ABSTRACT
When Nietzsche announced, in 1882, that ‘God is dead’ (GS 125)1 he did not mean merely the God of traditional Christianity. He meant, rather, anything that performs the function in human life that was once performed by the God of traditional Christianity. A ‘religion’, in other words, is anything that postulates or promises a true world. Hence ‘European Buddhism’ counts as a religion, as do both Hegelianism and Marxism. Nietzsche explicitly includes the latter pair among the doctrines that can no longer be believed:
The total character of the world is . . . in all eternity chaos – in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms.
