"Transvaluation of all Values!"

The promised atheist side of the argument. This excerpt is a somewhat weak example of Nietzsche's ideas contained in The Antichrist, but it really is impossible to sum up what he says in such a short philosophical treatise as it is, so I just drew out the conclusion. If you are interested in the rest of it, quite a short piece, I would suggest going to buy a copy.

As with yesterday, please read it, please think about it, and if you want to leave some of your thoughts in the comments, feel free. There is no right answer, only the the right process of how you got to that answer. That is: critical and original thinking.

"With this I will now conclude and pronounce my judgment. I condemn Christianity and confront it with the most terrible accusation that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. To my mind it is the greatest of all conceivable corruptions, it has had the will to the last imaginable corruption. The Christian Church allowed, [sic] nothing to escape from its corruption; it converted every value into its opposite, every truth into a lie, and every honest impulse into an ignominy of the soul. Let anyone dare to speak to me of its humanitarian blessings! To abolish any sort of distress was opposed to its profoundest interests; its very existence depended on states of distress; it created states of distress in order to make itself immortal. . . . The cancer germ of sin, for instance: the Church was the first to enrich mankind with this misery! The "equality of souls before God," this falsehood, this pretext for the rancunes of all the base-minded, this anarchist bomb of a concept, which has ultimately become the revolution, the modern idea, the principle decay of the whole social order, this is Christian dynamite. . . . The "humanitarian" blessings of Christianity! To breed a self-contradiction, an art of self-profanation, a will to lie at any price, an aversion, a contempt of all good and honest instincts out of humanitas! Is this what you call the blessings of Christianity? Parasitism as the only method of the Church; sucking all the blood, all the love, all the hope of life out of mankind with anemic and sacred ideals. A "Beyond" as the will to deny reality; the cross as the trade-mark of the most subterranean form of conspiracy that has ever existed, against health, beauty, well-constitutedness, bravery, intellect, kindliness of soul, against Life itself . . . .

This eternal accusation against Christianity I would fain write on all walls, wherever there are walls, I have letters with which I can make even the blind see. . . . I call Christianity the one great cure, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are too venomous, too under-hand, too underground and too petty, I call it the only immortal blemish of mankind. . . .

And time is reckoned from the die nefastus upon which this fatality came into being - from the first day of Christianity! Why not rather from its last day? From today? Transvaluation of all Values! . . ."

Excerpt from: The Antichrist: A Criticism of Christianity by Friedrich Nietzsche.