God is not dead & crooked timber of humanity

By Aditya Mukherjee

When Friedrich Nietzsche declared that ‘God is dead’, he was announcing the onset of a profound civilisational rupture. Nietzsche was not celebrating the disappearance of God; he was warning that modern humanity, intoxicated by reason, science, and power, had been stripped of the moral and spiritual underpinnings that once anchored it. In this vacuum, he feared, nihilism would run riot – a world teetering on the verge of ethical collapse. As the world finds itself in an entropic storm of fractured discourse, hatred, war, and moral atrophy, one cannot help but feel the unsettling relevance of Nietzsche’s words.

Across continents, brutality is rationalised on a Wagnerian scale, suffering becomes normalised, and human lives are reduced to strategic footnotes. Faith in shared values appears fragile, while aggression often masquerades as bravado. In such a world, it is tempting to believe that God has not merely ‘died’ in Nietzschean sense but has forsaken humanity. A pall settles over our moral consciousness as spectacle of cruelty – whether enacted through weapons, words, or wilful neglect – forces us to confront the loss of Apollonian restraint: reason, measure, and moral discipline in human conduct.

This despair is deepened by what the philosopher Immanuel Kant famously described as ‘the crooked timber of humanity’. By this, he meant that human beings are inherently flawed, capable of reason and goodness, yet equally prone to selfishness, violence, and moral compromise. From such crooked timber, Kant observed, no perfectly straight thing was ever made. History bears this out with painful clarity. Our own turbulent time is no exception.

Yet, the fallibility of human nature keeps alive the possibility of redemption and renewal, urging us to confront the dark, ominous shadows within. If humanity were the epitome of nobility and virtue – faith, restraint, and compassion would have no purpose. It is precisely because human beings at times display a pathology of savageness that moral and spiritual traditions matter. In this sense, faith provides ethical guidance and self-discipline that help people live responsibly in a problematic, imperfect world.

Nietzsche believed that in the absence of God, humanity would need to create its own values – a task he saw as both necessary and perilous. What he perhaps underestimated was the resilience of faith. Despite centuries of scepticism, violence, and betrayal, belief in God has not withered. It persists not because the world is just, but because it is not.

Faith persists as a moral resistance to chaos; a quiet insistence that human suffering cannot be the final word. For countless individuals, faith continues to shape conscience and inspire acts of compassion that never make headlines. It restrains the strong, consoles the weak, and reminds both that human worth cannot be measured solely by utility or dominance. In this sense, faith emerges as a quiet yet enduring moral constant of humanity.

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