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.This is all there is of morality.--"Thou shalt not know"--the rest follows from that.--God's mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd.How is one to protect one's self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem.Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought--and all thoughts are bad thoughts!--Man must not think.--And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sickness--nothing but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don't allow him to think.Nevertheless--how terrible!--, the edifice of knowledge begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods--what is to be done?--The old God invents war; he separates the peoples; he makes men destroy one another (--the priests have always had need of war.).War--among other things, a great disturber of science !--Incredible! Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in spite of war.--So the old God comes to his final resolution: "Man has become scientific--there is no help for it: he must be drowned!".49.--I have been understood.At the opening of the Bible there is the whole psychology of the priest.--The priest knows of only one great danger: that is science--the sound comprehension of cause and effect.But science flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditions--a man must have time, he must have an overflowing intellect, in order to "know."."Therefore, man must be made unhappy,"--this has been, in all ages, the logic of the priest.--It is easy to see just what, by this logic, was the first thing to come into the world :--"sin.".The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole "moral order of the world," was set up against science--against the deliverance of man from priests.Man must not look outward; he must look inward.He must not look at things shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them; he must not look at all; he must suffer.And he must suffer so much that he is always in need of the priest.--Away with physicians! What is needed is a Saviour.--The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrines of "grace," of "salvation," of "forgiveness"--lies through and through, and absolutely without psychological reality--were devised to destroy man's sense of causality: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and effect !--And not an attack with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one inspired by the most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of priests! An attack of parasites! The vampirism of pale, subterranean leeches!.When the natural consequences of an act are no longer "natural," but are regarded as produced by the ghostly creations of superstition--by "God," by "spirits," by "souls"--and reckoned as merely "moral" consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons, then the whole ground-work of knowledge is destroyed--then the greatest of crimes against humanity has been perpetrated.--I repeat that sin, man's self-desecration par excellence, was invented inorder to make science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the priest rules through the invention of sin.--50.--In this place I can't permit myself to omit a psychology of "belief," of the "believer," for the special benefit of 'believers." If there remain any today who do not yet know how indecent it is to be "believing"--or how much a sign of decadence, of a broken will to live--then they will know it well enough tomorrow.My voice reaches even the deaf.--It appears, unless I have been incorrectly informed, that there prevails among Christians a sort of criterion of truth that is called "proof by power." Faith makes blessed: therefore it is true."--It might be objected right here that blessedness is not demonstrated, it is merely promised: it hangs upon "faith" as a condition--one shall be blessed because one believes.But what of the thing that the priest promises to the believer, the wholly transcendental "beyond"--how is that to be demonstrated?--The "proof by power," thus assumed, is actually no more at bottom than a belief that the effects which faith promises will not fail to appear.In a formula: "I believe that faith makes for blessedness--therefore, it is true.".But this is as far as we may go.This "therefore" would be absurdum itself as a criterion of truth.--But let us admit, for the sake of politeness, that blessedness by faith may be demonstrated (--not merely hoped for, and not merely promised by the suspicious lips of a priest): even so, could blessedness--in a technical term, pleasure--ever be a proof of truth? So little is this true that it is almost a proof against truth when sensations of pleasure influence the answer to the question "What is true?" or, at all events, it is enough to make that "truth" highly suspicious.The proof by "pleasure" is a proof of "pleasure--nothing more; why in the world should it be assumed that true judgments give more pleasure than false ones, and that, in conformity to some pre-established harmony, they necessarily bring agreeable feelings in their train?--The experience of all disciplined and profound minds teaches the contrary.Man has had to fight for every atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it almost everything that the heart, that human love, that human trust cling to.Greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service of truth is the hardest of all services
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