"I have slain all gods—for the sake of morality!" — Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche Although often regarded as an atheist who did not take religion seriously, Nietzsche in fact thought deeply about the gods and how they functioned in the human psyche. The son of a Lutheran pastor who dropped theology in college after only one semester, Nietzsche was a profound religious thinker who devoted much of his writing to reevaluating the concept of god that prevailed in nineteenth-century Germany. As this volume demonstrates, Nietzsche sharply discerned between the positive and negative aspects of various gods, including the Christian God, the Jewish God (Yahweh), the Greek gods (especially Apollo and Dionysus), and the Buddha. The essays further touch upon Nietzsche's relationship to prominent religious thinkers of his time, as well as his influence on later religious thinkers, such as Martin Buber and Paul Tillich. Wide-ranging and diverse, Nietzsche and the Gods will be indispensable to our continuing understanding of Nietzsche's thought and to the broader study of philosophy and religion.

In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche observes that Greek tragedy gathered people together as a community in the sight of their gods, and argues that modernity can be rescued from 'nihilism' only through the revival of such a festival. This is commonly thought to be a view which did not survive the termination of Nietzsche's early Wagnerianism, but Julian Young argues, on the basis of an examination of all of Nietzsche's published works, that his religious communitarianism in fact persists through all his writings. What follows, it is argued, is that the mature Nietzsche is neither an 'atheist', an 'individualist', nor an 'immoralist': he is a German philosopher belonging to a German tradition of conservative communitarianism - though to claim him as a proto-Nazi is radically mistaken. This important reassessment will be of interest to all Nietzsche scholars and to a wide range of readers in German philosophy.

"David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer" attacks David Strauss's "The Old and the New Faith: A Confession," which Nietzsche holds up as an example of the German thought of the time. He paints Strauss's "New Faith"— a scientifically-determined universal mechanism based on the progression of history—as a vulgar reading of history in the service of a degenerate culture. Nietzsche polemically attacks not only the book but also Strauss as a Philistine of pseudo-culture.

Examines Nietzsche's complex attitudes toward religion and his understanding of how particular religions and deities affect the intellectual, moral, and spiritual lives of their various proselytes and adherents.

Combining biography and a careful analysis of Nietzsche's writings from 1844-1900, this book explores Nietzsche's critique of Christianity, Judaism, and antisemitism. The first part of the book is concerned with psychological aspects and biographical elements. Part Two focuses on the ethical and political aspects of Nietzsche's views as presented in his mature writings: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Toward the Genealogy of Morals, and the Antichrist.

Nietzsche argued that metaphor is at the basis of language, concepts, and perception, making it the vehicle by which humans interpret the world. As such, metaphor has profound consequences for the nature of religion and of philosophy. Nietzsche, Metaphor, Religion connects Nietzsche's early writings on rhetoric and metaphor, especially as understood by contemporary French philosophers and literary theorists, with Nietzsche's later writings on religion. The result is a radically anti-foundationalist reading of Nietzsche's "philosophy of religion" as an unending series of metaphoric-literary agons or contests.

Hammer of the Gods presents Friedrich Nietzsche's most visionary, futuristic and apocalyptic philosophies and traces them against the disorder of the 20th century and the current postmillennial panic. This radical re-interpretation reveals Nietzsche as the only guide to the madness in our society, which he himself predicted over 100 years ago. It presents Nietzsche as a philosopher against the state and the herd of society. The text has been compiled, translated and edited by Dr Stephene Metcalf of the University of Warwick.