The classic belief in God is dead for many people nowadays, but I think other conceptions have and probably will continue to be able to replace it, maybe even for as long as we are around.

• The future of worship of "something beyond" is interesting to consider. I think it will always be around, no matter what it morphs into. The possibilities for its morph are endless.

• Interesting also to think on is the increasing amount of people even in the "West" who have come to deeply consider classically Eastern notions of Divinity: That, for example, we really are all one experience, just simply experiencing each life separately. This makes intuitive sense if some kind of fundamental level of reality is a process of experience (or just a process in general) rather than a separable set of selves of experience. Alan Watts's Out of Your Mind series goes into this. This kind of "God" seems not quite to be dying out in the same way the other Western type appears to be.

Commentary

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."

""Could it be possible! This old saint has not heard in his forest that God is dead!""

• Nietzsche's famous quote appearing in several instances but most famously the two cited above, intends to express his idea that as a result of the Enlightenment period, the possibility of the existence of God has been quashed.

• Western civilisation had been primarily Christian in character since the Roman Empire, up until the Age of Enlightenment.

• This period brought about a huge societal shift from sacred revelation to valuing scientific rationality, and the rise of philosophical materialist and naturalist theories which seemed to disprove any previously regarded evidence of the existence of God.

• It is thought to primarily refer to the Christian notion of a God which was most significantly affected by The Enlightenment, however in later work Nietzsche writes, "Dead are all the Gods".

• In actual fact, Nietzsche was an atheist. The death of God did not refer to a literal belief in a God who was no longer living, but that our idea of a God has now died.

• Nietzsche also referred to the death of God as the sign of an impeding moral crisis. He argues in 'Twilight of the Idols' that "[Christian] morality is by no means self-evident", hence "When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet.".

• Thus by saying 'God is Dead', Nietzsche also meant 'morality is dead', and fears nihilism shall ensue as we find no reason to live.