“[I]t is at an end with priests and gods if man becomes scientific! — Moral: science is the thing forbidden in itself — it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sin, original sin. This alone is morality — ‘Thou shalt not know.’ All the rest follows from it.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
“[A] God who cures us of the flu at the right time, or who bids us get into a carriage at the exact moment when a downpour commences, ought to be such an absurd God to us that he would have to be done away with even if he existed. God as a domestic servant, as a postman, as an almanac-make…[God], a word for the stupidest kind of accidents…”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
“What alone did Mohammed borrow from Christianity? The invention of Paul, his expedient for priestly tyranny, for forming herds: the belief in immortality–i.e., the doctrine of judgment.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
“If today there are persons to be found who do not know how indecent it is to be a ‘believer’ — or in how far it is a symbol of decadenece — they will know it tomorrow.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
“Man is not to look outwards, he is to look inwards into himself, he is not to look prudently and cautiously into things as a learner, he is not to look at all, he is to suffer . . . And he is to suffer as to need the priest always . . . A savior is needed.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
“[B]elief removes no mountains but places mountains where there are none. A hasty walk through a madhouse enlightens sufficiently on these matters. Not to a priest to be sure: for he denies by instinct that sickness is sickness and a madhouse is a madhouse.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
“People to whom their daily life appears too empty and monotonous easily grow religious; this is comprehensible and excusable, only they have no right to demand religious sentiments from those whose daily life is not empty and monotonous.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
“One must not be misled: ‘judge not,’ they say, and send everything to hell which stands in their way. In making God judge, they themselves judge; in glorifying God, they glorify themselves.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“In Christianity, neither morality nor religion is in contact with any point of reality. Nothing but imaginary causes (God, soul, ego, spirit, free will–or even ‘unfree will’); nothing but imaginary effects (sin, salvation, grace, punishment, forgiveness of sin). An intercourse between imaginary beings (God, spirits, souls); an imaginary science of nature (anthropocentric, absolute lack of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology (nothing but self-misunderstandings … repentance, remorse of conscience, temptations by the devil, presence of God); an imaginary teleology (the kingdom of God, the last judgment, everlasting life). This purely fictitious world is greatly to its disadvantage, distinguished from the dream world in that while the latter reflects reality, the former falsifies, depreciates, and negates it. When once the concept of ‘nature’ was devised as a concept antithetical to ‘God,’ ‘natural’ had to be the word for ‘reprehensible’; that whole fictitious world has its root in hatred of the natural …”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
“There is not sufficient love and goodness in the world to permit us to give some of it away to imaginary beings.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
“A certain sense of cruelty toward self and others is Christian; the hatred against those thinking differently; the will to persecute. Gloomy and exciting concepts are in the foreground; the most greatly coveted states, designated with the highest names, are epileptoid states.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
“[O]ne does well to put on gloves when reading the New Testament.
The presence of so much filth almost compels one to do so.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
If today persons are still to be found who do not know how indecent it is to be a ‘believer’–or in how far it is a symbol of decadence, of a broken will to live–they will know it tomorrow.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
This quote begs the question, “Why is religious belief so indecent?” Nietzsche provides many answers in The Anti-Christ. Here, we’ll look briefly at one: The “belief” of most religious believers is not actual belief–rather, it’s wishful thinking raised to infinity.
Let’s consider American Christians. Very few of them actually believe Christianity’s promise of eternal life. If they did, they wouldn’t be so afraid of death. The deaths of loved ones would be cause for rejoicing, because, as they so desperately wish was true, those deaths would open the portals to paradise for their loved ones. But their fear of and reactions to death betray them. They don’t really believe in “salvation” and life after death, they just very much wish those things were true.
If they really believed in the truth of Christianity, they wouldn’t be so threatened by skeptics and nonbelievers. If the evidence for their “faith” was as well established–as they claim it is–as the fact that water runs downhill or that the earth is round, they wouldn’t react so maliciously and fearfully to critics. Instead, they’d pity them in the manner that most of us pity flat-earthers. But they don’t. All too many Christians hate and fear atheists and skeptics. And that betrays that they very much want to believe the promises of Christianity, but they don’t.
And at the same time they insist on the literal, incontrovertible truth of their “beliefs,” “believers” routinely raise the most contemptible argument imaginable, Pascal’s Wager, which posits that it’s “safer” to “believe” than not to “believe.” The underlying premise of this “wager” is that there’s no difference between lip service and actual belief, or at least that an omniscient deity prefers lip service to honesty. In other words you’d better kiss ass, and honesty be damned.
This is the precise opposite of intellectual integrity. This is the precise opposite of considering all relevant evidence and arguments, evaluating them as dispassionately as you can, and accepting the conclusions whether you like them or not.
Most “believers” are so driven by fear of death that they seize on comforting illusions, insist that those illusions are true, suppress their misgivings, and do their very best to suppress anything else that calls those illusions into doubt.
It’s hard to conceive of anything more intellectually indecent.
“A religion like Christianity, which is not in touch with reality on any point, which immediately falls down as soon as reality gets its right even in a single point, must, of course, be mortally hostile to the “wisdom of the world,” i.e., to science–it will approve of all expedients by which discipline of intellect, the noble coolness and freedom of intellect, can be poisoned, calumniated, and defamed. “Belief,” as an imperative, is the veto against science–in practice, the lie at any price…”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
Sharp and Pointed 