Category: Der Antichrist (book)

In Christianity, morality and religion are both completely out of touch with reality. Completely imaginary causes (‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ‘free will’ – or even an ‘unfree’ one); completely imaginary effects (‘sin’, ‘redemption’, ‘grace’, ‘punishment’, ‘forgiveness of sins’). Contact between imaginary entities (‘God’, ‘spirits’, ‘souls’); an imaginary natural science (anthropocentric; total absence of any concept of natural cause); an imaginary psychology (complete failure to understand oneself, interpretations of pleasant or unpleasant general sensations – for instance, the states of nervus sympathicus – using the sign language of religious-moral idiosyncrasy, – ‘repentance’, ‘the pangs of conscience’, ‘temptation by the devil’, ‘the presence of God’); an imaginary teleology (‘the kingdom of God’, ‘the Last Judgment’, ‘eternal life’). – This entirely fictitious world can be distinguished from the world of dreams (to the detriment of the former) in that dreams reflect reality while Christianity falsifies, devalues, and negates reality. Once the concept of ‘nature’ had been invented as a counter to the idea of ‘God’, ‘natural’ had to mean ‘reprehensible’ – that whole fictitious world is rooted in a hatred of the natural (of reality!), it is the expression of a profound sense of unease concerning reality… But this explains everything. Who are the only people motivated to lie their way out of reality? People who suffer from it. But to suffer from reality means that you are a piece of reality that has gone wrong… The preponderance of feelings of displeasure over feelings of pleasure is the cause of that fictitious morality and religion: but a preponderance like this provides the formula for decadence…

We have changed our minds. We have become more modest in every way. We have stopped deriving humanity from ‘spirit’, from ‘divinity’, we have stuck human beings back among the animals. We see them as the strongest animals because they are the most cunning: one consequence of this is their spirituality. On the other hand, we are also opposed to a certain vanity that re-emerges here too, acting as if human beings were the great hidden goal of animal evolution. Humans are in no way the crown of creation, all beings occupy the same level of perfection…

 
Let us not underestimate the fact that we ourselves, we free spirits, already constitute a ‘revaluation of all values’, a living declaration of war on and victory over all old concepts of ‘true’ and ‘untrue’.