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Although what I describe in the first section was an affliction of Victorian-era Europe, the same problems remain with us today. In the West we have continued to turn towards science, nature and humanity for what we need rather than God and the supernatural. We have "killed" the God of our ancestors - destroyed the central figure of meaning of Western culture for over nineteen centuries without having managed to find an adequate replacement.
For some, that is not entirely a problem. For others, it is a crisis of the greatest magnitude. The unbelievers in Nietzsche's tale think that seeking God is funny - something to laugh at if not pity. The madman alone realizes just how terrible and frightening is the prospect of killing God - he alone is aware of the true gravity of the situation.
But at the same time, he does not condemn anyone for it - instead, he calls it a "great deed." The meaning here from the original German is not "great" in the sense of wonderful, but in the sense of large and important. Unfortunately, the madman is no sure that we, the murderers, are capable of bearing either the fact or the consequences of a deed this great. Thus his question: "Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?"
This, then, is the basic question of Nietzsche's parable which, as we saw early on, is a fiction rather than a philosophical argument. Nietzsche didn't really like metaphysical speculations about the universe, humanity, and abstract concepts such as "God." As far as he was concerned, "God" wasn't important - but religion and the belief in a god was supremely important and he certainly had a lot to say about them.
From his perspective, religions like Christianity which focus upon an eternal afterlife were actually a kind of living death themselves. They turn us away from life and truth - they devalue the life we have here and now. For Friedrich Nietzsche, life and truth are in our lives and our world right here, not in a supernatural illusion of heaven.
Beyond God, Beyond Religion
And, as many people besides Nietzsche have found, religions like Christianity also perpetuate things such as intolerance and conformity despite some of the teachings of Jesus. Nietzsche found these things to be especially repugnant because, as far as he was concerned, anything old, habitual, normative and dogmatic is ultimately contrary to life, truth and dignity.
In place of life, truth and dignity is created a "slave mentality" - which is one of the many reasons Nietzsche called Christian morality a "slave morality." Nietzsche does not attack Christianity because it "tyrannizes" its adherents or because it imposes a general direction upon people's lives. Instead, what he refuses to accept is the particular direction Christianity travels towards and the dogmatic manner in which it operates. It attempts to conceal the fact that its direction is simply one of many
Nietzsche took the position that in order to shed the chains of slavery, it is necessary to kill the slave master - to "kill" God. In "killing" God, we can perhaps overcome dogma, superstition, conformity and fear (providing, of course, that we don't turn around and find some new slave master and enter into some new type of slavery).
But Nietzsche also hoped to escape nihilism (the belief that there are no objective values or morality). He thought that nihilism was both the result of asserting the existence of God and thus robbing this world of significance, and the result of denying God and thus robbing everything of meaning.
Thus he thought that killing God was the necessary first step in becoming not a god as suggested by the madman, but in becoming an "overman," described elsewhere by Nietzsche. But that is a topic for another article.
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