What it does remind us is that 'God' is not to be separated from the quest for the Kingdom of God and is not and cannot be the object of any detached 'scientific' contemplation. Heidegger's critique of onto-theology is also driving a wedge between speaking of God and the aims of science - not so as to get rid of God but rather to free God from a false objectification.

But my point is that 'the death of God' is not something like the Battle of Waterloo or Magna Charta. It's not a historic event of that kind. For many people it hasn't happened yet. Others - to recur to an earlier question - are still in the phase of intense shock.

I'm not sure that I 'am' a philosopher - but I do engage with questions that are generally recognized as philosophical questions, such as the character of human existence and what makes for a good human life.

What it does remind us is that 'God' is not to be separated from the quest for the Kingdom of God and is not and cannot be the object of any detached 'scientific' contemplation. Heidegger's critique of onto-theology is also driving a wedge between speaking of God and the aims of science - not so as to get rid of God but rather to free God from a false objectification.

In brief, I regard love as a more decisive focus of meaning than death. In terms of Heidegger's argument, this is because I think he misdescribes the importance of the deaths of others and focuses exclusively on my relation to my own death. But, in reality, the deaths of others have a more urgent and immediate impact on our lives than the purely notional knowledge that I too will one day die.

I still read a lot about teenage angst! Of course, any kind of mourning CAN become pathological and then it 'has to stop', but to move through life untouched by the loss of hopes, beliefs and aspirations once cherished is also questionable.

And perhaps this has to do with what I sense is a turning away from the idea of religion as being about conserving a certain heritage from the past towards religion as having to do with how we orientate ourselves to the future, to all we truly long for, to hope.