“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. 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? What water is there for us
to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement,
what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this
deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to
appear worthy of it?”-Nietzsche, the Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann

No, Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor wasn’t the first to coin this phrase. Hell, I’d bank that Nietzsche wasn’t either… by a long shot. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is one of the first respected scholars to lay such a claim. What does he even mean here? Let me be the most honest by saying that I have no idea because I am not Nietzsche and I’m especially not the Nietzsche that had busied himself experiencing the moment the thought occurred to write this message. But I will tell you this folks: Thank God for Friedrich Nietzsche.

God is dead. Face it folks: the God that made miraculous things occur in the Old Testament has not existed a day past the birth of the New Testament. God is a three-letter word. At the time Nietzsche wrote this statement, human beings were already thinking of God more as a word than as a truth. As humans became more intelligent about reality, primitive notions of God dissipated.

What I mean by this:

• God is a three letter word that represented a notion
• God is necessarily a salient perspective
• God is not a user friendly concept
• God can be called any word in the dictionary so long as the word is used to describe God
• God spelled backwards is Dog. Mix it up and you get Ogd or Gdo or Dgo
• Ogd is a good name for a caveman
• We know damn well that in order to describe what is God-like we do not need to resort to the protection of a single word; God is just a word or sound that is used to describe something that is God-like, or, something that is incomprehensible

God is dead. People who would claim otherwise should be required to provide a solid reasoning for their silly thought processes. “God”. When said out loud it is only a sound – many would not even recognize it as a word.

Nietzsche asks “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy [of the murder of God]“ Well? Why not believe that we are actualizing the possibility of becoming God-like?