“He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.”

That is what Mircea Eliade said about “modern nonreligious man.” He had explained that our religious ancestors imitated the ways of their gods to realize their human potential, but that modern nonreligious people, which is what we are really, no matter how religious we may imagine we are, believe we realize our potential by demystifying the world – by killing God.

Eliade’s association of killing God with freedom lingers in my thoughts. It lingers with my memory of Alfred Kazin making this association in God and the American Writer, with my memory of Nietzsche’s Parable of the Madman and Thomas Hardy’s poem God’s Funeral. It lingers with something Satan said in Paradise Lost about how he would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. It lingers with Patrick Henry’s battle cry, “Give me liberty or give me death.”

It is true. The price of freedom is the death of God.