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North Rocks Community Church > Faith on The Rocks > Posts > Death of god?
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21/08/2009‘The death of God is not unusual,’ writes John Bowker. ‘It occurs in every generation everywhere in the world.’ Back in the 2nd century CE the Greek Diagoras chopped up a sacred statue (in order to boil his turnips) and declared that God did not exist.
In 1923 the US atheist HL Meneken held his own memorial service for the Gods, listing over 100 who had ‘gone down the chute’ after reigning supreme over generations of worshipful believers.
The 19th and 20th centuries saw: Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution undermining the creation story; Sigmund Freud’s dismissal of belief in god as a childish illusion; Karl Marx’s dubbing of it as the opium of the people; and Friedrich Neitzsche declaring God ‘pitiable’, ‘absurd’ and ‘dead’. Humanism developed a non-religious ethic and it was considered only a matter of time before faith faded away. The past few decades, however, have proved predictions of the inevitable demise of gods and religions to be wrong – or at any rate embarrassingly premature.
From http://www.newint.org/features/2004/08/01/god-biography/ |
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