Apocalypse: The Death of God

36. Parable of the Assassin.

One night god falls asleep. He dreams in lucid psychedelics: entire cosmos pop in and out of existence in aeonic flashes, whole eternities crystalize into marbles in the palm of a child—when suddenly the dreamscape turns pitch black and the abyss engulfs him. He wails: oh no, a harbinger! I have met my fate… in this void I will extinguish, never to awaken again.

Meanwhile, a mortal named Timothy passes by the guards in through the back door of heaven and finds his way to the head chamber. Like a titan, the mortal towers over the vulnerable deity, who lies below in an ocean of silk. With one fell swoop Timothy decapitates him—no romantic fanfare, no passionate last words, simply the death of god at the hands of a vengeful man.

The next morning the peasants hear the news. Ecstasy heightens their once lowly hearts, and they dance joyously arm in arm. They feel liberated, as if loosed from invisible shackles. Whenceforth they address Timothy by the name Thanatos—for what could the soul of such an assassin be if not death itself?

37. Earliest Assassins.

The Presocratic atheists killed god over 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece. Unlike the precise logicians of today, these earliest freethinkers wielded neither scalpels nor blades, but rather bone clubs and stone hammers to smash bad ideas. The notion of god plainly offended their common sense; it struck many of them as glaringly absurd—they viewed it as bad taste to indulge in the gross religious sacraments of their day.

Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not, nor of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.
—Protagoras, 490–420 BC

The gods of popular belief do not exist […] but primitive man, out of admiration, deifed the fruits of the earth and virtually everything that contributed to his existence.
—Prodicus, 465–395 BC

This universe […] has not been made by any god or man […] They pray to images […] for they do not know what gods and heroes are. […] Their processions and their phallic hymns would be disgraceful exhibitions were it not that they were done in honor of Dionysus […] When defiled they purify themselves with blood, as though one who had stepped into filth were to wash himself with filth. If any of his fellowmen should perceive him acting in such a way, they would regard him as mad.
—Heraclitus, 535–475 BC

38. Zombie Sadist.

Despite the death of god millennia ago, his undead corpse still shambles around the earth, leaving bigotry and genocide behind in its footprint. This zombie being has been mutilated, stabbed and chopped in virtually every way, and in spite of this relentless onslaught, it survives unnervingly in the heart of man. To this point, atheists can speculate that in the event they do decapitate the god-zombie once and for all, it will proceed then to haunt the world as a ghost. In other words, it remains quite possible that the god-delusion will never go extinct in total.

39. Ostracism, not Extermination.

Ergo, it behooves atheists to revise their idealistic ambition for annihilation to a realistic ambition for quarantine, i.e., ostracize believers into remote obscurity. A statistically significant percentage of members in the main world religions commit acts of terrorism and genocide to defend their faith in god, thus any pipe dream of global atheistic evangelism classifies as not only impossible, but horribly dangerous. For example, an apostate atheist in Iraq or Syria at this present moment would suffer crucifixion in front of an apathetic mob who has already witnessed this sort of brutal murder of unbelievers myriad times. The law to kill heretics is ingrained in the culture and seems utterly ordinary to members of society, like a weekend sports event or party.

To reiterate in clearest terms: religious radicals in the poorest and dumbest areas of the world deem it morally necessary to murder atheists in cruel and unusual ways. It is extremely dangerous to expound the merits of freethought in those particular countries. Alas, global abolishment of the god delusion qualifies as literally impossible, thus staunch ostracism of those violent populations remains the only alternative. In short: atheists must place as many miles and walls as possible between the terrorists and themselves—and even then the terrorists will still infiltrate their peaceful society.

40. Naked Imperialism.

But it gets worse. These religious radicals need more than their own safe space; their dogma explicitly requires them to imperialistically conquer civilizations that do not worship their god. They seek to install a global empire by necessity.

Likely the reader sniffs out the putrid stink of Jihadism because the militant Islamic movement, the Islamic State, rears the ugliest head and shrieks the loudest at present. In truth the absolutism required for religious faith underlies all religion in essence—the Islamic State simply embodies it most honestly, most nakedly, most romantically. By stripping off the veil of political correctness to reveal their fully nude ambition—nothing less than a terrestrial empire—Isis relishes its freedom to heroize martyrdom. They declare spiritedly: we will kill every infidel to install the kingdom of Allah on this planet. Die for this cause and become an eternal hero!

41. Universal Force.

This kinky imperialism, this raw radicalism, this romantic heroism tugs fiendishly at the heartstrings of any Islamist with a pulse—like a reformed heroin addict staring at a needle, that little niggle of lust taunts them. Once the lethal poison of theism, of faith, of idealism infiltrates the blood stream, all that remains is to extend the principle of absolutism to its contingent logical conclusion: the enforcement of universal compliance.

In the realm of the absolute, any alternative or divergence from its perfection is looked down upon as a blemish, a pimple on its flawless face. And the faithful idealists will scrub and scrub until they exfoliate the impurity away. Any idealist—translation: theist—who denies their lust for universal social compliance immediately classifies as a bald-faced liar. A real theist cannot believe in a perfectly ideal being whom created a perfectly ideal world and then also coexist with swine whose shameless disbelief destroys the perfectly synchronized harmony of the cosmos. Embedded deep inside the heart of a theist lies the prejudice that every unbeliever falls under the category of human pollution, a living breathing cancer who infects the health of their god’s perfectly conceived creation.

A genuine theist sees every unbeliever as an affront, as a danger that threatens to tilt the weighted world off its axis into a death spiral.

Herein the elementary logic of jihadism:

God is a perfect being.
God created the world.
Thus the world is a perfect creation.
But the anomaly of disbelief suggests imperfection in the world, and thus threatens the perfection of god.
The theist must extinguish the threat of imperfection to defend the perfection of god.

The author will replace the religious terms god and theist with the secular terms idealism and idealist for a more grounded comprehension.

The elementary logic of idealism:

The ideal exists.
The ideal is perfect.
Any disbelief in the ideal suggests imperfection, and thus threatens the perfection of the ideal.
The idealist must extinguish the threat of imperfection to defend the perfection of the ideal.

42. Idealism as Religion of Absolutism.

The author discerns the essence of religion below:

God: the ideal being.
Faith: belief in the ideal being.
Worship: sacrifice to the ideal being.
Tribe: community that sacrifices to the ideal being.

Religion = god + faith + worship + community.

Religion revolves around the notional existence of an ideal being at its epicenter, thus the author refers to the entire ideology as idealism.

Idealism = ideal + faith + worship + community.

Insert the terminology of political statism into the same formula of idealism, and it reveals every style of government to be a religion too. For example:

Nationalism = president + patriotism + taxation + citizenry
Globalism = president + humanism + taxation + citizenry
Tribalism = chieftain + nepotism + taxation + family
Republicanism = representatives + populism + taxation + electorate
Democracy = electorate + populism + taxation + citizenry
Communism = regime + redistributionism + labor + workers
Socialism = regime + redistributionism + taxation + citizenry
Fascism = regime + corporatism + taxation + citizenry
Monarchism = royalty + authoritarianism + taxation + subjects
Totalitarianism = dictator + authoritarianism + labor + slaves
Feudalism = aristocracy + authoritarianism + taxation + peasants

The reader can literally insert any ideological jargon of either politics and religion into the formula to unveil both of them as idealism at heart.

Islam = Allah and Sheikhs + monotheism + tithing + Muslims
Christianity = Yahweh and Pope + monotheism + tithing + Christians
Buddhism = Buddha and Dalai Lama + mysticism + asceticism + monks
Wicca = divinity + henotheism + sacrifice + witches

43. Truest Enemy of Antitheism.

It is necessary to state whom we regard as our antithesis: the theologians, and all those who have the blood of theologians in their veins […] this poisoning extends much further than people think: I unearthed the “arrogant” instinct of the theologians, wherever nowadays people feel themselves idealists […] they claim the right to rise above reality and to regard it with suspicion… Like the priest, the idealist has every grandiloquent concept in his hand, he wields them all with kindly contempt against the understanding, the senses, honors, decent living, science; he regards such things as beneath him, as detrimental and seductive forces, upon the face of which, “the Spirit” moves in pure absoluteness […] as if holiness had not done incalculably more harm to life hitherto, than any sort of horror and vice… Pure spirit is pure falsehood… As long as the priest, the professional denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is considered the highest man, there can be no answer to the question, what is truth? Truth has already been turned topsy-turvy, when the conscious advocate of nonentity and of denial passes as the representative of “truth.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, Aphorism 8

In light of this critical formula, the shrewd antitheist identifies his worst enemy as idealism, not just theism per se, for theism merely amounts to one manifestation of the essential idealism that underlies all absolutist ideologies. View idealism as the face that wears many masks, with religion and politics being two of those facades, and the manifestation of its force as statism.

44. Statism as Politics of Force.

If idealism underpins absolutist ideology, then the State embodies the physical manifestation of its force, e.g., its territory, fortress, army, police, administration, etc. Under this premise, the traditional distinction between the Church and State is a gross redundancy—the so-called Church is merely a theistic incarnation of the State spirit.

Statism (state-ism) pertains to the political enforcement of an absolutist ideology, be it a theistic state like the Islamic caliphate or Christian Vatican City or Judaic Israel, or a secular state like a Socialist or Republican nation. It all qualifies as statism; they all comprise the physical enforcement of idealism.

Idealism: religion of absolutism.
Religion: faith in an absolute—function of idealism.
Statism: politics that enforce idealism.
Politics: procedures of force—function of statism.

In grand summary: politics is a function of statism, whilst religion is a function of the idealism that the politics enforce. In other words, politics and religion remain forever entwined in essence and cannot be separated because politics enforce religion, i.e., the State enforces the Ideal. This conclusion defies and cripples three hundred years of the modern claim that the United States has established a “separation of Church and State” as if religion and politics are mutually exclusive. Nothing can be further from the truth. In reality, it has established a separation of theism and State, but certainly not Idealism and State. And by the by, as a pesky aside, when a national currency bears the phrase “In God we trust” in its letterhead, as well as crucifixes in municipal courthouses, it clearly refutes the claim of Church-State separation.

As an example, a republic enforces its own definitive ideal, its religion. It specifically places faith in the absolute notion that the supreme way to rule a society is through a political procedure whereby citizenry elect intermediaries to legislate on their behalf. Its worship occurs in the manner of taxation, the forced sacrifice of personal resources to the ideal. Its community consists of patriotic citizenry who wave tricolored flags, sing anthems, and reverently place their hands over their hearts.

Theistic religion = ideal + faith + sacrifice + community
Secular religion = ideal + faith + taxation + citizenry

Dear reader, it does not matter whether the State politically enforces a theistic, mystical, or secular ideal, whether Islamic law, Buddhist law, or Democratic law, it still enforces a religion, an ideal—a belief in an absolute idea: that Allah exists, or that life is suffering, or that populism is fair. Deindoctrinate the falsehood that religion and politics are opposites, when in fact, they need each other.

Religion characterizes the Ideal. Politics characterizes the State. The State enforces the Ideal, thus Politics enforces the Religion.

It may feel weird to view a secular ideal like democratic socialism or republican nationalism as a religion since it does not expound belief in a mythical deity on the surface; nonetheless, it still holds faith in an absolute ideal. This painstaking clarification will strike a fool as convoluted or tedious, but its importance cannot be overemphasized.

45. Genetic Sadomasochism.

A healthy, rational person can only marvel in bewildered astonishment at the extreme depth of evil and stupidity necessary to willfully champion any kind of idealistic imperialism. It would petrify them to discover that nearly the entire human species blindly worships Statist Idealism in its smorgasbord of incarnations across the globe. Almost nobody identifies as an antitheist, anti-statist, or anti-idealist explicitly.

What explains the heavy prevalence of this psychic illness? Quite simply: religious idealism and its accompanied political statism has been, and continues to be, bred into the genetics of humanity generation after generation. Humans are born into its dogma and indoctrinated thoroughly in childhood.

To answer the question succinctly: inbred brainwashing.

46. Masochistic Psychology.

As dystopian as it sounds, the human species rigorously breeds masochism into the psychology of its offspring, who then willfully submit to the Ideal under threat of force by the State. To reiterate another way: over hundreds of generations humanity has reared its own underclass of genetic masochists who submit to the idealistic sadism of the State.

Sadomasochism is the most deep-seated trait genealogically conditioned into the human psyche. Only this morning does the race finally awaken from the hibernation of this vicious cycle; it rubs its eyes for the first time in wonderment at the history of evil as if it were all just a dream, as if the feasting succubus was just a nightmare—and not really our history.

Could it be true? Did humans really breed generation after generation of utterly submissive masochists who championed their own sadists in the State? How does one shed their own genetic skin like a snake to escape this?

How does humanity escape its past when that very past makes up the blood in its veins—when that past acts as the metronome by which the heart beats?

Perhaps deindoctrinate idealism itself. Would this recode genetics, mutate blood cells, reshape a fingerprint? Would the human undergo rebirth into a free spirit like a snake with a new skin or a bird with new feathers? Would the face of man change?

We cannot radically heal any evil within an organism unless we submit the entire organism to new laws of life.

You ask: “But then what do you want? Can you proclaim for us a form of life which will be more suitable to freedom after the perishing of the institutions of the state? […] Do you offer us any other prospect besides anarchy, murder, and robbery? Show us a free, safe form of life and we would gladly agree with you.”

To this I respond quite simply that it is not our business to construct. Indeed, can any new crop sprout up as long as the old weeds thrive luxuriantly? Thus you must first exterminate the old weeds. […] Do you know that you are like a group of PhDs who believe that we want to give the people a philosophy with propositions, conclusions, and concepts? Nonsense! In any case, our philosophy exists only for the purpose of clearing away the traditional ideas of belief from human heads; thus, just at first, we can do nothing further than to criticize political forms, political concepts, and the religio-political trust, and to be satisfied if our critique is accurate and if it has proven that it is a contradiction to want to win freedom within the context of existing forms. Then in spite of all that, everyone and his brother may come and say: “But my God, there must be religion, there must be a state, there must be righteousness, there must be law.” This outcry does not bother us since it proceeds against critique out of fear, out of the presuppositions of faithfulness […] these people are just naturally deaf to deductive arguments for a rational freedom.

Therefore, you ask me what “the free community” is, what it looks like, how it is possible. To that I can give you no answer, for who is permitted to think beyond his own time? Our time, though, is only critical and destructive.

We set ourselves directly against our determined institutions because the spirit of non-freedom manifests itself in them. We do not bear ill will toward kings, but toward kingship; strip this man of the glitter of the throne, and he will be harmless.
—Edgar Bauer, Critique’s Quarrel With Church & State

47. Suicide Mission.

The ultimate personification of idealism—namely, god—the epitome of bad taste, bad conscience, and bad logic embodied into an undead zombie who saunters across the terrain… to slay this beast, the zombie hunter must chop its head off. Mutilation of limbs and chest will not do, for it will still bite with jagged rotted teeth. One must decapitate it.

Do not be a fool! This vocation to assassinate god equals nothing less than a voluntary suicide mission. Absolutely nobody survives; any who wanders into the black forest of antitheism will suffer euthanasia of the soul guaranteed. A human being simply cannot witness the death of god and remain the same person. Whosoever unlocks the gate to their heart so the essence of death may penetrate and paint it in the darkest shade of midnight, whosoever incarnates in this lifetime as The Devil, whosoever pets demons in the palm of their hand with stars in their eyes, and takes tragedy on the chin unfazed, only this lucky stroke, this species of freak, this bastard child of fate, this monster of the abyss, can knock the sun king off his throne of piled skulls.

In this tragically decadent world, with its shallow culture filled to the brim and spilling over the sides with masochists of every stripe, all of whom sacrifice blood and bone on the altar of idealism, the antitheist must be suicidal at the least, as the preliminary prerequisite. Do not risk this apocalyptic disillusionment unless one can afford to become an unseen ghost who passes through the walls of society. Food feels cumbersome, sex feels like a chore, and one’s own skin feels like it cuts off circulation. To strip off the veil of god—and god here encompasses all absolutist ideology—exposes the fraudulence of everything. Suddenly everything feels like a pebble in a shoe because it is all so depressingly unnecessary. When you murder god, a nuclear winter ensues, and by the looks of society that arctic darkness may never lift.

48. Theogony.

If humans conceived god and then they abort god, what does that say about god? Better still: what does it say about humans?

Does not the capacity to birth a god rank them above divine?

The flip-side: if humans conceived god and then believed that god created them in reverse, what does that say about humans?

Does not a parent who believes their own child gave birth to them rank below an animal? Even a worm knows its own eggs.

I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? […] You have made your way from worm to man, and much within you is still worm. […] Even the wisest among you is still a hybrid of plant and ghost. But do I bid you become ghosts or plants? […]

Man is a rope stretched between animal and the Übermensch—a rope over an abyss. […] What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and not a goal…
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Aphorism 3-4

49. Immortal Combat.

David slew Goliath with a deadly accurate blow to the forehead. Likewise, to slay god one needs only a single fatal strike: to obliterate his ontology—his notional being.
Nonetheless, the author will assassinate god with two kinds of strikes—the first to kill it, the second to certify it cannot resurrect.

Formal nomenclature of these refutations:

Qualitative: Ontology
Valuative: Epistemology, morality, aesthetics

50. The World’s First Fan Fiction.

No theist has ever validly proven that divinity exists—not logically, not empirically, not any way. They merely presume it lives in their thousands of tautological mythologies. At best, they define god into existence.

In reality, the god-character is the world’s oldest and most popular fictional protagonist, followed by Bilbo Baggins, Harry Potter, and Luke Skywalker. Every mainstream bookstore and library houses multiple shelves that feature a variety of editions, versions, translations and interpretations of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish fiction. Although, unlike Baggins, Potter and Skywalker, the god-character has been portrayed in every demographic as virtually every sex, race, animal, tree, plant, stone, weather, season, and force of nature in thousands of alternate universes. When one strips away the romantic pomp and circumstance, religious literature is nothing but the longest and biggest collaborative co-authorship project between billions of people in history; a global human undertaking that has weaved together the most elaborate fan fiction for a single character ever.

All recorded civilizations—repeat: all recorded civilizations—have re-imagined this same god-character in their own mythical or mystical fashion, often deifying and diabolizing names and personas from one another. And yet despite this monolithic tradition over millennia, nobody has confirmed in any conclusive way that the being exists for real; everybody just sort of took everybody else’s word for it as if it did not matter.

In a certain sense, the god-hypothesis does not need to be disproven because it has never been proven. Due to this, any time an atheist does charity to dismantle the falsity of divinity, they deserve acknowledgement for their generosity.

Yes—the reader read that right. When an atheist exorcises the ghost of god back to the void, they do so charitably.

51. Ontology: God as Zombie.

Theologians have long defined god as a perfect being. A perfect being necessarily consists of perfect qualities, i.e., it contains perfect character traits, perfect presence, perfect time, etc.

Alas! A perfect being can never change because it exists in an eternal condition of flawlessness. The tiniest little edit ruins its perfection forever. Thus, god refers to a frozen being, a fixed being, a static being, an ossified being, a fossilized being, a dead being.

The English lexicon possesses a word for this: corpse.

The ontology behind perfect being remains a purely hypothetical notion; the only citable example of perfect being in reality lies in the rigor mortis of a lifeless body—it has no functions, no processes, it becomes static.

God cannot be alive because life requires constant change. God could only assume form in reality as a corpse. Technically, even a dead body decays and mutates, but the premise stands. When a theologian defines god as perfect being, he unwittingly declares the death of god. When a theist claims god to be alive, he unknowingly classifies god as the living dead.

The amusing absurdity of theology: god as an undead zombie.

52. Epistemology: God as Boogieman.

Epistemology refers to the manner by which humans validate knowledge. In this postmodern era, scientific empiricism acts as the grounds for epistemology.

Greek philosopher Aristotle has become known as the great ancient champion and purveyor of empiricism. The term derives from Greek empeirikos, which means experience or reality. Ergo, empiricism requires physical evidence in order for a hypothesis to pass as a valid theory. Believe it or not, in science nobody can prove a theory per se—they can only falsify bad ideas and view whatever remains as tentatively valid. Hence the popular maxim: science is never settled.

Point blank: the god-hypothesis is unempirical and therefore unscientific and thus fails the requirements of epistemology. A scientist cannot falsify the claim that a deity created the cosmos; a biologist cannot verify the claim that an immaterial soul exists inside the human body. Not only does god remain unproven, it cannot be proven. How does an astronomer confirm the location of heaven and hell, or Mount Olympus and Hades—which, by the by, provides yet another example of how the authors of Christianity borrowed from Greek culture, in particular from the celestial and infernal landscapes of their mythical other-worlds.

Theists generally define god as a being who observes and lives with people omnipresently at all times. God as spook that haunts bedrooms? God as boogieman?

53. Morality: God as Freddy Krueger.

The pathos of tragedy—the gut wrench a witness feels when they watch disaster befall a good person. They close their eyes, shake their head, and exclaim: what a tragedy! That person did not deserve that fate!

Man still has no answer to the question: why do bad things happen to good people? This mystery has plagued him since the inception of religion—hell, this question fostered the advent of religion!

The gods hate me? The universe despises me? I did something wrong? I have offended nature?

No! A thousand times no!

It is nothing short of remarkable that humanity still cannot stare reality straight in its cosmic eyes and affirm: you owe us nothing, and we owe you thing. Friend—the answer to this riddle is that no riddle exists. The only exit from morality’s circular logic is to never plunge into its infinite loop in the first place. Moral absolutism swallows a thinker whole in its bottomless quicksand.

Cosmic morality does not exist; hence disaster strikes good people every day. True cosmic justice would necessitate that all events unfold equivalent to the moral value of their original cause. A person who acts ethically 95 percent of the time would then need to experience good fortune 95 percent of the time. Inversely, a corrupt villain who deceives and defrauds would need to suffer tragedy ordinarily. But friend, don’t evil people tend to… excel?

This leaves two possibilities: either the cosmos is devoid of morality or the cosmos possesses inverse causality and bestows fortune upon the evil and tragedy upon the noble to variant degrees. In the latter circumstance, moral pessimism becomes the rule—the cosmos itself becomes evil mainly.

The traditional theist defines god as a perfectly moral being who created the cosmos. If that flawless entity failed to infuse morality into its creation, then it cannot be flawless, ergo god does not exist. If that flawless entity did infuse morality into its creation, then that entity qualifies as evil because it victimizes innocent people with a serial frequency. Children born into slavery in the Middle East? Half of Europe decimated by the Black Plague? Malaria slaughters entire tribes in Africa like a vicious ghost army every year.

So which does the reader prefer: no god and no cosmic morality or a merciless god with the ethics of a serial killer?
God as horror movie villain? God as Freddy Krueger?
The monk screams: wait, wait! A perfectly moral god exists, but he granted everyone a soul with free will. Now god snuggles on a couch in apathetic bliss whilst cherubs feed him grapes in heaven.

Oh, sad little monk, one cannot hate you for trying. But god still qualifies as evil in that absurd scenario. He still created a cosmos where natural disaster devastates whole populations all the time, regardless of individual free will—if that even exists. On the main, the deity’s creation generally plagues human life with no rhyme or reason.

Did the infant born with AIDs inflict that upon herself through her free will? An earthquake in Haiti terminated 316,000 innocent men, women, and children in 2010. Did their free will cause that brutal natural disaster?

At what point does the theist acknowledge that fate can impose devastation upon innocent people because the universe has no innate morality to moderate it?

If god exists, the heinous monster deserves nothing less than an Inquisition-style torture and death.

54. Aesthetics: God as Frankenstein.

Golden halos, lighthearted angels, billowy clouds, flowing white robes… Renaissance painters depicted their monistic god in the loftiest, most beautiful aesthetic they could imagine. Or, perhaps a contemporary New Age motif of pantheism… photos of spiral galaxies and rainbow nebulae. Or, maybe a Wiccan polytheistic portrayal of the goddess… a nude, innocently sexual woman with long red hair seated on a giant mushroom in a serene meadow; she has befriended the morning songbird and evening firefly; baby deer bring her fresh fruit in the afternoon. So darling! So adorable! So lovely! So… boring.

Artists tends to characterize their god according to what they consider the quintessence of cleanliness and health. Does anybody find it peculiar that theists never depict their god as a filthy, cancerous troll—one who eats shit, and lives amongst the jackals?

If god is defined as the being of perfect beauty and health whom created the cosmos, then why does ugliness and illness exist? Did this flawless being forget to infuse humanity with perfect health too, the way it failed with morality?

The New Ager screams: oh, oh, oh! Wait! Humans possess immortality, but simply have not unlocked it yet. If only everybody ate ten bananas, five apples, and three plates of tofu every day, the species would live forever.

To which the author retorts: every single human being who has ever lived has also died. Do not talk about immortality when death has a statistical rate of 100 percent certainty!
If god created man in his own image—as a reflection of itself—and man suffers deformity, illness, sickness, retardation and death, then must not god look like a shit-eating troll? A mishmash of odds and ends stitched together into a freak? God as Frankenstein’s monster?

55. The Apocalypse.

All ridicule of god aside, the death of faith in this nonentity does not merely entail the death of the god-character per se. It demolishes the earthly foundation on which all ideology stands. When god collapses dead into his own footprint, it sends shockwaves across the soul of humankind. It detonates a veritable armageddon of the psyche; one which betides the Age of Nihilism with a nuclear winter of the intellect at a magnitude unexperienced in the species’ history.

Quite literally, the English lexicon does not possess the necessary terminology to define the substance and scope of this global ideological cataclysm. For the death of god denotes the death of idealism in mankind. The most toxic intellectual venom caused mankind to fall into a coma over ten thousand years ago. Who can possibly prognosticate what illness and madness will ensue when he finally opens his eyes and sees reality for the first time, moreover, when it dawns on him how much evil he committed in his stupor? His ocean of tears would drown the earth.