"Then there is nobody above man. Then there is nobody to dominate man, nobody to decide for man. If there is nothing higher than man, then freedom is absolute. But howsoever appealing the argument, it is fundamentally wrong; it is based on wrong premises.

"The declaration that God is dead is in a sense true: the false god, the man-made God, is certainly dead. The God of the temples and the churches and the synagogues and the mosques and the gurudwaras is certainly dead. The God that man has imagined in his own image, the God that man has made according to his own wishes, the God that is nothing but a projection of man's mind and desires, that God certainly is dead.

"But that God had really never existed; it is dead because it has never existed in the first place. And it is good that the man-made God is dead, because when the artificial is removed the natural can sprout. When the false ceases the true can explode. The untrue must cease for the truth to be.

"I look at atheism with great respect, because it removes the false. It has a great work to do. Its work is not against God; its work really is for God, because it destroys all man-made idols of God. And then, in that emptiness, the true God can become manifest, can be revealed.

"All the great saints have been against the false god. They will agree perfectly with Nietzsche, Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre. Of course, they will agree for a totally different reason: not that the true God is dead, not that the true God can ever be dead. To say that God is dead is a contradiction in terms if by God you mean the true God, the God 'that which is.' It is a contradiction in terms because God is nothing but life, and how can life be dead? It goes on and on, it is an unending process. Life is a pilgrimage with no beginning and no end; God is another name for life.

"Those who know, they know God as the fragrance of life, the perfume of existence, the very ground of being."