The great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche first stated the phrase “Gott ist tot” in his 1882 collection The Gay Science. The Death of God was a poignant motif that haunted Nietzsche until the day he died – inspiring him so that he became almost prophetic in heralding his gospel.[1] In Nietzsche’s view the Death of God didn’t mean the literal demise of a concrete deity, rather it conveyed his view that the static, unmoving God of the western world was no longer a definitive moral source for mankind – in our unrelenting progress. We must now realize that we are culpable of egotistical deicide and that we must recreate a moral compass to rectify this outrageous crime.
And we may be closer to that realization than Nietzsche could have predicted.
Several comprehensive polls conducted by Gallup International puts the number of atheists at around 13% of the world population. This statistic is however much higher in developed nations in the European Union and Japan or rapidly industrializing super-states like China. Developing regions in contrast are much more religious; just 2% of Sub-Saharan African respondents were non-believers and less than 1% of those polled in the Middle East answered in like.[2]
It is
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Only in the warm glow of God’s compassion could we air our disappointed ambitions, our unfulfilled frustrations and our heaviest sorrows. Religion may well have been a deep illusion but it was an important one. In today’s world of belligerent capitalism we need a loving, unjudging institution which evokes our better nature – our humanity. To build kind, secular civilizations in our own time we must never forget the purposes of religion – to offer us answers not necessarily to the hard physical world around us but to our spiritual selves, to offer us comradeship in the face of a climate of competition and, most importantly, to offer us fulfilment of our own moral