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 in order to make science, culture,
and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the priest rules
through the invention of sin.—