All right-thinking people have long known that there is no God;
belief in His existence was a childish superstition, a cognitive error overcome by advances in our understanding of the world, and human maturity requires that we learn to live in the clear, invigorating light of that knowledge.
But are we unbelievers, atheists, agnostics, guilty of unchaining the earth from its sun, For the believer even those who can no longer see the sun 'knows' it is still shining its light and will do so for eternity.
Nietzsche’s most famous proclamation of the death of God is voiced by a madman, and directed not at believers but at unbelievers, who mock the madman’s claim to be seeking God by the light of his lantern in the sunny marketplace; how can anyone still think that God might be found in our daylight world?
But the madman finds this marketplace atheism to be more childish than the theistic belief it claims to have outgrown. His perception is that God is dead, not non-existent; God’s absence is not a discovery but the result of a deed, and a terrifying one. We are God’s murderers.
We do not escape theistic underpinnings that easily.
belief in His existence was a childish superstition, a cognitive error overcome by advances in our understanding of the world, and human maturity requires that we learn to live in the clear, invigorating light of that knowledge.
But are we unbelievers, atheists, agnostics, guilty of unchaining the earth from its sun, For the believer even those who can no longer see the sun 'knows' it is still shining its light and will do so for eternity.
Nietzsche’s most famous proclamation of the death of God is voiced by a madman, and directed not at believers but at unbelievers, who mock the madman’s claim to be seeking God by the light of his lantern in the sunny marketplace; how can anyone still think that God might be found in our daylight world?
But the madman finds this marketplace atheism to be more childish than the theistic belief it claims to have outgrown. His perception is that God is dead, not non-existent; God’s absence is not a discovery but the result of a deed, and a terrifying one. We are God’s murderers.
We do not escape theistic underpinnings that easily.
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