God is not a being. This is your beginning point. If this is so, then atheism rather than the opposite of theism, would be its highest expression. Or perhaps we need to speak of two kinds of atheism. One is an ontological atheism that is repeated in an age when God is dead. But the God that dies here is the God of being, a God that is no longer required by science and philosophy, and whose death, therefore, is only the end of a certain way of doing science and philosophy that famously no longer requires this hypothesis (a God that died in the pages of Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason, and certainly did not need Dawkins et al. to kill it off). What would the other atheism be? It would be a moral atheism, atheism redoubled and intensified. It would be more than the assertion that we do not need God for science and philosophy, but that we do not need God for our values either. It is this God that is murdered for the second time by Nietzsche, and this murder is far more frightening and unsettling than the rather tame euthanasia of the God of science and philosophy. What happens when the second God dies? Do we know what this means?
