God is dead
In his work The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed God’s death. In his view, without the presence of God, people would enjoy their freedom unhindered. He opined that “we” can hear the noise as God is being buried and smell the putrefaction. The only way that Nietzsche could reach the greatness within him was by overcoming his connection to religious ideals.
There are people who live like Friedrich’s Nietzsche’s “God is dead” (Friedrich & Thomas, 2006). One example is Thomas Jonathan Jackson Altizer. Alitzer is a theolegian and in his teachings, he has integrated Nietzsche’s concept. Just like Nietzsche who believed that on Jesus and his significance of the death on the cross, so does Alitzer; according to the publication on Time magazine titled Is God Dead?, Alitzer’s perception of “death of God” is the time-line between the moment the world was created until the time that Jesus was crucified on the cross.
According to Nietzsche, to become an overman or a superman, one needs to control his or her desires and use them in a way that is creative. So as to become an overman or a superman Alitzer needs to stop engaging scholars, leaders or other people in critical debates. As early as the 1960’s, Alitzer engaged other radical theologians like William Hamilton, Paul Van Buren and Gabriel Vahanian. Even he engaged a Jewish rabbi, Richard Rubenstein, in a critical discussion. In 1965 and 1966, Alitzer had his religious views published by Time magazine in a publication titled Is God Dead?
There were other religious discussions that Alitzer was engaged into with notable figures such as John Warwick Montgomery, a Lutheran evangelist, and Walter Ralston Martin, a justifier of the Christian countercult movement.
Alitzer needs to stop those religious critical debates so that he can become a superman, since the debates have done what he tries to explain more harm than good. The critical discussions have served a mighty blow to Alitzer as the debates have been against him; the evangelical theologians used philosophical, theological and methodological questioning and have found him pointed out to his weaknesses such as through the methods that he uses to understand the Biblical literature and his dependence on Hegelian dialectic reasoning. Since Altizer is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, State University of New York at Stony Brook; he should use lectures and scholarly works such as his memoir “Living the Death of God” to tell his arguments, rather than using religious critical debates that are used against him.
Nietzsche describes three metamorphoses on how a man can become a superman. These metamorphoses are the camel, the lion, and the child respectively. The camel is associated with this because of the tendency of camels to take slow strides that appear needing more effort. The camel depicts the normal human being, who adheres to the norms of the society and God’s teachings. What he adheres to occupies the space the he would have otherwise of knowing the “reality.” In this man is required to renounce what he he is “bound” to. Next is the lion. The lion depicts brevity and independence. The lion is a spirit that confronts the “values” that bounds it and instead, accommodate new possibilities. Lastly, is the child. A child depicts innocence. The child is the new beginning. The child is the starting of the journey and as the child grows up, so is the creation of a new world.

Reference
Nietzsche, F. & Common, T. (2006). The Gay Science. Mineola, NY : Dover Publications.