A maneuvering:

We misunderstand the utterance "God is dead" as an atheist theological argument, as is obvious. But just as surely we misunderstand it as a description of historical precedent--that a God once lived amongst his people, and has died to them. Rather, it is a proclamation about the nature of God, and an offering of a predicate to God. "God is omnipotent, omnipresent--and God is also dead. " The omnimorbid. Much more, though, it is a making of something as God, putting it in the place of God. What I'm saying is, the logic goes as such: God is dead. Therefore, death is God.

That is, the totality is dead; death swallows up life. When we get down to it, death is truth, while life is something about death, and shows up within death. It is no coincidence that Nietzsche starts to wax materialistic when offering proofs of the eternal recurrence, speaking of configurations of matter, forces, and the law of conservation of energy. Matter, in materialism, is dead. The eternal recurrence is just this: that everything has already happened; it will happen again, but only as it already has--given each moment a perfectly rigid permanence. The present becomes meaningless, as it loses all of its determining power, and all spontaneity. The present just is the present as already-happened. The future also becomes defined by the past: what happens in the future is just what already happened. And to be past--and purely past--is just to be dead.

Surely there is another way.