Nietzsche on Religions

Beyond Good and Evil summary

• From the start, the Christian faith is a sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit; at the same time enslavement, and self-mockery, self-damaging.
• In religion, we find it tied to three dietary demands: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence. But one cannot decide what is cause and what is effect, and whether any relation of cause and effect is involved here.
• The philosopher who is the man of the most comprehensive responsibility who has the conscience for the over-all development of man. This philosopher will make use of religion for his project of cultivation and education, just as he will make use of whatever political and economic states are at hand.
• For strong and independent who are prepared and predestined to command, religion is one more means for overcoming, for the ability to rule, as a bond that unites rulers and subjects.
• If a few individuals of noble descent (who are descent of strong and independent) are inclined through lofty spirituality to prefer a more withdrawn and contemplative life and reserve for themselves only the subtle type of rule, then religion can be used as a mean for obtaining peace from the noise and exertion of cruder forms of government, and purity form the necessary dirt of all politics. For example, by means of a religious organization, they gave themselves the power of nominating kings of the people while themselves kept and felt apart and outside.
• Religion gives some of the ruled the instruction and opportunity to prepare themselves for future ruling and obeying. Some of the ruled are prepared for this. Those are who have fortunate marital customs, the strength and joy of the will, the will to self-control, and receive temptation from religion to walk the paths to higher spirituality. Those are who test the feelings of great self-overcoming, of silence and solitude.
• Asceticism and puritanism are means for educating and ennobling a race that wishes to become master over its origin.
• To ordinary human beings, religion gives an inestimable contentment with their situation and type, peace of heart, and ennobling of obedience, transfiguring and beautifying the whole lowliness, the whole poverty of their souls.
• The most venerable art of Christianity or Buddhism is teaching even the lowliest how to place themselves through piety in an illusory higher order of things, and thus to maintain their contentment with the real order: the hardness of their life is necessary.
• There are dangers in religions too. Dangers manifest and sicken people when religions do not want to be means of education and cultivation in the philosopher’s hand, but insist on having their own sovereign. One danger of religion is when religion is for sufferers and would like to make sure that every other feeling about life should be considered false and should become impossible. Danger when religion cast suspicion on the joy in beauty, manly, conquering, domineering. Danger when religion turn man into unsureness, agony of conscience, self-destruction.
• Christaintiy has been the most calamitous kind of arrogance. Europe is ruled by men who are not high and hard enough to be artists, not strong and farsighted enough, not noble enough to see the different order of rank, chasm of rank, between man and man. With “equal before God”, a smaller, easy to please, sick European mediocre has been bred.