youtube/watch?v=CNQXQKflJNA From the pulpit: “Is God Dead?” Time Magazine’s cover asked exactly that on April 8, 1966. The answer they gave nearly 50 years ago is the same today: We don’t know. What we did know then is that young folks were leaving organized religions in droves and their sense was that theology was either based on superstitious nonsense or outright lies. Some few philosophers turned to “Nietzsche” and his premise that: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?” He was speaking about Christ, of course. In his view Christ had been alive but died on the cross—His message of love died with Him. So Nietzsche believed that God was actually, physically dead and that His death was not metaphor but a reality of modern life. Today, 78% of Americans consider themselves Christians, however fewer and fewer people worship in a church or belong to an organized religion. Only about 20% of us are regular church goers. There is a good reason for this growing apathy: God is dead. I’ve read the New Testament many times, studied it though and through and over and over and allowed those few concepts to hang around and put them into practice. I keep coming back to the same question: If Christ was God, or even Son of God, and He said all those wonderful things and led by such wonderful example and so exemplified love: How could there be so much evil and hate and derision in the world? Surely, any God who can come and go through the concept of death would never vacate children to be murdered in their classroom, or stand idly by as mothers and their babies were gassed to death by an evil force, or even permit a mass murder of soldiers executed by ‘freedom fighters.’ I could go one and one. But the point is made, it is incredulous to believe that such a saintly God, with such high morals and exuding such a force of love would stand by as America dropped bombs on innocent people in Viet Nam or Libya or Iraq or even Dresden, Germany or kill thousands with a nuclear bomb in Nagasaki, Japan. God is dead. No, I cannot prove what Nietzsche theorized, but If God were dead—it would help explain a lot about how unholy and evil people rise to power and seem to stay there. Why there are so many poor and disenfranchised. Why we still kill to end disputes. Why we spend so much national treasure on the art of killing. About how through the course of my lifetime people are abandoning religion and how they can better see the inherent prejudice in all forms of religion. God is dead, explains a lot. And what if me and old Nietzsche-boy have this thing figured out. That God has gone. That there is no heaven and no hell. That there are no angles and saints. That the bible is folklore and nice stories designed to make a point. That the only thing holy are the words that Christ left us before He was executed—and we deny even that about His life and refuse on economic grounds or moral-superiority grounds or political grounds to abandoned His very message and calling—“Love one another.” It would seem that we can’t even get love right. Yes, God is dead. Or, if not dead than indifferent to our plight. Perhaps He has thrown up His hands in despair because we are a “stiff-necked people” and not worthy of His guidance. In which case we are doomed to toil through existence. Or perhaps, we have fooled ourselves into believing that one person could take on all our troubles and dissuade all our fears and offer us hope that things will get better. Maybe, just maybe, God is not dead. Maybe He lives in all of us and we should abandon our religions like false prophets and idols that should never have been worshipped in the first place. Maybe we should try joining hands, not in prayer for something that has already vanished into eternity, but join together and stand up to injustice and immorality and hate and fear and poverty and war and shout to the moon and to the stars and to the sky that God is not dead, He loved us and lives in us and we demand change. Before we die on the cross once again for the same old sins.
Posted on: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 13:11:53 +0000
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