write a short note on Shadow of God?
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God is dead" - between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries this message made its way across Europe. It is a sentence that can have many different meanings.
Nietzsche, with whom this statement is usually connected, first puts it in the mouth of a madman, who, one day with a lantern at a marketplace, is asking for God. He meets with mockery: the people in the marketplace are no longer interested in God. The society in which Nietzsche lived consisted mostly of people who were not asking the question about God - they were comfortable dwelling in the securities of their conventional religion or an equally conventional atheism. Through the mouth of the Madman in Happy Science, Nietzsche not only formulates the question, but also announces the answer: God is dead! We killed him! But shortly thereafter Nietzsche, through the very same character, pronounces that people are as yet unable to understand the consequences of their deed, accept responsibility for it and transform the death of God into an opportunity to attain a higher type of humanity, the superhuman.
Nietzsche knew, however, that the death of God is not a matter of moment. He mentions a legend: Buddha used to meditate in a cave and his shadow stayed on the wall even long after his death. Nietzsche adds that the shadow of the murdered God also remains among us and that we will have to deal with it.
It is not easy to understand what exactly Nietzsche meant by God, the death of God and the shadow of God. If God for Nietzsche means a symbol for the metaphysical basis of Western culture and at the same time for the Christian "board of values", then we can understand that the shadow of God for Nietzsche also means modern science, modern political ideals that include socialism and democracy and in the end even the grammar of speech itself. Nietzsche prophesizes a time in which all values will be reevaluated and in which nihilism, "the most unpleasant of guests", will enter through our doors. And this nihilism, just like the death of God, is ambivalent for Nietzsche - it is both a threat and a chance.
Nietzsche's sentence "God is dead" is one of the possible answers to the question of where God is today - it is one of the possible interpretations of God's silence. Nietzsche died at the turn of the 19th century -- a century in which many were shaken in the securities of their religion and their atheism. Many people went through the experience of God's silence. However, they understood this painful experience in different ways and found different answers to it.
Some thought that God's voice perished in the noise of the grandiose building site of the city of man. Those who perceived God as a competitor and an enemy to people's freedom understood the development of human power as a victory over God. God Himself appeared to thinkers as Feuerbach, Freud and Marx as a mere shadow of man, a reflection of his wishes, anxieties or unjust social relations, a product of internal or external conflicts. These thinkers and their pupils promised that when man overcomes religious alienation and understands God as a human project, the voice of God inside him will silence forever. God should ask no more disturbing questions from Man's victorious reason.
But the 20th century brought yet another experience with God's silence. Many have waited in vain for God's answer, facing the suffering of millions in wars and concentration camps of the two most horrible regimes in human history, Nazism and communism. For some of them, the protest against the evil of the world grew into a revolt of the conscience against God - and this revolt was their last prayer. They refused to continue the dialogue with God, who either appeared weak or apathetic, cruel or non-existent. With Dmitri Karamazov, they "refused the ticket" into the world in which children have to suffer.
Many of those, who in this century of wars and dictatorships went through valleys of suffering and death, rejected God as a guarantor of the best of possible worlds and found no other religious answer to their protest and painful questions.
But the Bible knows protest and painful questioning as language, in which man can communicate with God. Jesus´ prayer struggle in the Getsemane garden and his painful question on the cross: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" was preceded by the struggles of Jacob, Job, Jeremiah and by the disputes of many patriarchs and prophets with God.
Hegel related the sentence "God is dead", the expression of the desolation of modern man, to the event of the cross, on which the one who was both Man and God died. For Hegel, the cross is not just an event of the remote past, but it is a part of the "history of Being." The "death of God" is an inner moment of "God´s biography", the roads of God through history. Modern atheism is participation at the "Good Friday of history", an important but not the last stage of the history of the spirit.
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Nietzsche, with whom this statement is usually connected, first puts it in the mouth of a madman, who, one day with a lantern at a marketplace, is asking for God. He meets with mockery: the people in the marketplace are no longer interested in God. The society in which Nietzsche lived consisted mostly of people who were not asking the question about God - they were comfortable dwelling in the securities of their conventional religion or an equally conventional atheism. Through the mouth of the Madman in Happy Science, Nietzsche not only formulates the question, but also announces the answer: God is dead! We killed him! But shortly thereafter Nietzsche, through the very same character, pronounces that people are as yet unable to understand the consequences of their deed, accept responsibility for it and transform the death of God into an opportunity to attain a higher type of humanity, the superhuman.
Nietzsche knew, however, that the death of God is not a matter of moment. He mentions a legend: Buddha used to meditate in a cave and his shadow stayed on the wall even long after his death. Nietzsche adds that the shadow of the murdered God also remains among us and that we will have to deal with it.
It is not easy to understand what exactly Nietzsche meant by God, the death of God and the shadow of God. If God for Nietzsche means a symbol for the metaphysical basis of Western culture and at the same time for the Christian "board of values", then we can understand that the shadow of God for Nietzsche also means modern science, modern political ideals that include socialism and democracy and in the end even the grammar of speech itself. Nietzsche prophesizes a time in which all values will be reevaluated and in which nihilism, "the most unpleasant of guests", will enter through our doors. And this nihilism, just like the death of God, is ambivalent for Nietzsche - it is both a threat and a chance.
Nietzsche's sentence "God is dead" is one of the possible answers to the question of where God is today - it is one of the possible interpretations of God's silence. Nietzsche died at the turn of the 19th century -- a century in which many were shaken in the securities of their religion and their atheism. Many people went through the experience of God's silence. However, they understood this painful experience in different ways and found different answers to it.
Some thought that God's voice perished in the noise of the grandiose building site of the city of man. Those who perceived God as a competitor and an enemy to people's freedom understood the development of human power as a victory over God. God Himself appeared to thinkers as Feuerbach, Freud and Marx as a mere shadow of man, a reflection of his wishes, anxieties or unjust social relations, a product of internal or external conflicts. These thinkers and their pupils promised that when man overcomes religious alienation and understands God as a human project, the voice of God inside him will silence forever. God should ask no more disturbing questions from Man's victorious reason.
But the 20th century brought yet another experience with God's silence. Many have waited in vain for God's answer, facing the suffering of millions in wars and concentration camps of the two most horrible regimes in human history, Nazism and communism. For some of them, the protest against the evil of the world grew into a revolt of the conscience against God - and this revolt was their last prayer. They refused to continue the dialogue with God, who either appeared weak or apathetic, cruel or non-existent. With Dmitri Karamazov, they "refused the ticket" into the world in which children have to suffer.
Many of those, who in this century of wars and dictatorships went through valleys of suffering and death, rejected God as a guarantor of the best of possible worlds and found no other religious answer to their protest and painful questions.
But the Bible knows protest and painful questioning as language, in which man can communicate with God. Jesus´ prayer struggle in the Getsemane garden and his painful question on the cross: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" was preceded by the struggles of Jacob, Job, Jeremiah and by the disputes of many patriarchs and prophets with God.
Hegel related the sentence "God is dead", the expression of the desolation of modern man, to the event of the cross, on which the one who was both Man and God died. For Hegel, the cross is not just an event of the remote past, but it is a part of the "history of Being." The "death of God" is an inner moment of "God´s biography", the roads of God through history. Modern atheism is participation at the "Good Friday of history", an important but not the last stage of the history of the spirit.
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