God is dead, and we have killed him

 God is dead, and we have killed him - Friedrich Nietzsche

For most of human history, growth or self development wasn’t a thing. Change occurred so slowly that almost all died in pretty much the same economic & social condition they were born with. People lived their entire lives and nothing changed, no new developments, inventions, technologies. People would live and die on the same land, among the same people, using the same tools & nothing ever got better. Mostly due to disease, battles, rulers & famine the existence was a slow miserable one. And with no prospect for change or a better life in this lifetime, people drew their hope from spiritual promises of a better life in the next lifetime. Religions & spiritual leaders flourished on the promise of that single hope of improvement because God was the only one who could promise any salvation for a better future.

Then something happened & God started to die. That something was science which started to improve the lives of humans & no longer the premise was valid. Science became a religion where fact was of value and everyone could question over its significance, unlike God who was a father nobody questioned. People used better tools, access to more food, became healthier & started to trade in money. Now you can look back ten years of your life & can say look where I was and where I am.

But we now had to pay the price of killing the God. That price is a realization that we are in fact the maker of our life & we are responsible for our improvement. Now we started to realize that either we all deserve everything or none deserve anything. Now, science based religion separated into ideological based religions. Communism, nationalism, feminism, liberalism, etc. If ideological religion failed we were responsible, because it was we who invented it unlike a preserved God, our hope started to rest on the balance of our own ideology rather than the rigid frame of God or religion. Hope can be preserved because God is always preserved, but not ideology.

That piece of hope that sustained humankind for so long was shattered in the wake of technological evolution and ideological revolution. In short, our identity destroyed.

God is dead was not some obnoxious atheistic gloating, it was a cry for help because Nietzsche understood that our existence is inherently chaotic and unknowable, believed that we are not psychologically equipped to handle the task of explaining our existence. The fabric was torn & he knew that to cohere the chaotic existence was a crisis in making.

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