This short treatise is Nietzsche basically ripping everything about Christianity. He begins, “Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life; it has depraved the reason even of the intellectually strongest natures by teaching men to feel the supreme values of intellectuality as sinful, as misleading, as temptations…. I call an animal, a species, an individual depraved when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers what is harmful to it…. Where the will to power is lacking there is decline.” He continues by ripping into Kantian morality, “Each one of us should devise his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. A people perishes if it mistakes its own duty for the concept of duty in general…. What destroys more quickly than to work, to think, to feel without inner necessity, without a deep personal choice, without joy? as an automaton of ‘duty’? It is virtually a recipe for decadence, even for idiocy.”
Nietzsche contrasts Christianity with Buddhist philosophy, “Buddhism is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity—it has the heritage of a cool and objective posing of problems in its composition, it arrives after a philosophical movement lasting hundreds of years; the concept ‘God’ is already abolished by the time it arrives. Buddhism is the only really positivistic religion history has to show us, even in its epistemology (a strict phenomenalism—), it no longer speaks of ‘the struggle against sin’ but, quite in accordance with actuality, ‘the struggle against suffering’. It already has—and this distinguishes it profoundly from Christianity—the self-deception of moral concepts behind it—it stands, in my language, beyond good and evil…. Prayer is excluded, as is asceticism, no categorical imperative, no compulsion at all…. He demands no struggle against those who think differently; his teaching resists nothing more than it resists the feeling of revengefulness…. In the teaching of the Buddha egoism becomes a duty…. The precondition for Buddhism is a very mild climate, very gentle and liberal customs, no militarism; and that it is the higher and even learned classes in which the movement has its home. The supreme goal is cheerfulness, stillness, absence of desire, and this goal is achieved…. In Christianity the instincts of the subjugated and oppressed come to the foreground: it is the lowest classes which seek their salvation in it. Here the caustic business of sin, self-criticism, conscience-inquisition, is practiced as a power…. Here the highest things are considered unachievable, gifts, ‘grace’…. Hatred of mind, of pride, courage, freedom, libertinage of mind is Christian; hatred of the senses, of the joy of the senses, of joy in general is Christian.”
Science is also opposed to Christianity by Nietzsche, “A religion like Christianity, which is at no point in contact with actuality, which crumbles away as soon as actuality comes into its own at any point whatever, must naturally be a mortal enemy of the ‘wisdom of the world’, that is to say of science…. ‘Faith’ as an imperative is a veto against science.” Nietzsche continues by invoking Genesis, “God had created himself a rival, science makes equal to God—it is all over with priests and gods if man becomes scientific!—Moral: science is the forbidden in itself—it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sins, original sin…. Happiness, leisure gives room for thought—all thoughts are bad thoughts…. Man shall not think…. The beginning of the Bible contains the entire philosophy of the priest.—The priest knows only one great danger: that is science—the sound conception of cause and effect. But science flourishes in general only under happy circumstances—one must have a superfluity of time and intellect in order to ‘know’…. ‘Consequently man must be made unhappy’—this has at all times been the logic of the priest.—One will have already guessed what only came into the world therewith, in accordance with this logic—‘sin’…. The concept of guilt and punishment, the entire ‘moral world-order’, was invented in opposition to science—in opposition to the detaching man from the priest…. The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrine of ‘grace’, of ‘redemption’, of ‘forgiveness’—lies through and through and without any psychological reality—were invented to destroy the causal sense of man: they are an outrage on the concept cause and effect!”
To that end, Nietzsche extols the virtues of skepticism, “Great intellects are sceptics. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The vigour of a mind, its freedom through strength and superior strength, is proved by scepticism…. A spirit which wants to do great things, which also wills the means for it, is necessarily a sceptic. Freedom from convictions of any kind, the capacity for an unconstrained view, pertains to strength…. The man of faith, the ‘believer’ of every sort is necessarily a dependent man—such as cannot out of himself posit ends at all. The ‘believer’ does not belong to himself, he can be only a means, he has to be used, he needs someone who will use him.”
Finally, Nietzsche pontificates on the natural class divisions amongst men, “The most spiritual human beings, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in severity towards themselves and others, in attempting; their joy lies in self-constraint: with them asceticism becomes nature, need, instinct. They consider the hard task a privilege, to play with vices which overwhelm others recreation…. Knowledge—a form of asceticism.—They are the most venerable kind of human being: this does not exclude their being the most cheerful, the most amiable. They rule not because they want to but because they are.”
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