5.
We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a
war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all
the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its
concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts—the
strong man as the typical reprobate, the “outcast among men.”
Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it
has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative
instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those
natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest
intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The
most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his
intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually
destroyed by Christianity!—
