In his 1882 work Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (i.e. The Gay Science), the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared:
“Gott is tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet! Wie trösten wir uns, die Mörder aller Mörder? Das Heiligste und Mächtigste, was die Welt bisher besaß, es ist unter unsern Messern verblutet—wer wischt dies Blut von uns ab? Mit welchem Wasser könnten wir uns reinigen?”
In English, this means:
“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have murdered him! How do we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? The holiest and mightiest thing that the world so far has possessed, it has bled to death under our knives—who will wash this blood off from us? With what water could we purify ourselves?”
When he wrote this, Nietzsche did not mean that God had literally died, but rather that modern science had disproven his existence and human beings had entered into a new, secular age. Nietzsche believed that humans needed to find something to replace God to provide life with meaning.
Few academics today agree with everything Nietzsche believed, but they do generally seem to agree that, in the western industrialized world in the twenty-first century, religion is no longer important in most people’s lives and secularism and rationality now generally reign supreme. This notion, however, is entirely mistaken. Traditional religions of all kinds are, in fact, thriving in the western world, especially here in the United States, and belief in the supernatural remains widespread.
Continue reading “The Modern World Isn’t Even Remotely Secular”