No theologian, no founder of religions thought about this, that if you accept God as the creator, you are destroying the whole dignity of consciousness, of freedom, of love. You are taking all responsibility from man, and you are taking all his freedom away. You are reducing the whole of existence to just the whim of a strange fellow called God.

But Nietzsche's statement is bound to be only one side of the coin. He is perfectly right, but only about one side of the coin. He has made a very significant and meaningful statement, but he has forgotten one thing, which was bound to happen because his statement is based on rationality, logic and intellect. It is not based on meditation.

Man is free, but free for what? If there is no God and man is free, that will simply mean man is now capable of doing anything, good or bad; there is nobody to judge him, nobody to forgive him. This freedom will be simply licentiousness.

There comes the other side. You remove God and you leave man utterly empty. Of course, you declare his freedom, but to what purpose? How is he going to use his freedom creatively, responsibly? How is he going to avoid freedom being reduced to licentiousness?

Friedrich Nietzsche was not aware of any meditations -- that is the other side of the coin.

Man is free, but his freedom can only be a joy and a blessing to him if he is rooted in meditation.

Remove God -- that is perfectly okay, he has been the greatest danger to human freedom -- but give man also some meaning and significance, some creativity, some receptivity, some path to find his eternal existence.

Zen is the other side of the coin. Zen does not have any God, that's its beauty.

But it has a tremendous science to transform your consciousness, to bring so much awareness to you that you cannot commit evil. It is not a commandment from outside, it comes from your innermost being. Once you know your center of being, once you know you are one with the cosmos -- and the cosmos has never been created, it has been there always and always, and will be there always and always, from eternity to eternity -- once you know your luminous being, your hidden Gautam Buddha, it is impossible to do anything wrong, it is impossible to do anything evil, it is impossible to do any sin.

Friedrich Nietzsche in his last phase of life became almost insane. He was hospitalized, kept in a mad asylum. Such a great giant, what happened to him? He had concluded: "God is dead," but it is a negative conclusion. He became empty, but his freedom was meaningless. There was no joy in it because it was only freedom from God, but for what? Freedom has two sides: from and for. The other side was missing. That drove him insane.

Emptiness always drives people insane. You need some grounding, you need some centering, you need some relationship with existence. God being dead, all your relationship with existence was finished. God being dead, you were left alone without roots. A tree cannot live without roots, nor can you.

God was non-existential, but it was a good consolation. It used to fill people's interior, although it was a lie. But even a lie, repeated thousands and thousands of times for millennia, becomes almost a truth. God has been a great consolation to people in their fear, in their dread, in their awareness of old age and death, and beyond -- the unknown darkness.

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"God is dead." - Nietzsche? | Yahoo Answers