Can Killing God Help You Live A Better Life?
…okay, so maybe flying up into the sky and killing God with your own two hands isn’t gonna get that girl to text you back or whatever. I’m not asking you to try this specific strategy.
But there has been a change in how we view our own lives. Thanks to all the extra time alone we’ve had recently, most of us have found ourselves lying in bed at night, pondering our purpose until the wee hours of the morning.
Do any of my goals matter when they’re all going to fade in a million years anyways? Am I really gonna get to heaven if I keep trying to be a good person? Does my life actually matter?
If you don’t have the answers to those kinds of questions, I know one person that might just help you find them: Friedrich Nietzsche, the O.G. God-killer.
Who was Friedrich Nietzsche?
Nietzsche was, and still is, one of the most famous and simultaneously misunderstood philosophers in the Western canon. He lived a miserable life which was cut tragically short after a psychotic breakdown at forty four, rendering him unproductive until his death eleven years later.
But during his prime? He was unstoppable. He studied in university as a teenager and was awarded a tenured professorship when he was twenty-four years old. The prodigy quickly became one of the major players in European philosophy while he was alive. Even after his death, his legacy has only become stronger.
One of the most popular products of this legacy was his deceptively simple proclamation that God is dead.
It’s been interpreted a thousand ways, and most of them aren’t even close to what Nietzsche was trying to say. From those edgy freshman dudes in that one Intro to Philosophy class you took in college, to videos in that weird corner of YouTube you were in during a rabbit hole, and even in a major-budget movie you definitely didn’t watch.
So, what did he actually mean to say?
God is dead, and here’s why
When Nietzsche said that God is dead, he didn’t mean it in the literal sense. He didn’t even mean that God is dead because Christianity was on a decline in Europe at the time.
Rather, he penned his famous phrase because he believed that true world beliefs as a whole, beliefs in something higher and mightier than the world we’re all living in right now, had lost their usefulness and were thus fading from popular consciousness. For most, God represented this true world.
He maps out the death of true world theories in his book, Twilight of Idols. The true world began as an unattainable place for all but the virtuous man, who already lived and embodied this higher plane of existence. Eventually, this true world was admitted to be unattainable for now, but was promised to a virtuous few during the afterlife. Here, Heaven comes to mind.
As time passed, another concession was made: the true world was “unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable,” but the pursuit of it was worthy on its own merit. However, after enough time passed, even this pursuit lost its value for most.
Thus, the true world is proven useless, and Nietzsche calls for its abolition.
During the most primordial phases of this idea, the virtuous few were held to a set of well-meaning, but arbitrary, standards about how to be virtuous. As the true world was questioned, so were the virtues that came with it. This continued until these supposedly one-size-fits-all standards were proven equally useless.
This explains why Nietzsche described a world after the death of God as “not at all sad and dark, but rather like a new, scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn? Indeed, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel as if a new dawn were shining on us when we receive the tidings that ‘the old god is dead’; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, anticipation, expectation.”
Here’s how God died, according to Nietzsche.
It’s tempting to think that these ideas decayed as science progressed. To think that, as humans learned more truths about the world around us, we rational beings would be able to cast aside supposedly useless concepts like religion.
However, Nietzsche knew that a believer could always come up with a counter to any argument that a scientist put forth. He didn’t think that science killed the true world. (In fact, he even admitted that he couldn’t confirm or deny the existence of a metaphysical world beyond ours).
Instead, he saw that believers clung so deeply to their true world ideologies because these met a need in them that wasn’t being fulfilled. These needs were mostly psychological, including ones like the need to feel important or the need for a meaningful life. And oftentimes, these beliefs prevent them from making the most of the world that they inevitably live in every single day. A path like this would only lead to an unfulfilling life, which is all we can prove that we have.
How you can find meaning using these ideas.
Whether we realize it or not, most of us are fettered by ideological chains which we inherited from a pre-death-of-God society. Those kinds of mindsets, ideas, and beliefs are probably holding us back in ways we can’t recognize.
Does this mean that you have to denounce organized religion and become a nihilist to solve all your problems? No!
Nietzsche’s philosophy doesn’t demand you to believe everything that he did. Instead, it asks us to examine the sources from which we find meaning today. Are they really helping us enjoy the lives we live? Or are they letting us escape the only world we’ll ever know?
It’s worth taking some time in solitude to reflect on these kinds of ideas. Best case scenario, you discover a belief that isn’t serving you well and can replace it with something to make the world you live in right now that much better. And even if you don’t, you’ll be that much more confident in the beliefs you already have.
Try killing your Gods, in whichever form they take. It might just make your own little pocket of the universe that much more wonderful.
Hi! I’m Nina Maria, and I like to write about tech, philosophy, and climate change. If any of those things interest you, subscribe to my newsletter or check out my website to keep in touch.
