Nietzsche's madman announces that humanity itself has killed God

In an 1882 passage of The Gay Science, Nietzsche has a madman run into a marketplace shouting that 'God is dead, and we have killed him,' warning that science and secularism had destroyed the shared belief that once grounded morality and meaning. He wasn't celebrating atheism; he thought humanity hadn't yet grasped the consequences, and would need to build new values to fill the void.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science — §125, 'The Madman', 1882
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