The so-called "death of god" was a critical component of nietzsche's philosophy; without it, none of his claims make sense. explain what nietzsche meant by the phrase "god is dead" and how that claim drove his search for the "overman" or ubermensch, and the "master morality."

Nietzsche, the German philosopher, is well-known by his sentence “god is dead”. This words should not be taken literally since what Nietzsche wanted to say was that he never believed in God so he (God) could have never died as he never existed, so this sentence is a metaphor. Nietzsche wanted to express that the Christian God is no longer the believable source of faith of absolute moral principles.  

Nietzsche was an atheist during his adult life, so he never believed in God’s existence. Throughout his sentence, Nietzsche express not only the fact that God died, but also the fact that the human being killed him with the purpose of reaching a greater understanding of the universe. In other words, when the human being question himself, he killed God. But, for Nietzsche, the dead of God unleashes a certain crisis since society was born and established with these moral principles.  

With that being said, the “overman” is understood by Nietzsche as the person who is able to create his/her own principle’s system by identifying as “good” everything that proceeds from his/her own genuine will of power. Thus, traditional principles represented by Christianism subdue the weakest people to a “slave morality”.  Nietzsche thought these principles should disappear in order to find new ones that could represent his prototype of the ideal human being, “the overman”.