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.--

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 obje