26.
The concept of god falsified; the concept of morality falsified;—but
even here Jewish priest craft did not stop. The whole history of Israel
ceased to be of any value: out with it!—These priests accomplished
that miracle of falsification of which a great part of the Bible is the
documentary evidence; with a degree of contempt unparalleled, and in the
face of all tradition and all historical reality, they translated the past
of their people into religious terms, which is to say, they
converted it into an idiotic mechanism of salvation, whereby all offences
against Jahveh were punished and all devotion to him was rewarded. We
would regard this act of historical falsification as something far more
shameful if familiarity with the ecclesiastical interpretation of
history for thousands of years had not blunted our inclinations for uprightness
in historicis. And the philosophers
support the church: the lie about a “moral order of the
world” runs through the whole of philosophy, even the newest. What
is the meaning of a “moral order of the world”. That there is
a thing called the will of God which, once and for all time, determines what
man ought to do and what he ought not to do; that the worth of a people, or
of an individual thereof, is to he measured by the extent to which they or he
obey this will of God; that the destinies of a people or of an individual
arecontrolled by this will of God, which rewards or punishes
according to the degree of obedience manifested.—In place of all that
pitiable lie reality has this to say: the priest, a
parasitical variety of man who can exist only at the cost of every sound
view of life, takes the name of God in vain: he calls that state of human
society in which he himself determines the value of all things “the
kingdom of God”. he calls the means whereby that state of affairs is
attained “the will of God”. with cold-blooded cynicism he
estimates all peoples, all ages and all individuals by the extent of their
subservience or opposition to the power of the priestly order. One
observes him at work: under the hand of the Jewish priesthood the great
age of Israel became an age of decline; the Exile, with its long
series of misfortunes, was transformed into a punishment for that
great age-during which priests had not yet come into existence. Out of the
powerful and wholly free heroes of Israel's history they
fashioned, according to their changing needs, either wretched bigots and
hypocrites or men entirely “godless.” They reduced every great
event to the idiotic formula: “obedient or disobedient to
God.”—They went a step further: the “will of God”
(in other words some means necessary for preserving the power of the priests)
had to be determined—and to this end they had to have a
“revelation.” In plain English, a gigantic literary fraud had
to be perpetrated, and “holy scriptures” had to be
concocted—and so, with the utmost hierarchical pomp, and days of
penance and much lamentation over the long days of “sin”
now ended, they were duly published. The “will of God,” it
appears, had long stood like a rock; the trouble was that mankind had
neglected the “holy scriptures”. . . But the “will
of God” had already been revealed to Moses. . . . What happened?
Simply this: the priest had formulated, once and for all time and with the
strictest meticulousness, what tithes were to be paid to him, from the
largest to the smallest (—not forgetting the most appetizing cuts of
meat, for the priest is a great consumer of beefsteaks); in brief, he let
it be known just what he wanted, what “the will of God”
was.... From this time forward things were so arranged that the priest
became indispensable everywhere; at all the great natural events
of life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death, not to say at the
”sacrifice” (that is, at meal-times), the holy parasite
put in his appearance, and proceeded to denaturize it—in his
own phrase, to “sanctify” it. . . . For this should be noted:
that every natural habit, every natural institution (the state, the
administration of justice, marriage, the care of the sick and of the
poor), everything demanded by the life-instinct, in short, everything that
has any value in itself, is reduced to absolute worthlessness and
even made the reverse of valuable by the parasitism of priests
(or, if you chose, by the “moral order of the world”.. The fact
requires a sanction—a power to grant values becomes necessary,
and the only way it can create such values is by denying nature. . . . The
priest depreciates and desecrates nature: it is only at this price that he
can exist at all.—Disobedience to God, which actually means to the
priest, to “the law,” now gets the name of “sin”. the
means prescribed for “reconciliation with God” are, of course,
precisely the means which bring one most effectively under the thumb of
the priest; he alone can “save”. Psychologically considered,
“sins” are indispensable to every society organized on an
ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the
priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be
“sinning”. . . . Prime axiom: “God forgiveth him that
repenteth”—in plain English, him that submitteth to the
priest.