Throughout the beginning of the novel, his faith is steadfast. After his family has been split up and after he has been forced into the concentration camps, however, his faith in God begins to crack. Elie Wiesel describes how ¨For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The almighty the eternal and terrible master of the universe, chose to be silent.
Wiesel's loss of faith was brought on by the absence of God. This resulted in him questioning why it was God's will to allow Jews to suffer and die the way they had. Another portrayal of religious confliction within Wiesel was the statement of his faith being consumed by the flames along with the corpses of children (Wiesel 34). Therefore, he no longer believed God was the almighty savior everyone had set Him out to be or even present before them. To conclude, his experiences within Nazi confinement changed what he believed in and caused him to change how he thought and began questioning God because of the actions He allowed to take
In the beginning of his speech story, God was everything to him. He worshipped him and prayed to him every day of his life. Then the Holocaust began, and his faith started to dwindle as he suffered more and more. His suffering and pain of others are causing him to stray away from God, and he starts to rely on his feelings and his personal health. His life was once dominated by God, but now he does not care about his religion as much as he once did.
Elie Wiesel’s relationship with God was like a roller coaster ride. Before Wiesel was force out of his home town of Sighet to concentration camps he loved to talk about God and wanted to learn more about him, “... I asked my father to find me a master who could guide me in
The Eternal Lord of the universe, the All-Powerful and terrible, was silent. What had I to thank him for. ”(Wiesel/31) His faith in God began to be shaken. He felt anger against God.
He thought God himself had made him and the others suffer this evil, the cruel place called the concentration camps and how he has to fight for his life to survive. He struggles, asking god the nature what he is doing and why he had come to save them from hell. Which comes to this quotation "I pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real questions." (Elizer,5) His experiences had made him ask horrible and cruel questions to God if the powerful God is actually there with him or does God truly exists.
The same can be said for Elie Wiesel. As he has time to think about his current situation, he starts to feel as if God is at fault for this injustice which has fallen upon his and his Jewish allies. A boy who once was one of the most religiously devoted youth in his town was now giving up all hope that there is even a god at all. While being surrounded by death and sorrow, Wiesel comments, “Where is God?’ ‘Where is he” (86)?
The strict view he had of his faith when he was younger truly foreshadowed the strict view of faith he would preach about later on during the First Great
Next, another prisoner at the infirmary said to Wiesel that, when compared to God, he had “more faith in Hitler,” (81). His reasoning was because unlike God, Hitler actually kept his word about what he would do to the Jews. Even though what he would do was nothing but harmful, the prisoner in the infirmary believed in him more that God because whatever Hitler said, he did. Therefore, the absence of God led the Jews to forget about all of the power God had and everything that He could
Elie Wiesel’s relationship with God changes during his time in Auschwitz. He becomes angry with God for letting His own creations starve, torture, and mercilessly murder His devout worshippers. Wiesel cannot understand why his creator would open “six crematoria working day and night” to slaughter human beings (Wiesel 67). He does not trust God to be just any longer, for “every fiber in [him rebels]” (67). Wiesel feels he is stronger than the God whom he was bound to for so long, and he “no longer [accepts] God’s silence” (69).
For almost a year, Wiesel stood spectator to atrocities beyond what is imaginable, and his God was nowhere to be found. The hanging of a young child was a spiritual breaking point for many people in the camp. No one in the camp, Wiesel included, could understand how a merciful God would allow something like that to happen. Wiesel, while being forced to watch the execution alongside his fellow prisoners said “Being me, I heard the same man asking: ‘Where is God now?; And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He?
In my opinion when Nietzsche speaks of God being dead, he is stating that the people of his time could no longer believe in a supernatural creator who judges the world. We would use this figure of God to decide our lives for us and that to Nietzsche would be the opposite of living a life of authenticity. Instead we must abandon the idea of a God morality and come up with a human morality, that enable us to be capable of making ethical choices. This God figure had always been the basis for humanity’s ethical beliefs but with a cultural shift into rationalism and science, people have abandoned the idea that a God is the only way for them to determine right from wrong. Nietzsche wanted people of his time to move past the image of an all-knowing
Nietzsche prefaces this claim by explaining “the Christian faith from the beginning is sacrifice” (Beyond Good and Evil 33). He illustrates that Christianity commands one to give up multiple unnecessary things, and requires “solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence” seemingly so that they may devote themselves to false things such as the hopes of an afterlife (Beyond Good and Evil 34). His claims invoke the idea that Christianity is the main perpetrator of regression because these rules prevent an individual from establishing new philosophies and ideas, contributing to the conformity of society. Restraint from natural instincts and inhibits their education. Instead of encouraging thought, Christianity teaches the “narrowing of perspectives”, which results in the amount of leaders that rise above the many to be almost nonexistent (53).
Moreover, the money given for indulgences was not put to good use. Therefore, that defeats the purpose of indulgences. Moreover, his radical ideas meant that the price of paradise cannot be paid with money because that price is way beyond any humans reach. He believed that only our faith and the mercy of god can lead us to salvation. I do agree with him.
He does not believe in a God, stating that the church exists to “devalue nature and natural values” and claiming that these religious systems steal power, creating weakness in mankind (Nietzsche 34). He creates a primitive and selfish lifestyle as a model to compliment this new concept of inverted values. This lifestyle is based on the Hyperboreans, a mythical race that lives North of the Arctic Circle and exemplifies strength and vigor. Nietzsche believed in training people from a young age to maximize power to assert dominance and exude toughness because goodness was associated with everything that creates a feeling of power and, therefore, happiness. Straying away from this is the reason for man’s weakness, which he claims is equivalent to unhappiness and all that is considered bad.
