The following content is purely satirical and entirely fictional.
Authorities report that an undergraduate at Princeton University has had an insight that may ripple across the intellectual world for centuries to come: “God is dead.”
“One night I was lying in my room, and it just came to me,” said Jason Antideus ’25, a student living in Butler College's Monastery, “that God is just like, dead, man. And that, what's more — if you really think about it, we killed him. With like, technology and iPhones and stuff. It’s depressing shit, man!”
Antideus, a prospective philosophy major, has had a history of startling insights.
“In middle school, I said this thing that I guess was really smart. ‘You shouldn’t violate the categorical imperative, you idiot!’ And it spiraled out from there,” he said.
In high school, Antideus debunked long-held postulates left and right: “Boom, boom, boom. All these doctrines were just gone, all because of me. I think it’s a big reason why I got in here. That — and I volunteered a lot at my local no-kill shelter.”
A professor in the philosophy department, who requested to remain anonymous, gave her thoughts on the breakthrough at hand.
“This really opens a lot of doors for us in the philosophy department. We are so lucky to have a luminary like Jason here on campus with us. ‘God is dead.’ Wow. Who could have thought of that?” she said.
As far as his next steps, Antideus plans to “return to the grind.”
“I have this ‘History of German Thought’ class, that’s just, like, killing me,” he wrote in a GroupMe DM to The Daily PrincetOnion. “We’re reading this guy — Neechy [sic], maybe? — and I don’t know, he doesn’t seem super important, so I might just skip it.”
The Department of Religion has declined to comment for this article.
Daniel Viorica is a writer with Satire and The Prospect, and is from the mountains outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. He can be reached at viorica@princeton.edu.