Friedrich Nietzsche God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers -- at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think! \par \par -Nietzsche} "Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously !"- Friedrich Nietzsche, "Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual." - Friedrich Nietzsche "The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad." - Friedrich Nietzsche Destiny of Christianity. -- Christianity came into existence in order to lighten the heart; but now it has first to burden the heart so as afterwards to be able to lighten it. Consequently it shall perish. ( from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.119, R.J. Hollingdale transl.) But in the end one also has to understand that the needs that religion has satisfied and philosophy is now supposed to satisfy are not immutable; they can be weakened and exterminated. Consider, for example, that Christian distress of mind that comes from sighing over ones inner depravity and care for ones salvation - all concepts originating in nothing but errors of reason and deserving, not satisfaction, but obliteration. ( from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.27, R.J. Hollingdale transl. } Historical refutation as the definitive refutation.-- In former times, one sought to prove that there is no God - today one indicates how the belief that there is a God arose and how this belief acquired its weight and importance: a counter-proof that there is no God thereby becomes superfluous.- When in former times one had refuted the 'proofs of the existence of God' put forward, there always remained the doubt whether better proofs might not be adduced than those just refuted: in those days atheists did not know how to make a clean sweep. (from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 95, R.J. Hollingdale transl. } What distinguishes us [scientists] from the pious and the believers is not the quality but the quantity of belief and piety; we are contented with less. But if the former should challenge us: then be contented and appear to be contented! - then we might easily reply: 'We are, indeed, not among the least contented. You, however, if your belief makes you blessed then appear to be blessed! Your faces have always been more injurious to your belief than our objections have! If these glad tidings of your Bible were written on your faces, you would not need to insist so obstinately on the authority of that book... As things are, however, all your apologies for Christianity have their roots in your lack of Christianity; with your defence plea you inscribe your own bill of indictment. (from Nietzsche's Assorted Opinions and Maxims,s. 98, R.J. Hollingdale transl. } Other fears, other securities.-- Christianity had brought into life a quite novel and limitless perilousness, and therewith quite novel securities, pleasures, recreations and evaluations of all things. Our century denies this perilousness, and does so with a good conscience: and yet it continues to drag along with it the old habits of Christian security, Christian enjoyment, recreation, evaluation! It even drags them into its noblest arts and philosophies! How worn out and feeble, how insipid and awkward, how arbitrarily fanatical and, above all, how insecure all this must appear, now that the fearful antithesis to it, the omnipresent fear of the Christian for his eternal salvation, has been lost. (from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 57, R.J. Hollingdale transl. } Doubt as sin.-- Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature- is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned. (from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 89, R.J. Hollingdale transl. } The compassionate Christian.-- The reverse side of Christian compassion for the suffering of one's neighbor is a profound suspicion of all the joy of one's neighbor, of his joy in all that he wants to do and can. (from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 80, R.J. Hollingdale transl. } The despairing.-- Christianity possesses the hunters instinct for all those who can by one means or another be brought to despair - of which only a portion of mankind is capable. It is constantly on their track, it lies in wait for them. Pascal attempted the experiment of seeing whether, with the aid of the most incisive knowledge, everyone could not be brought to despair: the experiment miscarried, to his twofold despair. (from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 64, R.J. Hollingdale transl. } What a crude intellect is good for.-- The Christian church is an encyclopaedia of prehistoric cults and conceptions of the most diverse origin, and that is why it is so capable of proselytizing: it always could, and it can still go wherever it pleases and it always found, and always finds something similar to itself to which it can adapt itself and gradually impose upon it a Christian meaning. It is not what is Christian in it, but the universal heathen character of its usages, which has favored the spread of this world-religion; its ideas, rooted in both the Jewish and the Hellenic worlds, have from the first known how to raise themselves above national and racial niceties and exclusiveness as though these were merely prejudices. One may admire this power of causing the most various elements to coalesce, but one must not forget the contemptible quality that adheres to this power: the astonishing crudeness and self-satisfiedness of the church's intellect during the time it was in process of formation, which permitted it to accept any food and to digest opposites like pebbles. (from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 70, R.J. Hollingdale transl. } The everyday Christian. -- If the Christian dogmas of a revengeful God, universal sinfulness, election by divine grace and the danger of eternal damnation were true, it would be a sign of weak-mindedness and lack of character not to become a priest, apostle or hermit and, in fear and trembling, to work solely on one's own salvation; it would be senseless to lose sight of ones eternal advantage for the sake of temporal comfort. If we may assume that these things are at any rate believed true, then the everyday Christian cuts a miserable figure; he is a man who really cannot count to three, and who precisely on account of his spiritual imbecility does not deserve to be punished so harshly as Christianity promises to punish him. (from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.116, R.J. Hollingdale transl. } The persecutor of God. -- Paul thought up the idea and Calvin rethought it, that for innumerable people damnation has been decreed from eternity, and that this beautiful world plan was instituted to reveal the glory of God: heaven and hell and humanity are thus supposed to exist - to satisfy the vanity of God! What cruel and insatiable vanity must have flared in the soul of the man who thought this up first, or second. Paul has remained Saul after all - the persecutor of God. (from Nietzsche's The Wanderer and his Shadow, R.J. Hollingdale transl. } The first Christian. All the world still believes in the authorship of the "Holy Spirit" or is at least still affected by this belief: when one opens the Bible one does so for "edification."... That it also tells the story of one of the most ambitious and obtrusive of souls, of a head as superstitious as it was crafty, the story of the apostle Paul--who knows this , except a few scholars? Without this strange story, however, without the confusions and storms of such a head, such a soul, there would be no Christianity... \par That the ship of Christianity threw overboard a good deal of its Jewish ballast, that it went, and was able to go, among the pagans--that was due to this one man, a very tortured, very pitiful, very unpleasant man, unpleasant even to himself. He suffered from a fixed idea--or more precisely, from a fixed, ever-present, never-resting question: what about the Jewish law? and particularly the fulfillment of this law? In his youth he had himself wanted to satisfy it, with a ravenous hunger for this highest distinction which the Jews could conceive - this people who were propelled higher than any other people by the imagination of the ethically sublime, and who alone succeeded in creating a holy god together with the idea of sin as a transgression against this holiness. Paul became the fanatical defender of this god and his law and guardian of his honor; at the same time, in the struggle against the transgressors and doubters, lying in wait for them, he became increasingly harsh and evilly disposed towards them, and inclined towards the most extreme punishments. And now he found that--hot-headed, sensual, melancholy, malignant in his hatred as he was-- he was himself unable to fulfill the law; indeed, and this seemed strangest to him, his extravagant lust to domineer provoked him continually to transgress the law, and he had to yield to this thorn. \par Is it really his "carnal nature" that makes him transgress again and again? And not rather, as he himself suspected later, behind it the law itself, which must constantly prove itself unfulfillable and which lures him to transgression with irresistable charm? But at that time he did not yet have this way out. He had much on his conscience - he hints at hostility, murder, magic, idolatry, lewdness, drunkenness, and pleasure in dissolute carousing - and... moments came when he said to himself:"It is all in vain; the torture of the unfulfilled law cannot be overcome."... The law was the cross to which he felt himself nailed: how he hated it! how he searched for some means to annihilate it--not to fulfill it any more himself! \par And finally the saving thought struck him,... "It is unreasonable to persecute this Jesus! Here after all is the way out; here is the perfect revenge; here and nowhere else I have and hold the annihilator of the law!"... Until then the ignominious death had seemed to him the chief argument against the Messianic claim of which the new doctrine spoke: but what if it were necessary to get rid of the law? \par The tremendous consequences of this idea, of this solution of the riddle, spin before his eyes; at one stroke he becomes the happiest man; the destiny of the Jews--no, of all men--seems to him to be tied to this idea, to this second of its sudden illumination; he has the thought of thoughts, the key of keys, the light of lights; it is around him that all history must revolve henceforth. For he is from now on the teacher of the annihilation of the law... \par This is the first Christian, the inventor of Christianity. Until then there were only a few Jewish sectarians. (from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s.68, Walter Kaufmann transl. } Speaking in a parable.--A Jesus Christ was possible only in a Jewish landscape--I mean one over which the gloomy and sublime thunder cloud of the wrathful Yahweh was brooding continually. Only here was the rare and sudden piercing of the gruesome and perpetual general day-night by a single ray of the sun experienced as if it were a miracle of "love" and the ray of unmerited "grace." Only here could Jesus dream of his rainbow and his ladder to heaven on which God descended to man. Everywhere else good weather and sunshine were considered the rule and everyday occurrences. (from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.137, Walter Kaufmann transl } Blind pupils. -- As long as a man knows very well the strength and weaknesses of his teaching, his art, his religion, its power is still slight. The pupil and apostle who, blinded by the authority of the master and by the piety he feels toward him, pays no attention to the weaknesses of a teaching, a religion, and soon usually has for that reason more power than the master. The influence of a man has never yet grown great without his blind pupils. To help a perception to achieve victory often means merely to unite it with stupidity so intimately that the weight of the latter also enforces the victory of the former. (from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.122, R.J. Hollingdale transl. } Change of Cast. -- As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples. (from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.118, R.J. Hollingdale transl. } Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life. (from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, p.23, Walter Kaufmann transl. } Christianity as antiquity.-- When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed - whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions - is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross -- how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed? (from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.405, R.J. Hollingdale transl. } "The pianist who performs the work of a master will have played best when he makes his listeners forget the master, \par when it seems as though he is relating a tale from his own life or is experiencing something at that very moment. -Nietzsche "I do not by any means know atheism as a result; even less as an event: it is a matter of course with me, from instinct. \par I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. (God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers -- at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!) -Nietzsche "Little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes." "In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point." "You who hate the Jews so, why did you adopt their religion?" "I call Christianity the *one* great curse, the *one* great intrinsic depravity, the *one* great instinct for revenge fo r which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, *petty* -- I call it the *one* mortal blemish of mankind." "Belief means not wanting to know what is true." "Though I drew this conclusion, now it draws me." "The belief that the world as it ought to be is, really exists, is a belief of the unproductive who do not des ire to create a world as it ought to be. It is a measure of the degree of strength of will to what extent one can do without meaning in things, to what extent one can endure to live in a meaningless world because one organizes a small part of it oneself." All the beauty and sublimity we have bestowed upon... imaginary things I will reclaim as the property and product of man... with what regal liberality he has lavished gifts upon things so as to impoverish himself and make himself feel wretched!" "It is a matter of course with me, from instinct. I am too inquisitive, too *questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers - at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!" "The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was... accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on Earth. Presuming we gradually enter upon the reverse course, there is no small probability that with the irresistible decline of faith in the Christian god, there is now a considerable decline in mankind's feeling of guilt; indeed, the prospect cannot be dismissed that the complete and definitive victory of Atheism might free mankind of this whole feeling of guilty in-debtedness towards its origin... Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together." "A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." "Have you noticed there are no interesting people in heaven? -Just a hint to the girls as to where they can find their salvation." "Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial." "One is *not* free to become a Christian. One must be sick enough for it." "For let us not underestimate the Christian: the Christian, *false to point of innocence*, is far above the ape--regarding Christians, a well-known theory of descent becomes a mere compliment." "The 'evangel' died on the cross. What has been called 'evangel' from that moment was actually the opposite of that which *he* had lived: '*ill* tidings,' a *dysangel*." "This indictment of Christianity I will write on all walls, wherever there are walls--I have letters to make even the blind see." "One does well to put on gloves when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do this." "However un-Christian this may sound, I am not even predisposed against myself." "Assuming that he believes at all, the everday Christian is a pitiful figure, a man who really cannot count up to three, and who besides, precisely because of his mental incompetence, would not deserve such a punishment as Christianity promises him." "Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity." "The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom, all price, all self-confidence of spirit; it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation..." "The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently." "Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains... But it can put mountains where there are none." "What a theologian feels as true, must be false: one has therein almost a criterion of truth." "War to the death against depravity--depravity is Christianity." "It is regrettable that a Dostoyevski did not live near this most interesting of all decadents--I mean someone who would have known how to sense the very stirring charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the sickly, and the childlike." "The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a *promise* of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction." "...it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the forbidden as such -- it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, seed of all sin, the original sin. This alone is morality. 'Thou shalt not know' -- the rest follows." "It was the sick and dying who despised the body and the earth and invented the things of heaven and the redeeming drops of blood: but even these sweet and dismal poisons they took from the body and the earth!" "Who is more godless than I, that I may rejoice in his teachings?" "The noble soul has reverence for itself" "Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear nothing further." "Is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders?" ". . . an absurd problem came to the surface: 'How COULD God permit that crucifixion of Jesus Christ]!' . . . the deranged reason of the little community found quite a frightfully absurd answer: God gave his Son for forgiveness, as a SACRIFICE . . . The SACRIFICE FOR GUILT, and just in its most repugnant and barbarous form -- the sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty! What horrifying heathenism!" "The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad." "Only under two suppositions does prayer- that custom of earlier ages that has not yet completely died out- make any sense: it would have to be possible to induce or convert the divinity to a certain course of action, and the person praying would himself have to know best what he needed, what was truly desirable for him. Both presuppositions, assumed true and established by custom in all other religions, are however denied precisely by Christianity; if it nonetheless adheres to prayer in the face of its belief in an omniscient and all-provident rationality in God which renders prayer at bottom senseless and, indeed, blasphemous- in this it once again demonstrates its admirable serpent cunning; for a clear commandment 'Thou Shalt Not Pray' would have led Christians into unchristianity through boredom." "Christianity has done it's utmost to close the circle and declare even doubt to be a sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature - is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on it's origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned." "Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age he would have repudiated his doctrine." "Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth." "For the old gods, after all, things came to an end long ago; and verily, they had a good gay godlike end. They did not end in a "twilight," though this lie is told. Instead: one day they *laughed* themselves to death. That happened when the most godless word issued from one of the gods themselves--the word: "There is one god. Thou shalt have no other god before me!" An old grimbeard of a god, a jealous one, thus forgot himself. And then all the gods laughed and rocked on their chairs and cried, "Is not just this godlike that there are gods but no God?" He that has ears to hear, let him hear! "Everywhere the voice of those who preach death is heard; and the earth if full of those to whom one must preach death. Or, "eternal life"---that is the same to me, if only they pass away quickly." "Christianity came into existence in order to lighten the heart; but now it has to burden the heart first, in order to lighten it afterward. Consequently it will perish." "An agreeable opinion is accepted as true: this is the proof by pleasure or, as the church says, the proof by strength), that all religions are so proud of, whereas they ought to be ashamed. If the belief did not make us happy, it would not be believed: how little must it then be worth!" "Thus a certain false psychology, a certain kind of fantasy in interpreting motives and experiences, is the necessary prerequisite for becoming a Christian and experiencing the need for redemption. With the insight into this aberration of reason and imagination, one ceases to be a Christian." "One should not go into church if one wants to breathe pure air." "The last Christian died on the cross." "I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time." "There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the world's religions." "Man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he has so far felt best on earth; and when he invente d hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven." "Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire." "Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place and cried incessantly: 'I am looking for God! I am looking for God!' - As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost him then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? thus they shouted and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. WE HAVE KILLED HIM - you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? W hither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, foreward, in all direction? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light candles in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." "The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity--and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive." "Christianity makes suffering contagious." "A certain sense of cruelty towards oneself and others is Christian; hatred of those who think differently; the will to persecute. Mortal hostility against the masters of the earth, against the 'noble', that is also Christian. Hatred of mind, of pride, courage, freedom, libertinage of mind, is Christian; hatred of the sense, of the joy of the senses, of joy in general is Christian." "But in the end one also has to understand that the needs that religion has satisfied and philosophy is now supposed to satisfy are not immutable; they can be weakened and exterminated. Consider, for example, that Christian distress of mind that comes from sighing over ones inner depravity and care for ones salvation - all concepts originating in nothing but errors of reason and deserving, not satisfaction, but obliteration." "At the deathbed of Christianity.-- Really unreflective people are now inwardly without Christianity, and the more moderate and reflective people of the intellectual middle class now possess only an adapted, that is to say marvelously simplified Christianity. A god who in his love arranges everything in a manner that in the end will be best for us; a god who gives to us and takes from us our virtue and our happiness, so that as a whole all is meet and fit and there is no reason for us to take life sadly, let alone exclaim against it; in short, resignation and modest demands elevated to godhead - that is the best and most vital thing that still remains of Christianity. But one should notice that Christianity has thus crossed over into a gentle moralism: it is not so much 'God, freedom and immortality' that have remained, as benevolence and decency of disposition, and the belief that in the whole universe too benevolence and decency of disposition prevail: it is the euthanasia of Christianity." "The Christian concept of God is one of the most corrupt conceptions of God arrived on earth; perhaps it even represents the low-water mark in the descending development of the God type. God degenerated to the contradiction of life,* instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! In God a declaration of hostility towards life, nature, and the will to life! God is the formula for every calumny of 'this world', for every lie about the 'next world!' In God nothingess defied, the will to nothingness sanctified . . . "In Christianity the instincts of the subjugated and oppressed come to the fore: here the lowest classes seek their salvation. The causistry of sin, self-criticism, the inquisition of the conscience, are pursued as a PASTIME, as a remedy for boredom; the emotional reaction to one who has POWER, called 'God,' is constantly sustained (by means of prayer); and what is c onsidered unattainable, a gift, "grace." Public acts are precluded; the hiding-place, the darkened room, is Christian. The body is despised, hygiene repudiated as sensuality; the church even opposes cleanliness (the first Christian measure after the expulsion of the Moors was the closing of the public baths, of which there were two hundred and seventy in Cordova alone). Christian too is a certain sense of cruelty against oneself and against others; hatred of all who think differently; the will to persecute. Gloomy and exciting conceptions predominate; the most highly desired states, designated with the highest names, are epileptoid; the diet is so chosen as to favor morbid phenomena and overstimulate the nerves. Christian too is mortal enmity against the lords of the earth, against the 'noble'-- along with a sly, secret rivalry (one leaves them the 'body,' one wants ONLY the 'soul'). Christian, finally, is the hatred of the SPIRIT, of pride, courage, freedom, liberty of the spirit; Christian is the hatred of the SENSES, of joy in the senses, of joy itself." "Buddha says: 'Do not flatter your benefactor!' Repeat this saying in a Christian church: right away it clears the air of everything Christian!" "God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight." God is dead: but considering the state Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown. [And Nietzsche adds] -And we-- we still have to vanquish his shadow.