This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 13 Feb 2007, by tony curzon price.
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13 Feb 07
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As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness—there can be no doubt of that—morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe—the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles.—
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What, in all strictness, has really conquered the Christian God? The answer may be found in my Gay Science (section 357): "Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness taken more and more strictly, the confessional subtlety of the Christian conscience translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. To view nature as if it were a proof of the goodness and providence of a God; to interpret history to the glory of a divine reason, as the perpetual witness to a moral world order and moral intentions, to interpret one's own experiences, as pious men long interpreted them, as if everything were preordained, everything a sign, everything sent for the salvation of the soul—that now belongs to the past, that has the conscience against it, that seems to every more sensitive conscience indecent, dishonest, mendacious, feminism, weakness, cowardice: it is this rigor if anything that makes us good Europeans and the heirs of Europe's longest and bravest self-overcoming."
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If we look for the beginnings of Christianity in the Roman world, we find organizations growing up for mutual support, combinations of the poor and sick, for burial, on the lowest levels of contemporary society, in which that major way of combating depression, the minor joys which habitually develop out of mutual demonstrations of kindness, were consciously employed. Perhaps at the time this was something new, a real discovery? Such a calling out for "the will to mutual assistance," for the formation of the herd, for "a community," for a "congregation," must summon up again, if only in the smallest way, an aroused will to power and lead to new and much greater outbursts. In the fight against depression, the development of the herd is an essential step and a victory. By growing, the community also reinforces in the individual a new interest, which often enough raises him up over the most personal features of his bad disposition, his dislike of himself (Geulinx's despectio sui ["Contempt for oneself." Arnold Geulinx (1624-69) discussed in Kuno Fischer's Geschichte der neuern Philosophie I]). All sick pathological people, in their desire to shake off a stifling lack of enthusiasm and a feeling of weakness, instinctively strive for the organization of a herd. The ascetic priest senses this instinct and promotes it. Where there is a herd, it's the instinct of weakness which has willed the herd, and the cleverness of the priest which has organized it.
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