Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was no friend of Christianity, but he was not naive about the consequences of abandoning belief in God either. The quotation from ‘The Madman’ story in The Gay Science makes this clear. For Nietzsche, humans would need to become gods themselves to fill the void left by ‘the Death of God’. Become Ubermenschen (Over-men). Not everybody could be an Ubermensch, of course. Women, the weak and the ill may find it hard. In Christianity, the weak had been given a special place, and this was part of its problem for Nietzsche. For ‘The Madman’, the West had not caught up with the realities of living in a post-Christian world. People still clung to the shadows of a belief that, according to Nietzsche, had died. Because of this, people had not begun the existential struggle to construct a whole new morality: to become Ubermenschen, free of the ‘slave morality’ of Christianity.
In 2008, there was an Atheist Bus Campaign to present ‘peaceful and upbeat’ messages about atheism. One poster read: ‘There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’.
I think Nietzsche would have found this hilarious.
Cat is Dead
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him…Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” The Madman speech in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science
When Cat is away
the mice can play.
Play, mice, play.
Cat is away.
Cat’s coming back!
Isn’t that fun!
Run, mice, run!
Cat coming back
makes the fun.
But, say, what is that?
There isn’t a Cat?
There isn’t a Cat
who comes back?
Is that what you say?
How can mice play,
if there isn’t a Cat,
if there isn’t a Cat
who comes back?
Pretend there’s a Cat!
Well, how about that!
Pretend there’s a Cat
who comes back.
Hooray! Let’s do that.
Let’s pretend there’s a Cat
who pretends to come back,
so we can pretend to play.
But pretending to play
is hardly a ball,
and the mice miss the Cat,
who never came back
because he never existed at all.
Now, there’s mice in the walls
and mice under the floor,
but the mice cannot play,
anywhere, anymore.