.......I am your father," I will kill him anyways because that would be taking the joke too far.

[_John Larsen]

I for one felt a great sense of relief. I was no longer trying to please an undecipherable being. Also, everything in the world finally made sense.

John

[_Gadianton]

The first time I heard that phrase was from my Book of Mormon teacher at BYU, and the way he brought it up, I couldn't understand what he was trying to get at. He said that this was the sentiment of many of his theology student colleagues in grad school at Harvard. I thought it was really dumb, how does it make sense that "God is dead?" He never explained what it meant or even attributed it to Nietzsche. So upon hearing for the very first time, specifically that "God is dead", I thought it was one of the stupidest things I'd ever heard.

But not all Mormons are opposed to the slogan. Just as some sell out the church to make room for DNA evidence and so on, the professor who taught the Nietzsche section of my history of phil class at BYU was a Nietzsche fanatic. He was more than happy to bring in a TV and, and in direct violation of the teachings of the prophets, show us a segment of the R-Rated movie, "Apocalypse Now" which he felt captured the spirit of Nietzsche. It was the famous plane attack scene with Wagner playing in the background. But this wasn't a bad thing, oddly, for him, as it could be seen metaphorically I suppose for the impending doom of metaphysics or something. All in all, he felt, like my friend Clark Goble (http://www.libertypages.com/clark/10111.html) that Nietzsche's dead God was the Christian one, not the Mormon one who is all hip and existential.

[_LifeOnaPlate]

I'd wait for 3 days and see what happens then. Meanwhile, I might go afishing.

[_Bond...James Bond]

Here was the list of emotions (off the top of my head) there were probably more:

-grieving
-fear (of unknown)
-anxiety (that people will go crazy without order provided by God)
-confusion (of unknown)
-anger/deluded/betrayed
-empowered
-contentment (at the knowledge that there was a God)-this one particularly puzzled me...but I think that the knowledge that God existed may serve at some level as acknowledgement that God was.

Alot more other things were listed, but they were usually degrees of the above.

[_cksalmon]

Hi Bond--

I realize you stated that we were to suspend our versions of reality for a bit and avoid cop-out answers.

BUT.

This is a rhetorical trope, not a statement of fact, so I'm really not sure how to answer the question.

(And I'm not suggesting that Nietzsche was a closet theist.)

Most, but not all, of my exposure to Nietzschean thought comes via its a/theological application in Mark Taylor's work. Nietzsche was an incredibly insightful commentator on Christendom and his thought still resonates, for me at least, today.

But, Nietzsche is not, I don't think, saying the same thing here as Altizer's 'death of God' theology, for example (in which, at some points, he apparently wants us to take him quite literally).

I think the question may conflate what is true (per Nietzsche's critique) with what is real.

I guess I'm saying that I don't read Nietzsche's comment as a metaphysical pronouncement.

CKS

[_Zoidberg]

I read the whole Thus Spoke Zarathustra when I was 13 (probably couldn't handle it now; too boring), and it was... well... interesting. Especially the part where he says "Don't forget the whip if you are going to a woman".

I think Nietzsche's prognosis about God was a bit too optimistic. Religious dogmatism is alive and well, we have all the necessary answers, and if it be God's will, all will become known in the end. We're aren't about to become overmen, either. In fact, most people are in the beast of burden stage right now, IMHO. God is certainly not dead yet, even though his health might be in a poor state. And even if we cease to believe in God, there still will be plenty of moral absolutists to whip us into obedience.

So I would say "Yeah, right".