ABSTRACT
Next to Dostoevsky, the best-known European thinker to speak of the death of God was Friedrich Nietzsche, yet Nietzsche wrote his famous lines years before he discovered Dostoevsky, and he never read The Brothers Karamazov. Friedrich Nietzsche first used the phrase "God is dead" in The Gay Science published in 1882. Nietzsche harshest condemnation of Christianity is to be found in his book The Antichrist published in 1888. Christianity, he argued, has propagated the disastrous idea of equality for all. In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche calls himself an "immoralist." Unlike Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud never had to wrestle with the problem of God. The idea of the death of God has figured in two quite disparate intellectual movements of the twentieth century. Jean-Paul Sartre called himself an atheistic existentialist. Christian atheism, Hamilton wrote, "affirms that all images of God are equally useless, because the concept of 'God' is an empty idea for modern man.
