VI. God and ReligionA. Christianity
The strongest and most successful advocate of slave morality is the Christian church that, by teaching the virtues of love, self-sacrifice, and humility, distorts the nature of life and thereby makes human beings something far less than what they can be. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche asserts,
“With this I complete my indictment and pronounce my judgment: I condemn Christianity. I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible accusation that has ever been uttered. I say that it is the worst of possible corruptions that it seeks to effect the ultimate corruption, the most dreadful corruption. The Christian Church has befouled everything with its touch; it has reversed every sound value, turned every truth into a lie, and every impulse of integrity it has stigmatized with baseness. Then let no one date to speak to me of its ‘humanitarian’ blessings! By its inmost necessity it must stand forever opposed to the effort to abolish suffering; for it battens upon suffering-it requires and it creates suffering to ensure its continuance. The canker of sin, for example, it was the church which first conferred this misery upon mankind: of the ‘equality of souls before God’ – this utter lie, this excuse for the rancor of all base minds, this bombshell concept bursting out in modern religiousness and subversion of human discipline-this is non other than Christian dynamite . . .. The humanitarian blessings of Christianity indeed! My view of so-called humanitarianism of Christianity is that it contradicts true humanism: It splits the human core with the art of self-pollution, the desire to escape from actuality at all costs, a mistrust of al healthy instincts, a contempt for them even.” In passing, we should note that he has almost equally barbed remarks regarding philosophers, the Germans, the Jews, the Anti-Semites, the English men and women, and common people and scientists in other passages of his works and so he does not single out Christianity alone for virulent criticism. Although Nietzsche attacks Christianity he expresses some respect for Jesus.
