Who Killed God?

A popular religious/philosophic thought in the early and mid 20th century was–God is dead. Can anyone remember what killed God? Some say he died in sorrow over the sins of Man.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_God_theology

I think some of the gods died from old age, while others died from wars.

William Blake was a Christian who denied God but respected Jesus. Blake called God the old nobodaddy (nobody’s daddy).
I suppose Blake could be called a deist except for the fact that he found Urizen (your reason) a negative force.
Did disbelief in God as a moral father eventually kill him? I personally believe the erstwhile hoopla over the death of God was about anthropomorphic descriptions rather than spiritual awareness.

Which do you suppose came first, the idea that a god was immortal or the idea that gods die? Did people once suppose that gods ordinarily die followed by the idea that gods live an extraordinarily long lives compared to humans and then the thought that a god might never die?

The idea that a god might live an extraordinarily long period of time might follow from the observation that people were worshiping a god when one was born and continued through one’s lifetime so that there was a sense of such god’s longevity. If the collective memory of one society did not contain the memory of time when such God was unknown it might go unnoticed when the god’s longevity past into immortality.

Or was immortality the primordial characteristic of being a god of which all deaths were a kind of aberration? And if so was there kind of a shock to it? Were the followers of Dionysus surprised and shocked at his death?

In either case the monotheistic development of God from gods and then of God into a triune God passes from the possibility of a dying god to the impossibility of a dying God to the possibility of the death an incarnate hypostasis of God.

Nevertheless the idea of the death of God that emerged in the 19th century was a shock to Friedrich Nietzsche with which he shocked the educated world. It is measure of the power of the symbol that so many thinkers have used it with so many disparate and widely divergent meanings. A measure of the extent that the phenomenon of the Nietzschen “death of God” has permeated the modern secular world is the degree to which the expression is no longer shocking to people.

the idea of god, is a metaphysical one… it has no existence in
the physical world… god is spirit… one is often told that…

“I hold god in my heart” that is not a physical god one holds in their
heart, but a spiritual god… a metaphysical god…
metaphysical: beyond the physical…

so god doesn’t physically exists in the world… so how does one kill
a metaphysical idea? a metaphysical spirit?

let us reflect about the prior gods… the Egyptian gods or the Norse
gods or the Roman gods… do they live? I would say given the idea
that gods do not have a physical presence, that they have a spiritual
aspect, that the Egyptian gods, the Norse gods, the Roman gods are
dead as well… but what killed them?

if god are spiritual entities, then the loss of belief in the gods killed them…
god can only exist if there are people left to believe in them…
once no one believes in a god, that is death of a god…
to write a play like Miller, “Death of a god” would mean
to write a play about the loss of belief in god or gods…
we aren’t writing the actual death of god, we are writing
about the loss of faith in that god…and that is the death of a god…
for god is an emotional, spiritual idea, not a physical idea, hence
we can only reference the death of god in terms of belief or
the loss of belief…

for Nietzsche wrote, “god is dead and we have killed him” that isn’t
a physical expression of us putting a knife into god, but simply that
we know longer hold belief in that concept…

we may be the first generation of human beings that has actively walked
away from a belief in god without replacing it with some other belief…
like the way that the Catholic church replaced the old gods with the new
belief in one god, the son and holy ghost…

but in a very real sense, we cannot just hold that Christianity was able to
remove one set of beliefs and replace it with another set of beliefs without
understanding that the old set of beliefs were no longer viable in the Ancient world…
for them, the old gods of Ra, or Odin or Zeus or Jupiter… were no longer living
in their hearts spiritually…and an empty heart cannot stand empty for very long…
we human beings must find something to believe in even if it isn’t healthy or wise
for us… see Trumpism for an excellent example of a replacement belief that
can only lead to disaster…

god is dead and we have killed him

he is no longer living in our hearts and we have killed him by
removing that belief from our hearts…

we killed god spiritually by our loss of faith in him…

will we replace the faith in god with another faith or shall
we be strong enough to finally stand without any sort of
belief, religious or otherwise to help us face the world?

I wonder…

Kropotkin

The idea that god is dead derives from Nietzsche proclaiming it in Also Spake Zarathustra.

It all reflects the fact that the christian god is not really a god (like Dionysos is) but just an aggregate of values reflecting a sickness-unto-death.

Using Kierkegaards phrase here, because he can be seen as the inside of the world that Nietzsche diagnosed from the outside.

Blake says that Jahweh is he who dwells in eternal fire, not that he doesn’t exist; he also sees Jesus as having become Jahweh. His theology is intense and bizarre and very exciting. He does not believe in christian virtues, he says things like ‘the tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction’; as far as forgiveness, he says ‘the cut worm forgives the plow’ suggesting that general christian virtues are for worms.

What if we reserved our worship to physical things?
And let go of the spirit-gods.

K: that is the entire essence of modern capitalism… worship of physical
things like cars, houses, large screen TV sets, money… that is, in part,
why our modern world has failed… we worship and pray to the god “Mammon” far
more the any spiritual god… Oh, lord, let me win the 200 million dollar lottery…
is heard far more then a prayer to bring about peace in our time…
the time to pray to divine “spiritual” being is over as it is the time to
pray for our economic well being… let us find something new to pray to…
or even to forsake the need for prayer…why pray for peace when peace
can be found once man/human beings understand that we are not two different
beings but two sides of the same coin…and two sides of the same coin can always
become one thing… good vs evil… becomes two sides of the same coin,
and then good/evil become one… there is no good or evil, just our
interpretations of good and evil…depending on where you sit, one action may
be good or the exact same action can be considered evil… the Holocaust
depending upon where one sits, can be considered to be good or can be considered
to be evil…how can you say so Kropotkin? many, many Germans benefited from
the disposal of the Jews… they got better jobs, better housing, more money…
better cars with the Jews gone… of course, we know where the Jews stand on this…
did your life improve with the Jews gone? if yes, the the Holocaust was a benefit
and a dam good thing… a Jew, not so much…and where do I stand? the Holocaust
was a terrible thing and could have been stopped but for the money involved…
people made money off of the Holocaust… and in our modern capitalistic
world, making money is all that matter… who dies is irrelevant or who is
dehumanized is unimportant… it is the money made that counts…
not the lives lost…so says capitalism…where is good and evil when one
is counting their money?

Kropotkin

Regardless of who killed him, Dostoyevski was the first to say it happened. Well, one of his characters. Personally, I think he (the character) meant that he just died. Worse, that he is simply dead. The idea of someone killing God is ridiculous.

God the metaphoric 'spirit will never die until the superman can look into the mirror like narcissus, and see that what he sees is only an image of the real with nothing, nobody behind it.

The early seeing is believing god is dying because, no one really thinks niwedays that the superman, once he has attained the whole warth and everything in it, has been redempted from that awesome temptation by faith in the above.

Private property doesn’t directly equate to greed.
Crapitalism is unfair often, but life is rarely equal or fare anyway.

Commies are cruel as hell.
Crapitalism isn’t perfect but it is all that can be used right now.

God as a meme that lives past individual lives may account for belief in God’s longevity.
Both Blake and Nietzsche attack Jehovah. The 21st century has seen a reprisal of this attack in works of Dawkins, Hitchens, etc. If God is dead as Jehovah, why attack him?
The God meme dies hard because there seems to be nothing that can replace it. To the 21st century God-killers I would only say, “Me thinks thou dost protest too much.”

PK,
Not all that is ascribed to the physical amounts to mammon. Pantheism and panentheism are examples of the natural physical universe as God or God’s creation. Mammon probably meant following the ways of the world with its politics and religions.

Thanks.
My favorite Blake poems and writings are “The Tyger”, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” and “The Book of Thel.” I enjoyed a course in Blake in grad school.
Alfred Kazin"s introduction to “The Portable Blake” (1946—the Viking Press) is a worthy piece of good scholarship,

Perhap’s you are right in a sense; but the lack of belief results in a “killing”.

“in his novels, Dostoevsky brings out the truth that those who ‘kill’ God also kill man and that man without God cannot remain free.” --RALPH MCINERNY.

While combing through the internet, I ran across some interesting ideas on the topic “does God need us?”
If some meteorite struck the Earth killing all life forms, would God be killed?
Does God’s love of us suggest a need for us?

That is not necessarily a bad thing, Ierrellus.

Paul Tillich said: The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.
The God which is “killed off” is the immature, irrational belief of the God which we grew up with which paves the way for the more mature, intelligent, evolving God which Tillich spoke of and which is more deeply rooted and grounded in "reality.

Fall into barbarism is what kills God, as in the architect of the universe immanent in man.

The relentless unfolding of the Hebrew architect however is too fierce to be overcome by indolence; loss of logos is not an option for the logos itself.

Man is both the sexual organs of the machine, and of the Logos.