Z came to me last night and told me to blog this ...
The statement "God is dead", occurs in several of Friedrich Nietzsche's works. In Nietzsche's view, recent developments in modern science and the increasing secularization of European society had effectively 'killed' the Christian God, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than a thousand years. Nietzsche claimed the death of God would eventually lead to the loss of any universal perspective on things, and along with it any coherent sense of objective truth. Instead we would retain only our own multiple, diverse, and fluid perspectives.
Alternatively, the death of God may lead beyond bare perspectivism to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing has any inherent importance and that life lacks purpose. Developing this idea, Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, therein introducing the concept of a value-creating Ubermensch (Superman). Zarathustra's gift of the superman is given to a mankind not aware of the problem to which the superman is the solution.
'2001: A Space Odyssey', 'Thus Spake Zarathustra'
