Is "God" dead?

In his brilliant, “The Parable of a Madman”, Nietzsche writes metaphorically (note: he gives this away by referring to it as a “parable”). In the parable, an often-quoted snippet—-”God is Dead”—-is bandied about by insecure college freshmen. Of course, given his bilious nature, Nietzsche likely didn’t mean something like a Primary Mover or even Spirit or the Divine. He alludes to the growing self-referentiality of our species and our seemingly complete dismissal, in general, of mysticism and the sacredness of forces that lie beyond the comprehension of our tiny skulls. Everything is becoming a material to consume or in which to engage in a transactional exchange, even the human flesh that we embody (think of sex trafficking), even the mysteries of Time and Space. With a sort of unconscious hubris, we have chosen to defile the Unmanifested by anthropomorphizing No-Thing or what Siddartha Guatama shrewdly used the Pali word for “emptiness” to describe. One can’t consume or engage in a transnational exchange with Emptiness. Here in the Americas, we’ve mass produced and mass reduced the notion of “God” into a religious image of a young, blue-eyed, Caucasian man with a full beard (despite all reliable data suggesting that the man, Jesus, looked more like Mohammed Atta than Paul Newman and whose Middle Eastern province was under the direct rule of the Roman Emperor Tiberius, of whom we have remarkably detailed facial sculptures.) I may be picking on the Christians (because it’s fun) but. look at Donald Trump and tell me that we haven’t killed the sacred, the mysterious, the spirit—-all those things that Nietzsche playfully refers to as “God” in the parable. Yes, in this parable, there is no doubt that '‘God is dead.” Have you ever put Nietzsche’s pithy and provocative phrase back into context within his parable? If not, well, why not do so now? For your reading pleasure and contemplation below.

“Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off of us? With what water could we purify ourselves now?”