Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
I: Criticism of Religion§247 Nothing could be more useful and deserves more promotion than systematic Nihilism in action. As I understand the phenomena of Christianity and pessimism, this is what they say: “We are ripe for nonentity, for us it is reasonable not to be”. This hint from “reason” in this case, is simply the voice of selective Nature.
On the other hand, what deserves the most rigorous condemnation, is the ambiguous and cowardly infirmity of purpose of a religion like Christianity: or rather, such as the Church, which, instead of recommending death and self-destruction, actually protects all the malformed and sick and encourages them to propagate their kind.
Problem: with what kind of means could one lead up to a severe form of really contagious Nihilism, a Nihilism which would teach and practise voluntary death with scientific conscientiousness (and not the feeble continuation of a vegetative sort of life with false hopes of a life after death)?
Christianity cannot be sufficiently condemned for having depreciated the value of a great cleansing Nihilistic movement (like the one which was probably in the process of formation), by its teaching of the immortality of the private individual, as also by the hopes of resurrection which it held out: that is to say, by dissuading people from performing the deed of Nihilism which is suicide —
In the latter’s place it puts lingering suicide and gradually a puny, meagre, but durable life; gradually a perfectly ordinary, bourgeois, mediocre life, etc.