Nietzsche vs. Religion

“Authenticity, in religious practices or otherwise, offers no secure protection against the sense of loss that accompanies a recognition of the groundlessness of all one’s practices. Only average everydayness or inauthenticity could do that, and the one is doomed to be periodically shattered and the other is (presumably) not available to the smart folks like us who have now read Nietzsche and Heidegger.” --James C. Edwards. The Plain Sense of Things. p. 148.

I’m grading essays on Nietzsche’s use of the term “nihilism” in Beyond Good and Evil. Some of my students can’t seem to deal with the assignment at all because they are so blinded by the fear and rage they feel over Nietzsche’s apparent atheism. Some of my students aren’t enraged, but they still want to know if Nietzsche was an atheist.

It seems to me he probably was, but I don’t think his thought requires atheism. What it requires is an interrogation of, and thus, a possible rejection of our belief in God as ___________. For many of us belief in God, like a host of other beliefs, appears to us as a necessity. Without God, life would be meaningless, valueless, and devoid of moral judgment . . . at least that’s how many of us feel, so we cling to the belief despite all the evidence against that proposition.

Of course, there could be no evidence against the proposition “God exist” because the terms “God” and “existence” are so slippery, one might even say, “so devoid of content, that no logic or evidence could falsify such a claim (unless “incoherence” counts as an argument against such a proposition).
But Nietzsche, at least in Beyond Good and Evil, only asserts that most people have lost faith in the “discredited” God as “father,” “judge,” “rewarder,” etc. It seems to me that he is right about this. Many (all?) premodern people did see the world as essentially “just,” with God, or karma, or something punishing the evil and rewarding the good. (The sorority girl version of this dogma persists: “I believe everything happens for a reason.”) But in the modern world we doubt this. (We don’t assume that only bad people get cancer and only good people get rich.)

And yet . . . we cling to the notion of God as rewarder, or we push the rewards and punishments more securely into another (invisible) realm (either heaven/hell or some psychological state of satisfaction/torment), but in the end, Nietzsche would argue, this is wishful thinking and, worse, a denial of the importance of our lives here and now and a failure to analyze the cause of our psychological torments and satisfactions.
Worst of all, the modern believer is so thoroughly soaked in his own nihilism he must (violently) repudiate the differences he sees in others. The rewarder/judge he claims to see in God (but doesn’t really see because the modern religious person is biggest nihilist of all) must be made present through the actions of the “believer” himself who then goes on to judge and reward in God’s place, including judging and rewarding himself.