Dog is Dead button

God is dead" (German: "Gott ist tot"; also known as the death of God) is a widely-quoted and sometimes misconstrued statement by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It is found in Nietzsche's classic work Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra), which is most responsible for popularizing the phrase. "God is dead" is not meant literally, as in "God is now physically dead"; rather, it is Nietzsche's way of saying that the idea of God is no longer capable of acting as a source of any moral code or teleology. Nietzsche recognizes the crisis which the death of God represents for existing moral considerations, because "When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident.... By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands." This is why in "The Madman", the madman addresses the atheists primarily — the problem is to retain any system of values in the absence of a divine order. (He also goes to the churches to point out the death of God is an oft-forgotten part of the Christian creed, that Holy Saturday comes between the cross and Easter, that the experience of God's absence is essential to Christian life.)