When Nietzsche writes
‘God is dead’. It is not the same sentence structure and therefore a
different semantic meaning to the phrase ‘There is no God”.
Historical background for a Nietszchean exegesis:
Around that time in the burdening Wessenschaft relation between
anthropology and archaeology, a theory emerged that the earliest god’s
were old chieftans or Kings (Ur-Kings) when earlu differences in wealth
emerged, with emerging longer periods of settlement that would be
returned to, even amongst still semi-nomadic groups. These burial mounds
would be then be worshipped and stories told of this King for
generations after any lived memory of the King survived. Later temples
would be built around these burial mounds and the dead God-King would
emerge, leading to hereditary living God-Kings (eg later (but now
ancient) Egypt).
This temple would also be the place that as
agrarian techniques developed so would the storage of grain, this
storage would soon last more than two years. The ‘clerical’ priests
would be in charge of distribution and a religious ‘economy’ related to
writing, maths, status and labour emerged. Thus, for example, famines
were still related to religious beliefs, where the strength of the
economy and thus religious faith was related to how long a drought,
famine, or plague of locusts the stores could survive. Thus today in
modern anthropological psychological dynamics and their relation to the
economy, scapegoating is still related ot this ‘hangover’ (best
described by Azazel as scapegoat in Leviticus 16 and it’s relation as a
relation to the community’s fears).
So with regards such economic, social and religious organisation, this is still a relation to the phrase ‘God is dead’.
(This is related with regards to violence in Nietzsche and Freud’s
mythology with regards the killing of the father by the Band of
Brother’s. In these mythologies this God-King in this buriial mound was
orginally killed and then mourned, as explained in Totem and Taboo.
Anthropologically and archeologically the Band of Brothers theory has
been put in doubt, but the burial mound theory not so much. Which leaves
room for a relation to a more utility based theory of emergence,
although still not to divest oneself of the entirety of any violence/
death wish theory (such as Bowlby, although there are other evidence
based aspects of Bowlby etc etc)).