DECLARED AT THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY THAT GOD IS DEAD!
This put paid to the idea of a higher superior power, symbolized by the figure of God, controlling mankind’s individual and social behaviour through an entire set of moral prohibitions and taboos, the basis for which are the Ten Commandments.
Following the idea of the death of God and the apparent loosening of moral injunctions within Western society, the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81) is, according to the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), supposed to have declared: