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What Is Nietzsche's Claim On God Being Dead

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Born in Prussia, Friedrich Nietzsche grew up to be one of the most influential, controversial, interesting and intriguing philosophers of our modern time, with bold statements such as “God is dead and we killed Him,” that still resonate in society today. His work Zarathustra is best known for his controversial teaching of the Übermensch (superman or "overman"), and through this concept humanity would be able to emerge from the shadow of the dead God and take their rightful place as leaders of this society. This teaching mainly conveys the promise of a life predicated on the love of one’s self, the love of the body, and an aspiration to noble values, a continuation of a theme set by the philosophers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In this paper I will provide a Christian critique Friedrich Nietzsche’s claim on “God being dead,” his slave morality concept, and his idea of eternal recurrence, that are all part of …show more content…

These holy men and women achieve a union with God that is so powerful that they become distinct from this world just like He is, but not separated just like He is not as well. They experience and help us partake of events that cannot be defined or described, experiences that are completely alien to our human understanding. Something that Nietzsche would describe as beyond that psychological and physiological understanding. He would also say that it is a state of mind that not everyone can reach, but a state that everyone should strive for, which is exactly what holiness is to Christians, but of course that is not what he meant. It is something that cannot be comprehended because it is something that is not necessarily achieved but something granted and given by

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In multiple instances in the book they are put to the test to try and reclaim holiness they may have lost due to their poor actions. Constantly facing obstacles in their journey that test their conscience and cause them to choose between what is good and what is

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In the book ‘Night’, about Elie Wiesel's experience with the holocaust, his connection with God changes through the hardships he faces, and he loses his connection and identity associated with God. The change in Elie's relationship with God is shown by his first devotion, his gained defiance, to his finally concluding that God is dead. When the story started he was a young boy, wanting to know more about God, and increase his devotion. “One day I asked my father to find me a master who could guide me in my studies of Kabbalah.”

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Through these perspectives, Whitmarsh emphasizes the significance of atheism in classical history, with a clear intention of opposing the frequent neglect atheists and atheist history receive from influential historians and educators. To this end, Whitmarsh aims to disprove the misconception that religion is inherently natural in humans, thus recognizing and acknowledging atheist history as equally significant to religious history. Such a platform is consistent

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Genocides test their victims not only physically, but also mentally and spiritually. This was observed during the Holocaust, where the “lucky” survivors at the concentration camps had to come to terms between their reality and their idea of faith. Author and survivor, Elie Wiesel, shows this in his memoir Night. Throughout the memoir, Wiesel shows that during these times of trouble, faith in humanity was more insidious than the faith in God. Even though times of great prosperity, or of great ruin, turn men to faith as a cure-all, events such as the Holocaust spiritually exhausted their victims into a state of losing faith.

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To culminate the semesters worth of thoughts and readings of the relationship between religion and literature I decided to analyze the contents of the book Night by Elie Wiesel. This book is an account of Elie’s life in Nazi Germany. It addressed his inner most thoughts as a young man who’s life suddenly changes during the reign of Adolf Hitler. In the following paragraphs I have explored a few religious aspects of Night in relation to two of the required readings and a discussion post assigned to this class.

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In conclusion, in the memoir Night, Elie Wiesel utilizes the suffering and adversity of Jews during the Holocaust in order to present how when faith in God is lost, a person can continue to progress in life or not, but they will only be able to if they have hope and faith in themselves. The book illustrates that without God, one must still be able to live a satiated life and be able to procure self-motivation. In the lives of Jews during the Holocaust, as well as people today, no matter what religion one has faith in, when faith in that is lost due to hardships, one must be able to find hope in other places. This is not to say that following a religion is useless, but instead to relay the message that in addition to faith in something else,

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Edmund Burke once said, “Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference”. In the memoir, Night, by Elie Wiesel, Elie struggles to comprehend why God is letting such horrible things happen during the Holocaust, which in turn lessens his faith in God. He believes that no one, even God, should turn away, or show indifference to such a horrible situation. In this memoir, it is evident that Elie’s faith in God has changed.

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Steele analysis Night as being focused on how the Holocaust affected many people’s faith with God. He states that Night’s purpose was , “to focus on the Holocaust’s significance for altering the human understanding of man’s relationship to God” (Steele 1). He then begins to explain that ever since 1945, due to the Holocaust, many theological revisions have taken place in both Jewish and Christian beliefs. However, he distinctly points out that, “Night is not an example of the “death of God theology””(Steele 1). He makes it perfectly clear that Wiesel did not lose complete faith in God, however his views of God were significantly alter after his survival.

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The Night considers the main problem of Judaism and Christianity is precisely that of building a theology and an ethics of responsibility. In Elie Wiesel’s view, this is expressed through the responsibility generated by an existential memory “Do not ever struggle against memory. Even when it is painful; it will help you, it will reward you, it will make you richer. After all, what would culture be without memory? What would love for a friend be without the possibility of remembering it the next day?

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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?

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The holocaust is among the most gruesome genocides to this day. On the flip side, this makes it a great time period to observe how faithful individuals can stay, in the most troublesome situations imaginable. In Night, by Elie Wiesel, the author details his own experience in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. Throughout the story, it is evident that many individuals in the camps desired that religion and faith would come to their rescue. Despite Elie’s religious background, due to the horrors the holocaust is famous for today, his own relationship with god, and his own Jewish identity became rather foggy.

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Earlier, a man had asked that question while a young boy was hanged alongside the adults, murdered at the hands of the Nazis. “Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ‘Where is God now?’” (Wiesel, 72). At this moment, Elie and many others began to question their faith.

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"If a temple is to be erected, a temple must be destroyed!" Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is one of humanity's most influential and amaranthine thinkers. He was a German philosopher, political critic, philologist, writer, and poet. Some of his most famous works include Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), The Gay Science (1882), The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Twilight of the Idols (1889), The Will to Power (1901), etc. His impact isn't just on recently found scholarly insight, but additionally on the way numerous contemporary Western philosophers approach "life".

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