Thursday, May 24, 2007
62.
— With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul. Let any one dare to speak to me of its “humanitarian” blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish distress; it lives by distress; it creates distress to make itself immortal.... For example, the worm of sin: it was the church that first enriched mankind with this misery!—The “equality of souls before God”—this fraud, this pretext for the rancunes of all the base-minded—this explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modern idea, and the notion of overthrowing the whole social order —this is Christian dynamite.... The “humanitarian” blessings of Christianity forsooth! To breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for all good and honest instincts! All this, to me, is the “humanitarianism” of Christianity!—Parasitism as the only practice of the church; with its anæmic and “holy” ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love, all the hope out of life; the beyond as the will to deny all reality; the cross as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever heard of,—against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness of soul—against life itself....
This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found—I have letters that even the blind will be able to see.... I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,—I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race....
And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus* when this fatality befell—from the first day of Christianity!—Why not rather from its last?—From today?—The transvaluation of all values!...
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A traveler who had seen many countries, peoples and several of the earth's continents was asked what attribute he had found in men everywhere. He said: "They have a propensity for laziness." To others, it seems that he should have said: "They are all fearful. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions." In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that there will be no second chance for his oneness to coalesce from the strangely variegated assortment that he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. For the majority it is idleness, inertia, in short that propensity for laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are fearful, and fear most of all the burdensome nuisance of absolute honesty and nakedness. Artists alone hate this lax procession in borrowed manners and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone's secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle; they dare to show us man as he is, to himself unique in each movement of his muscles, even more, that by being strictly consistent in uniqueness, he is beautiful, and worth regarding, as a work of nature, and never boring. When the great thinker despises human beings, he despises their laziness: for it is on account of their laziness that men seem like manufactured goods, unimportant, and unworthy to be associated with or instructed. Human beings who do not want to belong to the mass need only to stop being comfortable; follow their conscience, which cries out: "Be yourself! All that you are now doing, thinking, and desiring is not really yourself."
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Sunday, May 13, 2007
It is not surprising how right-wingers haste to rustle against the cassocks of priests, cardinals, and popes, claiming to be the bulwarks of religious piety and virtue in the world of politics. A claim that religious hierarchies gaily embrace because right-wingers tend to utter mouthfuls of cheap middle-class moralistic rhetoric (on "married heterosexual families", "values", etc.), never mind if they are curiously matched to neoliberalistic, often belligerent, policies.
But it takes a real brazen-face like that of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi (who very uncatholic-like divorced in 1984 and has recently been immortalised in some photos pampering 5 young women) to go and take part in the "Family Day" celebration in Rome after having seen the cartoon published by "Il manifesto" (that he defined "unworthy") and to affirm that "religion and Left are a contradiction".
The cartoon published by "Il Manifesto".
Woman: "There will be lots of priests". Man: "Do you reckon we should leave the kids at home?"
Well, the cartoon is obviously quite aggressive. But hey, it's not like it is so gratuitous, is it?
On the family day, an interesting article by Eugenio Scalfari (in Italian), titled "Camels gallopping through the eye of the needle", here.
Robert Pigott
BBC Religious affairs correspondent
The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has revealed figures showing the extent to which priests in its largest archdiocese may have abused children.
Nearly 150 priests and members of other religious orders have been accused or suspected of abuse since 1940.
Details of the allegations, including against 74 of the diocese's priests, were given by the Dublin archdiocese. [...]
