God Is Dead?

This was released as the first single from 13, the first album Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler have recorded together since 1978's Never Say Die!.

This Sabbath doom anthem finds Ozzy questioning the existence of a higher being, given some of the hard times on Earth. The Blizzard of Ozz winds up by concluding that "I don't believe that God is dead." Speaking to BBC Radio 1's Zane Lowe, Osbourne explained how he came up with the song title: "I was at somebody's office and there was a magazine on the table and it just said the words 'God Is Dead.' And I suddenly thought, with 9/11 and all these terrorist things in the name of religion and how many people have died [because of] religion, when you think about the tragedy that's happened throughout time, it just came in me head. You would think by now their God would stop people [from] dying in the name of. So I just thought, people must think there ain't no God, God is dead. And it just hit me. And I just started singing 'God is dead' [when I was laying down] rough vocals [in the studio] and Geezer gave me the lyrics about it.

Geezer is the lyricist in Black Sabbath," he continued; "I wrote a few sets of lyrics, but he's the main lyricist. I come up with the ideas and he fills the blanks in. At the end of the [song], there's still a bit of hope, because at the end, I sing, 'I don't believe that God is dead.' It's just a question of when you see something dreadful like people killing each other with bombs and blowing tube trains or the World Trade Center, you think people must go, 'There is no God.' [But] it's a load of B.S., you know."

The single's artwork was created by Heather Cassils and features an image of Friedrich Nietzsche in front of an atomic explosion. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) first came up with the phrase "God is dead" in his 1882 book, The Gay Science and repeated it in his famous work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche wasn't talking about God dying in a literal sense, but as someone who no longer believed in such a cosmic order. He believed the Christian God was no longer a viable source of any absolute moral principles.