158.

One should not confuse Christianity as a historical reality with that one root that its name calls to mind: the other roots from which it has grown up have been far more powerful. It is an unexampled misuse of words when such manifestations of decay and abortions as “Christian church,” “Christian faith” and “Christian life” label themselves with that holy name. What did Christ deny? Everything that is today called Christian.

159.

The entire Christian teaching as to what shall be believed, the entire Christian “truth,” is idle falsehood and deception: and precisely the opposite of what inspired the Christian movement in the beginning.

Precisely that which is Christian in the ecclesiastical sense is anti-Christian in essence: things and people instead of symbols; history instead of eternal facts; forms, rites, dogmas instead of a way of life. Utter indifference to dogmas, cults, priests, church, theology is Christian.

The Christian way of life is no more a fantasy than the Buddhist way of life: it is a means to being happy.

160.

Jesus starts directly with the condition the “Kingdom of Heaven” in the heart, and he does not find the means to it in the observances of the Jewish church; the reality of Judaism itself (its need to preserve itself) he regards as nothing; he is purely inward.—

He likewise ignores the entire system of crude formalities governing intercourse with God: he opposes the whole teaching of repentance and atonement; he demonstrates how one must live in order to feel “deified”—and how one will not achieve it through repentance and contrition for one’s sins: “Sin is of no account” is his central judgment.

Sin, repentance, forgiveness—none of this belongs here—it is acquired from Judaism, or it is pagan.

161.

The Kingdom of Heaven is a condition of the heart (—it is said of children “for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven”) : Not something “above the earth.” The Kingdom of God does not “come” chronologically-historically, on a certain day in the calendar, something that might be here one day but not the day before: it is an “inward change in the individual,” something that comes at every moment and at every moment has not yet arrived—

162.

The thief on the Cross:—When even the criminal undergoing a painful death declares: “the way this Jesus suffers and dies, without rebelling, without enmity, graciously, resignedly, is the only right way,” he has affirmed the gospel: and with that he is in Paradise—

163.

Neither by deeds nor in your heart should you resist him who harms you.

You should admit of no ground for divorcing your wife.

You should make no distinction between strangers and neighbors, foreigners and fellow countrymen.

You should be angry with no one, you should show contempt to no one. Give alms in secret. You should not want to become rich. You should not swear. You should not judge. You should be reconciled with foes; you should forgive. Do not pray publicly.

“Bliss” is not something promised: it is there if you live and act in such and such a way.

164.

The entire prophet and miracle-worker attitude, the anger, the calling down of judgment is a dreadful corruption (e.g., Mark 6:11. And whosoever shall not receive you . . . verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha, etc.). The “fig tree” (Matt. 21:18): Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, “Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward forever.” And presently the fig tree withered away.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labor.

Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. The time during which the laborer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor-power he has purchased of him.”

— Karl Marx, Capital (Vol I) (Ch. 10, §1)

Capitalists are capital personified

165.

In a quite absurd way, the doctrine of reward and punishment has been crowded in: everything has thereby been ruined.

In the same way, the practice of the first ecclesia militans [militant church], of the apostle and his attitude, has been represented in a quite falsifying way as commanded, as predetermined—.

The subsequent glorification of the actual life and teaching of the first Christians: as if it had all been prescribed and the prenoscription merely followed—

And as for the fulfillment of prophesies: what a mass of falsification and forgery!

166.

Jesus opposed the commonplace life with a real life, a life in truth: nothing was further from him than the stupid nonsense of an “eternalized Peter,” an eternal personal survival. What he fights against is this exaggerated inflation of the “person”: how can he desire to eternize precisely that?

In the same way he fights against hierarchy within the community: he does not promise that reward shall be proportionate to performance: how can he have meant punishment and reward in the beyond!

167.

Christianity: a naive beginning to a Buddhistic peace movement in the very seat of ressentiment — but reversed by Paul into a pagan mystery doctrine, which finally learns to treat with the entire state organization — and wages war, condemns, tortures, swears, hates.

Paul starts from the need for a mystery felt by the broad, religiously excited masses: he seeks a sacrifice, a bloody phantasmagoria which will stand up in competition with the images of the mystery cults: God on the cross, blood-drinking, the unio mystica with the “sacrifice.”

He seeks to bring the afterlife (the blissful, atoned afterlife of the individual soul) as resurrection into a causal relationship with that sacrifice (after the type of Dionysus, Mithras, Osiris).

He needs to bring the concept guilt and atonement into the foreground, not a new way of life (as Jesus himself had demonstrated and lived) but a new cult, a new faith, a faith in a miraculous transformation (“redemption” through faith).

He understood what the pagan world had the greatest need of, and from the facts of Christ’s life and death made a quite arbitrary selection, giving everything a new accentuation, shifting the emphasis everywhere—he annulled primitive Christianity as a matter or principle—

The attempt to destroy priests and theologians culminated, thanks to Paul, in a new priesthood and theology—in a new ruling order and a church.

The attempt to destroy the exaggerated inflation of the “person” culminated in faith in the “eternal person” (in concern for “eternal salvation”—), in the most paradoxical excess of personal egoism.

This is the humor of the situation, a tragic humor: Paul re-erected on a grand scale precisely that which Christ had annulled through his way of living. At last, when the church was complete, it sanctioned even the existence of the state.

168.

—The church is precisely that against which Jesus preached—and against which he taught his disciples to fight—

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

169.

A god who died for our sins: redemption through faith; resurrection after death—all these are counterfeits of true Christianity for which that disastrous wrong-headed fellow [Paul] must be held responsible.

The exemplary life consists of love and humility; in a fullness of heart that does not exclude even the lowliest; in a formal repudiation of maintaining one’s rights, of self-defense, of victory in the sense of personal triumph; in faith in blessedness here on earth, in spite of distress, opposition and death; in reconciliation; in the absence of anger; not wanting to be rewarded; not being obliged to anyone; the completest spiritual-intellectual independence; a very proud life beneath the will to a life of poverty and service.

After the church had let itself be deprived of the entire Christian way of life and had quite specifically sanctioned life under the state, that form of life that Jesus had combatted and condemned, it had to find the meaning of Christianity in something else: in faith in unbelievable things, in the ceremonial of prayers, worship, feasts, etc. The concept “sin,” “forgiveness,” "reward”—all quite unimportant and virtually excluded from primitive Christianity—now comes into the foreground.

An appalling mishmash of Greek philosophy and Judaism; asceticism; continual judging and condemning; order of rank, etc.

174.

The Christian-Jewish life: here ressentiment did not predominate. Only the great persecutions could have developed this passion to this extent—the ardor of love as well as that of hatred.

When one sees one’s dearest sacrificed for one’s faith, one becomes aggressive; we owe the triumph of Christianity to its persecutors.

The asceticism in Christianity is not specifically Christian: this is what Schopenhauer misunderstood: it only makes inroads into Christianity wherever asceticism also exists apart from Christianity.

Hypochondriac Christianity, the torturing and vivisection of the conscience, is in the same way only characteristic of a certain soil in which Christian values have taken root: it is not Christianity itself. Christianity has absorbed diseases of all kinds from morbid soil: one can only reproach it for its inability to guard against any infection. But that precisely is its essence: Christianity is a type of decadence.

191.

Christians have never put into practice the acts Jesus prescribed for them, and the impudent chatter about “justification by faith” and its unique and supreme significance is only the consequence of the church’s lack of courage and will to confess the works which Jesus demanded.

The Buddhist acts differently from the non-Buddhist; the Christian acts as all the world does and possesses a Christianity of ceremonies and moods.

193.

“What to do in order to believe?”—an absurd question. What is wrong with Christianity is that it refrains from doing all those things that Christ commanded should be done.

It is the mean life, but interpreted through the eye of contempt.

195.

“Christianity” has become something fundamentally different from what its founder did and desired. It is the great antipagan movement of antiquity, formulated through the employment of the life, teaching and “words” of the founder of Christianity but interpreted in an absolutely arbitrary way after the pattern of fundamentally different needs: translated into the language of every already existing subterranean religion—

It is the rise of pessimism (—while Jesus wanted to bring peace and the happiness of lambs): and moreover the pessimism of the weak, the inferior, the suffering, the oppressed.

Its mortal enemy is (1) power in character, spirit and taste; “worldliness”; (2) classical “happiness,” the noble levity and skepticism, the hard pride, the eccentric intemperance and the cool self-sufficiency of the sage, Greek refinement in gesture, word, and form. Its mortal enemy is the Roman just as much as the Greek.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

The struggle against the “old faith” as undertaken by Epicurus was, in a strict sense, a struggle against pre-existing Christianity—a struggle against the old world grown senile and sick, already gloomy, moralized, soured by feelings of guilt.

Not the “moral corruption” of antiquity, but precisely its moralization is the prerequisite through which alone Christianity could become master of it. Moral fanaticism (in short: Plato) destroyed paganism, by revaluing its values and poisoning its innocence.—

We ought finally to understand that what was then destroyed was higher than what became master!—

Christianity has grown out of psychological decay, could only take root in decayed soil.

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Will to Power (438)

The warlike and the peaceful. — Are you a human with the instincts of a warrior in your system? If so, a second question arises: are you by instinct a warrior of attack or a warrior of defense? The remainder of mankind, all that is not warlike by instinct, wants peace, wants concord, wants ‘freedom,’ wants ‘equal rights’: these are only different names and stages of the same thing. To go where one has no need to defend oneself—such people become dissatisfied with themselves if they are obliged to offer resistance: they want to create conditions in which there is no longer war of any kind. If the worst comes to the worst, to submit, obey, acquiesce: anything is better than waging war — thus, e.g., does a Christian’s instinct counsel him. In the case of the born warrior, there is something like armament in his character, in his choice of states, in the development of every quality: in the first type, it is the ‘weapon’ that is developed best, in the latter the armor.

The unarmed, the unarmored: what expedients and virtues they need in order to endure—to triumph.

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Will to Power (923)

In Summa: domination of the passions, not their weakening or extirpation! — The greater the dominating power of a will, the more freedom may the passions be allowed.

The “great human” is great owing to the free play and scope of his desires and to the yet greater power that knows how to press these magnificent monsters into service.

Education [Erziehung]: essentially the means of ruining the exceptions for the good of the rule. Higher education [Bildung]: essentially the means of directing taste against the exceptions for the good of the mediocre.

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Will to Power (933)

Man hasst mehr, plötzlicher [...] als Patriot als als Individuum; man opfert schneller sich für die Familie als für sich: oder für eine Kirche, Partei. Ehre ist das stärkste Gefühl für Viele d.h. ihre Schätzung ihrer selber ordnet sich der Schätzung Anderer unter und begehrt von dort seine Sanktion.

One hates more, more suddenly ... as a patriot than as an individual; one sacrifices oneself more quickly for the family than for oneself: or for a church, a party. Honor is the strongest feeling for many, i.e., their esteem of themselves is subordinated to the esteem of others and from there they seek its sanction.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1881) (11[130])

Der freieste Mensch hat das größte Machtgefühl über sich, das größte Wissen über sich, die größte Ordnung im notwendigen Kampf seiner Kräfte, die verhältnismäßig größte Unabhängigkeit seiner einzelnen Kräfte, den verhältnismäßig größten Kampf in sich: er ist das zwieträchtigste Wesen und das wechselreichste und das langlebendste und das überreich begehrende, sich nährende, das am meisten von sich ausscheidende und sich erneuernde.

The freest human has the greatest sense of power over himself, the greatest knowledge of himself, the greatest order in the necessary struggle of his powers, the proportionately greatest independence of his individual powers, the proportionately greatest struggle within himself: he is the most ambivalent being and the most changeable and the longest-lived and the most abundantly desiring, nourishing, the most self-shedding and renewing.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1881) (11[130])

Love. — Love forgives the beloved even his lust.

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Gay Science (62)

Will and willingness. — Someone took a youth to a wise man and said: “Look, he is being corrupted by women!” The wise man shook his head and smiled. “It is men who corrupt women”, he exclaimed, “and the failings of women should be atoned for and set right in men – for man makes for himself the image [Bild] of woman, and woman shapes herself [bildet sich] according to this image [Bild]”. “You are too gentle towards women”, said one in the company; “you do not know them!” The wise man replied, “The way of men is will; the way of women is willingness – that is the law of the sexes; truly a hard law for women! All human beings are innocent of their existence; women, however, are doubly innocent. Who could have oil and mercy enough for them?” “Forget oil! Forget gentleness!” shouted someone else from the crowd; “one has to raise women better!” “One has to raise men better”, said the wise man and beckoned to the youth to follow him. – But the youth did not follow him.

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Gay Science (68)

Capacity for revenge. — That someone cannot defend himself and therefore also does not want to – this is not enough to disgrace him in our eyes; but we have a low regard for anyone who has neither the capacity nor the good will for revenge – regardless of whether it is a man or a woman. Would a woman be able to hold us (or “enthrall” us, as they say) if we did not consider her able under certain circumstances to wield a dagger deftly (any kind of dagger) against us? Or against herself – which in certain cases would be the more severe revenge (Chinese revenge).

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Gay Science (69)

On female chastity. — There is something quite amazing and monstrous in the upbringing of upper-class women; indeed, maybe there is nothing more paradoxical. The whole world agrees that they should be brought up as ignorant as possible about matters erotic, and that one has to impart in their souls a deep shame in the face of such things and the most extreme impatience and flight at the merest suggestion of them. Really, in this matter alone the “honour” of a woman in its entirety is at risk: what else would one not forgive them? But here they are supposed to remain ignorant deep in their hearts: they are supposed to have neither eyes, nor ears, nor words, nor thoughts for this their “evil”; yes, even knowledge is here an evil. And then to be hurled as if by a gruesome lightning bolt into reality and knowledge, with marriage – and precisely by the man they love and esteem the most: to catch love and shame in a contradiction and to have to experience all at once delight, surrender, duty, pity, terror at the unexpected proximity of god and beast, and who knows what else! There one has tied a psychic knot that may have no equal. Even the compassionate curiosity of the wisest connoisseur of human psychology [Menschenkenner] is insufficient for guessing how this or that woman manages to accommodate herself to this solution of the riddle and to this riddle of a solution, and what dreadful, far-reaching suspicions must stir in her poor, unhinged soul; indeed, how the ultimate philosophy and scepticism of woman casts anchor at this point! Afterwards, the same deep silence as before, and often a silence directed at herself; she closes her eyes to herself. Young women try very hard to appear superficial and thoughtless; the most refined among them simulate a kind of impertinence. Women easily experience their men as a question-mark regarding their honour and their children as an apology or atonement – they need children and wish for them in an altogether different way from that in which a man wishes for children. In sum, one cannot be too gentle towards women!

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Gay Science (71)

From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed towards that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that. Yet, strange to say, she is allowed to know much less about her function as wife and mother than the ordinary artisan of his trade. It is indecent and filthy for a respectable girl to know anything of the marital relation. Oh, for the inconsistency of respectability, that needs the marriage vow to turn something which is filthy into the purest and most sacred arrangement that none dare question or criticize. Yet that is exactly the attitude of the average upholder of marriage. The prospective wife and mother is kept in complete ignorance of her only asset in the competitive field — sex. Thus she enters into life-long relations with a man only to find herself shocked, repelled, outraged beyond measure by the most natural and healthy instinct, sex. It is safe to say that a large percentage of the unhappiness, misery, distress, and physical suffering of matrimony is due to the criminal ignorance in sex matters that is being extolled as a great virtue. Nor is it at all an exaggeration when I say that more than one home has been broken up because of this deplorable fact.

If, however, woman is free and big enough to learn the mystery of sex without the sanction of State or Church, she will stand condemned as utterly unfit to become the wife of a “good” man, his goodness consisting of an empty head and plenty of money. Can there be anything more outrageous than the idea that a healthy, grown woman, full of life and passion, must deny nature’s demand, must subdue her most intense craving, undermine her health and break her spirit, must stunt her vision, abstain from the depth and glory of sex experience until a “good” man comes along to take her unto himself as a wife? That is precisely what marriage means. How can such an arrangement end except in failure? This is one, though not the least important, factor of marriage, which differentiates it from love.

— Emma Goldman,
Anarchism and Other Essays (chapter 11)

The attraction of imperfection. — I see here a poet who, like some people, exerts a greater attraction through his imperfections than through all that reaches completion and perfection under his hand – indeed, his advantage and fame are due much more to his ultimate incapacity than to his ample strength. His work never wholly expresses what he really would like to express, what he would like to have seen: it seems as if he has had the foretaste of a vision, but never the vision itself – yet a tremendous lust for this vision remains in his soul, and it is from this that he derives his equally tremendous eloquence of desire and craving. With it he lifts his listener above his work and all “works” and lends him wings to rise to heights which listeners otherwise never reach; and so, having themselves become poets and seers, they give the creator of their happiness their due admiration, as if he had led them immediately to the vision of what was for him holiest and most ultimate; as if he had really attained his goal and really seen and communicated his vision. The fact that he never reached his goal benefits his fame.

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Gay Science (79)

The deeper we trace the political influences in history, the more are we convinced that the “will to power” has up to now been one of the strongest motives in the development of human social forms. The idea that all political and social events are but the result of given economic conditions and can be explained by them cannot endure careful consideration. That economic conditions and the special forms of social production have played a part in the evolution of humanity everyone knows who has been seriously trying to reach the foundations of social phenomena. This fact was well known before Marx set out to explain it in his manner. A whole line of eminent French socialists like Saint-Simon, Considerant, Louis Blanc, Proudhon and many others had pointed to it in their writings, and it is known that Marx reached socialism by the study of these very writings. Furthermore, the recognition of the influence and significance of economic conditions on the structure of social life lies in the very nature of socialism.

It is not the confirmation of this historical and philosophical concept which is most striking in the Marxist formula, but the positive form in which the concept is expressed and the kind of thinking on which Marx based it. One sees distinctly the influence of Hegel, whose disciple Marx had been. None but the “philosopher of the Absolute,” the inventor of “historical necessities” and “historic missions” could have imparted to him such self-assurance of judgment. Only Hegel could have inspired in him the belief that he had reached the foundation of the “laws of social physics”, according to which every social phenomenon must be regarded as a deterministic manifestation of the naturally necessary course of events. In fact, Marx’s successors have compared “economic materialism” with the discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler, and no less a person than Engels himself made the assertion that, with this interpretation of history, socialism had become a science.

— Rudolf Rocker,
Nationalism and Culture (Bk. I, Ch. 1)

Kwame Ture on religion

Few things to note, however:

1. It was Marx who said this, in the introduction part of his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right; not Marx & Engels in the Communist Manifesto.

2. It is a widely misunderstood quote. By "opium", Marx meant a painkiller, implying that religion is like a painkiller for people suffering under alienating conditions (like under capitalism, or class societies in general). Reading the quote in context would make this clear.

3. However, what Ture was saying might go beyond this... that is, religion doesn't have to be just a coping mechanism...
cf. indigenous/folk religions/cultures.

4. One may say, that Christianity (used by slaveholders) and this Christianity (used for liberation) aren't the same. It's not the same Christianity; they might be same only in name.

Other than that... what Kwame Ture said here is profound and applicable to liberation struggles and oppressed cultures generally.

The national army. — The greatest disadvantage of the national army, now so much glorified, lies in the squandering of men of the highest civilisation; it is only by the favourableness of all circumstances that there are such men at all; how carefully and anxiously should we deal with them, since long periods are required to create the chance conditions for the production of such delicately organised brains! But as the Greeks wallowed in the blood of Greeks, so do Europeans now in the blood of Europeans: and indeed, taken relatively, it is mostly the highly cultivated who are sacrificed, those who promise an abundant and excellent posterity; for such stand in the front of the battle as commanders, and also expose themselves to most danger, by reason of their higher ambition. At present, when quite other and higher tasks are assigned than patria and honor, the rough Roman patriotism is either something dishonourable or a sign of being behind the times.

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human (Part I) (442)