I think I know why God is dead...

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**WARNING: the following text is written purely for the sole purpse to expess the opinions and views of the author. If you are easily offended by any sort of cristicism towards your religious beliefs please turn away now! You are NOT the target audiece for this thread. You have been warned.**

Have you ever wondered why some people say that "God is dead"? (apart from being ispried by the well-known German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche?)

Well allow me enlighten you.

Let's start with a more recent event; the attack on gay night club in Orlando.

Where was this "kind and loving" God when that religiously insane madman came and shot at everyone at that club? If God truly existed then why couldn't he have conviced the shooter to be racional? Even if he was under a different religion, why couldn't he just warn the victims before it was too late?

I mean, sure, you could say that he "saved" the other half that survived, but why was he so picky? If he was "all powerful" like some Christians say his is the why could't he just save them all?

The answer: He doesn't exist. He is nothing more than a human construct built with the sole purpose of mind control and manipulation of the masses.

Here are some quotes to help elaborate my point.

What the first few quotes mean (the ones from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) is that being part of a religious group means that you are willing to sacrifice your sense of individuality (your soul) in exchage for the service of said religious group. The other half (The one from Demons's Souls) tells you that, when you lose your sense of individuality, you are prone to making insane and irrational descisions. Why make your own choices when it has already been chosen by the religion and deity you serve? You have no morals of your own, you have no life of your own, because it now belongs to whatever religious group you belong to.

When these quotes are put together, they give a mortal blow to what is ultimately one of humanity's worst invention: religion

To put it bluntly (and in a Christian fashion) serving this fictional God is no different than making a deal with its fictional rival, the Devil; for serving God also requires you to pay a price: your very own soul.

Why waste your own unique soul by selling it to a fictional enitity that, in the long run, might make you an insane and unstable minion?

"Manipulation for the good of humanity" I hear you say? Well, then tell me why I am afraid of going to U.S.A., worried that some insane religious bigot might shoot me in the back just because some derilict and ancient book said I was inhuman?

Why, if I ever walk into U.S. soil, does my life have to be at the mercy of some criptic yet popular book, full of mysteries, alterations, traditions that are a byproduct of ancient times, and passages that dictate the very reputations of other groups and minorities?

And what have we, the LGBT community, have done to disserve all of this meaningless torture from these pathetic Christians?

I thnk this video has the answer to that:



I'll close this with a brief explanation of Nietzsche's famous quote:



Notice how I bolded "we". Isn't it strange that Nietszche explicitly refer to God's killer with a "we" instead of an "I"? Why is that? If anything he should be the one that killed God with his ideals, not a group of people. Was he reffering to the Ubermench (Supermen) in which he hoped to create with his works? Perhaps, but I think it has a much deeper than you might think.

In my interpretation, I think Nietzsche is using the term "we" as a means to refer to humanity as a whole, and its digusting and dispicable actions inspried by religion (God) and the countless times it has exploited religon in the name of its own selfishness and control. The attacks on Orlando could easily count as one such dispicable act inpired by the bane of modern human society as a whole: religion

the invalidation of this type argument is using the "Loving GOD Would NEVER Do...."

Loving parent would NEVER "let" their child marry the wrong, dangerous person

Loving Parent will NEVER tell their kid 'no'

Loving Parent will NEVER let their criminal child see prison time or report them for killing their spouse or boss.

This all come down to Free Will.


If Judeo-Christian God , the devil is given dominion over those that stray. Which means that technically in that (mine as a Catholic)belief, if bad things happen that isn't a thunderous voice from a cloud raining down destruction directly on the ones causing displeasure.... It isn't God that is author of the misery.

The more steeped in sin, the more power you have given by permission to be under the hand of Satan. And he is not really the humane philanthropist. Every perk has strings. Every action is engineered to maqke a human denounce the Spirit and be his eternally.

If Christian and in the New Covenant, already it is promised that there will be no more direct punishments and there will be forgiveness, when asked (not automatic). The only permanently unforgivable sin is to reject that which is the voice of God (Holy Spirit).
"Sacrifice" for "a group" is not what is called upon in scripture unless you count martyrdom that stems from refusal to denounce. The homogenization would only be proper if its basis is fellowship of the obedient. The various christian churches have been the tools of politics, but were not created to be tools to control but the "safe space" to worship.
This is true of most world Religions and methodologies with exception of tongue and cheek tax shelters like Scientology and Pastafarian. Monsters that hide behind religion would be monsters without that religion. Religions regardless if a construct of humanity or the guidance of higher sources; in general have brought far more to civilization than any faults that can be showcased for drops of time in their full buckets.


As for Religious or Racial bigots of the US. Not likely will you be shot in the back or shot at all. 0_0 Not anymore than in Paris, or Brussels, Or Bangledesh. The chance is lower that it will be an average multi generational citizen.
If you are shot in US, you are likely near an urban center. Shot by someone not fighting with you drunk , a cop you improperly surrender to or a thug robbing you... you are more likely to be victim of a car accident before you even hit that bingo number.
So if you are ANY Race, even of African descent, you are more likely to be shot in LA or Chicago than maybe here in backwater podunk North Carolina (most murders in 30 mile radius are drugs or DV). Now being bullied? 50/50.
Being shot on accident by drunk redneck improperly discharging a firearm... okay about the same as chance of a dogbite in lifetime.

This all the way! ^^^^

And if you are too much of a coward to watch that then let me explain myself...

1. What's up with your grammar? - How the heck am I supposed to take you and your Christian nonsense seriously if you can't even do grammar right!? And that's saying a lot since you are a 50 year old person from the U.S.A!! ! I am only 20 years old and I already check my grammar with care! How pathetic!! !

2. Did you even read what I just wrote? - All of that Christian nonsense you put there doesn't seem to be a direct response to what I just wrote. (Not to mention it all sounds like your mind is very far away. When was the last time you were at an asylum?) Take note that I already put a warning telling you that this isn't meant for those who are devout Christians (or devout of any religion). If your Christian beliefs don't allow you to understand what I just wrote here I think it proves that you didn't read any of what I just wrote; evidence that you are another ignorant Christian bigot that doesn't have anything better to do in his/her life.

All that said, I hope I made it perfectly clear that this thread is meant for athiests/agnostics.

Dostoyevsky writes that, "if there is no god, everything is permitted".
The opposite is true.
You need a god, a higher entity, to allow you to do horrible things to other people and still think you're doing the right thing.
You need a deep seated belief to be able to slaughter the innocent.
No one can do that, knowing what he's doing.
The victims must always be in some way demonic, inferior.


So, I'm there with you OP.
Relax.
Look up at the blue sky, and realize that only about 12 miles up, the for all our purposes infinite void of space begins, and we don't understand why we're not flying off.

And yes, the findamentalist christians the republican party made a deal with the devil with are possibly the most dangerous, because most powerful, group of people in the world right now.
What if Iran should develop a nuclear bomb? Well, *they* already have thousands.

Was God ever alive????

I think gingerpickles gave a decent response, though you rejected it out of hand. To see love as encompassing the desire to extend someone's life as long as possible is a very limited atheist point of view, because as an atheist, you think this life, preferably one with little suffering, is all you have. There is a progression in the Bible from old school badass genocidal old testament God to a non-interventionist hands-off watcher and judge God who cares more about what is in a person's heart than their external circumstances and the silly tribal wars we engage in.



He is quite correct, if there is no God, there is no afterlife or personal consequences for your actions, the "good" atheist is going to exactly the same place as Stalin when they die. Everything is permitted because it doesn't matter in the long run, the end result is the same.



No we don't, this is an atheist falsehood, humans are perfectly capable of dehumanising people and engaging in mass indiscriminate killing with or without God. It is a feature of a tribal species, not a bug. Religion as we know it was an evolutionary step forward into bigger tribes and bigger cooperations. Banishing our extant religions will be a step backwards on that path, not forwards.

for this view to make sense, you need to see it with the idea of an afterlife in mind. The view that, if there is none, the outcome is the same.
However, from the atheist perstpective, there will be no adding up of sins against virtues.
You'll die, having lived as a decent human being, or you will die having lived as a genocidal monster.
the question that the atheist is confronted with is: how do I live? The outcome doesn't matter.
There will be no I to experience that.

Stalin had his religion, communism, or rahter, stalinism. From his point of view, his actions served a higher purpose.
He lived for his God and did everything right.
It is for the non-believer in Stalinism, that he was a monster.

You see, for the atheist, there won't be resurrection, no 72 virgins, no nirwana.
So, everything the atheist is willing to fight for has to come from within himself. It has to withstand his own doubts, and he has to live with what he does. It is the atheist and the atheist alone who is responsible.

Imagine Abraham as an atheist, being told to kill his son.
He'll refuse.
Imagine Abraham the godfearing. He'll do what he thinks he must do. He gives up responsibility.
"ah, I liked my kid, but what can you do?", Abraham shrugs.

A good man will do good things, a bad man will do bad things. It needs something like religion to make a good man believe he's doing good things, while he's really doing bad things.

Göring told his SS-Officers that, to run a concentration camp takes true heroism- the heroism to give up oneself for the good of the Nazi-German-people, to be able to kill the innocent and the children. The heroism is in the self-sacrifice, in the giving up ones self to be able to do what "has to be done".

for an atheist, nothing ever HAS to be done.
And you can make up a god/religion for everything. If you want to kill Jews, you can make up Nazi-fascism.
If you want to cut off heads, you can make up Wahabism.
If you feel more moderate and just want to deny some people their freedom, you can make up a religion that demonizes gay people and vote against their right to marry.

Only as a true atheist, in the Nietzschean sense, you can not shift the responsibility to some higher purpose.



God, in the Nietzschean sense, is here any form of higher good.
and there has never been a tribe without a creation myth, that poses them to be the chosen people, the ones who the gods want to prevail. Our Religions as we have them now are random and they serve to expand our tribes, to give us all one big story, a Grand Narrative as Francois Lyotard calls it.
Postmodernism, which is based in Nietzscheanism, is therefore sceptical of Grand Narratives, that unite us in purpose.
Because they exclude all other purposes.

Don't worry, Nietzscheanism is hard. Having no God is painful.
I wish I could get an iPhone and think: oooh, this is great. But I just know it has been made by slaves.
All I can do is tell myself I need it for work, to function in my capitalist society. In other words, I use capitalism as a god and excuse to shift my responsibility away from myself.

OP, just out of curiosity, what are your opinions on the Eastern religions?

(Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.)

shlaifu I found your post difficult to follow but I will try to respond.

I think you are agreeing with me here, although you may not see it. "How do I live?" you ask if the outcome does not matter, the answer will always logically be "to seek as much pleasure as my fellow travellers will allow me to". To go any further than that you need some sort of abstract construction, that when analysed will sound suspiciously religious. This new "God" of the higher good will of course suit you and your lifestyle, unlike those tried and tested religions that require quite a bit of self sacrifice and restraint.



It's best not forgotten how anti-Christian the communists were, Christianity very much stood in the way of what they wanted to achieve. While I understand the religion analogy with Stalin I dislike it when people use it as a cheap shot against Christianity and religion in general. Stalin may have believed in that abstract higher purpose, but he and the rest of that regime were not believers in the afterlife, God or any form of post-death consequences which _may_ have tempered their actions.



Here you are meandering again, he doesn't have to live with what he does for very long does he? Because when he is dead he is dead, no eternal consequences for his actions. Any guilt can easily be assuaged with a quick and easy suicide.



So an atheist when an unimaginably powerful force tells him to kill his son (or else) will resist that order because he's so moral and atheist... I don't buy it. When the soviets waged their propaganda war against God, the country became very anti-God very quickly, did these moral atheist saviours resist the Soviet regime? No.

Christopher Hitchens often posed a (flawed) challenge to his opponents, he answered it in his own words (recorded by his brother):

What struck me most forcefully about the occasion were some words my brother said. Those of you who have followed the great religion debate will know that he has many times issued a challenge. ‘Can you name any moral action or ethical statement that could be made or performed by a believer but could not be made or performed by an unbeliever?’

He has maintained that it could not be answered.

During this Washington conversation, he answered it. And all those distinguished scribblers and broadcasters, in their accounts of the event, completely missed it.

So (and some of you will remember some fascinating earlier remarks by my brother about Isfahan that I publicised here, which had unaccountably not been noticed by anyone else, perhaps because his admirers would rather that he was as inflexibly dogmatic as they are. a common failing of admirers and disciples), I take this opportunity of recording what he said on that day in Washington, in the hope that those who are interested will notice at least that it took place.

‘Here is my attempt to win my own prize. When Lech Walesa was starting his work in the Polish shipyards and the Polish Militia and the outer ring of the Polish Army were closing in on Gdansk, he was interviewed with his then fairly small group, and he was asked: “Aren't you frightened, aren't you afraid? You've taken on a whole powerful state and army - aren't you scared?” And he said: “I'm not frightened of anything but God or anyone but God.”
‘This came back to me, I thought, well, this meets my two criteria. It's certainly a noble thing to have said, a distinguished thing to have said, and I certainly couldn't have said it. So it does meet both my criteria.’

It took a believer to stand up, almost alone, against the might of the Soviet regime. The challenge as I said is flawed, to make any real sense of it you need a well defined morality, which atheists do not have. What the western atheists have as a moral system is mostly borrowed from our Christian inheritance, mixed in with a bit of modern SJW nonsense about equality and a healthy dose of pure self-interest thrown in the mix, more fashion than anything else.

The rest of your post, I'm afraid is a bit harder to understand and follow, you reiterate that humans engage in religious thinking when it suits them, when there is an opening not filled by a workable tested religion. Then you tell us about the Nietzschean No True Atheist cult because this time it's got the answers... just follow me...



Ah shite, here we go again...

I've yet to have have an opinion about them. But my First impression as of yet is that they are much more complex and prestigious than Christianity could ever hope to be.

To be honest, for every "good" thing I find within Christianity, there's always 1000 more things I find wrong with said religion.

"Prestigious"?

English is your second language, and thats probably not the exact word you're looking for.

Being knighted by the Queen of England is a "prestigious" honor.

Maybe you meant "complex and sophisticated"? Or "complex and subtle'?

No I think that's what she meant, as in inspiring admiration. Looks like we're dealing with someone who has fallen for the myth of the "noble savage". The myth that humans were wonderful and lived in harmony with nature and love with one another until shock! horror! monotheism appears on the scene and wrecks everything.

well... I see a lot of people around me who consider it the greatest pleasure to work, have a family and a house, and they prefer that over, say, heroin and hookers.
so, maximum enjoyment doesn't mean cheap thrills. that's up to each individual.



"God is dead" is not found in "The Antichrist", but in "thus spake zarathustra".
sure Nietzsche picks apart Christianity, but this particular line points at something else. It is not a statement of anti-christianity, but about the end of belief in something holy. anything.
so, yes, stalinism communism and all had no god, and were atheistic in that sense, but Nietzsche speaks about any holiness, any higher purpose, anything that grounds man in history, any story of where we came from and where we are going in any other sense than the purely biological, reproduction with variation.



yes. [sarcasm] however, most people don't appreciate the idea of killing themselves. [/sarcasm]

[/quote]

sorry, my mistake. I meant the Nietzschean atheist here, not the atheist who still believes in a larger, external purpose, like communism. And the N-Atheist will not resist out of morality, but out of doubt in his own senses.
If he started hearing voices, he'd go see a psychiatrist, and tell him he hears a voice and experience the urge to kill his son.
You can imagine how that will end.
But tte question is, why would he do that? Because if there was a god, who spoke to him, he'd not recognize god's voice, but would have to consider it a hallucination- and himself crazy.

I didn't fully understand the Christpher Hitchen's quote. Sorry
But I'm not saying that a religious person is by definition unable to behave ethically, and I'll definitely admit that I'd imagine life to be easier if there was a story that would give it meaning and would give my existence any purpose.
However, I'm afraid that I can't ignore the fact that, whatever that story is, it's made up by someone at some point to fit his or her purpose. And millenia later, it likely serves more itself than anything else.

@ OP: don't be so harsh on Christianity. Among the world religions, it's one of the more advanced ones. From my understanding- and I have read only some and lack deeper understaning- Hinduism is a mess.
Buddhism is interesting. The japanese Zen Buddhism served well to support the Japanese-Chinese war that then became part of WW2. It's funny, in Zen, one can reach enlightenment and there's absolutely no reason not to be a genocidal monster at the same time.

Some pre-monotheism cultures did live more in harmony with nature, of course didn't mean the people in said cultures were all wonderful and lived in harmony with one another. For instance the the polytheistic viking culture seems like it was quite in tune with nature with all their gods being tied to nature and natural occurrences ,however they certainly weren't a peaceful culture who lived in harmony with everyone.

Hehe yes, my nature quip was more mocking than anything else. The other aspects of society are of course more important: order and stability, lack of intratribal violence, liberty of thought and speech, attempts to find some earthly justice through fair systems of government and law. Such things are very very rare in human history and what is left of it today all came from a very fragile truce between reason and Christian morality. A truce that, starting about 50 years ago, has been pissed on by petulant spoiled children who liked the benefits but didn't like the rules and didn't want to pay the price our form of civilisation demanded. What my opponents refuse to even consider is that post-Christian society may well look very similar to pre-Christian society, in many ways it already does. Not a pleasant prospect, unless you have been goaded into the "noble savage" myth.