In God is Dead. God Remains Dead. And We Have Killed Him., Friedrich Nietzsche examines the role religion plays in society, first as a means for explaining things beyond the phenomenology of human experience, and then as a means of social control. In his Critique of Religion, Nietzsche writes, “Christianity is a movement bearing all the marks of degeneracy, consisting of all sorts of refuse and waste; it is not the expression of the downfall of a race, but from the very beginning an aggregate of morbid elements which huddle together” (pg. 16). He continues, “The Church is precisely that against which Jesus preached and against which he taught his disciples. There is no God who died for our sins, no salvation through faith and no resurrection after death: this is all false coin when compared to the true Christianity and for which that sinister, pig-headed fellow [Paul] must be held responsible” (pg. 22). Nietzsche builds on the work of Arthur Schopenhauer in this volume’s titular essay (pg. 61). Schopenhauer’s book, The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion, similarly belongs to the Penguin Great Ideas series. Describing the role of organized religion in deceiving society, Nietzsche writes, “All preachers of morality, like all theologians, have a bad habit in common: all of them try to persuade man that his in in a very bad way, and that a severe, ultimate, radical cure is necessary. And because mankind as a whole has too eagerly lent its ears to these doctrines for centuries, men have come to believe something of the superstition that things are going quite badly, so that they are now far too ready to sigh” (pgs. 94-95). He concludes, “The greatest event of recent times – the fact that ‘God is dead’, that the belief in the Christian God has become untenable – has already begun to cast its first shadows over Europe” (pg. 106). Thus, Nietzsche seeks to free rational thought from the strictures of organized faith and its stifling societal power. Another good entry in the Penguin Great Ideas and a book that has influenced a great deal of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy as well as popular culture, most recently with the Fox/Netflix series Lucifer referencing it in the tenth episode of its second season. ( )