Q: How would Nietzsche describe the “death” of God and the rise of new religions?

“Where has God gone? I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are all his murderers... God is dead.”

To answer this question, I will explain how I disagree with his theory. Of course I don’t think Nietzsche meant that God was alive and we killed him in the physical sense. But perhaps because we have changed, people as a whole, then what we need God to be has changed.

I don’t entirely agree with Nietzsche’s view (as explained in class). He claims that as humans get more sophisticated, our old religions die, and that is how the old God dies. Then, as we gain more maturity and more knowledge, new religions are created and a new God is born. I disagree on a number of levels.

First, old religions do not necessarily have to die before new ones are born. Just look at the past two hundred years; many new religions have formed and have been successful in recruiting large numbers of followers. A new religion and an old religion can exist simultaneously and that is why there are so many different “Gods”.

Second, many old religions have not died yet and we are much more sophisticated in our knowledge now than we ever have been. We are smarter than ever, and we have more religions that ever. Nietzsche correlates higher intelligence with the extinctions of religion, but that is not what we have seen. The smarter we get, the more religions are born.

Thirdly, Nietzsche says that if there wasn’t a god that humans would invent one. This may be true of humans some thousands of years ago. But if we are getting smarter, then why would we need to create a god? I don’t think we would, we’ve already got hundreds to choose from. All we would need to do is pick the god that best conforms to our knowledge, spruce up the doctrine with bits and pieces from other religions that “make sense” and presto-chango a new religion is formed. But the older religions that were borrowed from did not die.

Nietzsche thought new religions were results of new gods. I think the god is old, the way to follow god is new. I don’t think we killed god at all. We maybe changed his house, his habits, and his laws, but that the God of those things was once the God of previous similar, simpler, such things.