no longer vizualizes the national
egoism; he is now a god only conditionally.... The public notion of this
god now becomes merely a weapon in the hands of clerical agitators, who
interpret all happiness as a reward and all unhappiness as a punishment
for obedience or disobedience to him, for "sin": that most fraudulent of
all imaginable interpretations, whereby a "moral order of the world" is
set up, and the fundamental concepts, "cause" and "effect," are stood on
their heads. Once natural causation has been swept out of the world by
doctrines of reward and punishment some sort of _un_-natural causation
becomes necessary: and all other varieties of the denial of nature
follow it. A god who _demands_--in place of a god who helps, who gives
counsel, who is at bottom merely a name for every happy inspiration of
courage and self-reliance.... _Morality_ is no longer a reflection of
the conditions which make for the sound life and development of the
people; it is no longer the primary life-instinct; instead it has become
abstract and in opposition to life--a fundamental perversion of the
fancy, an "evil eye" on all things. _What_ is Jewish, _what_ is
Christian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; unhappiness polluted
with the idea of "sin"; well-being represented as a danger, as a
"temptation"; a physiological disorder produced by the canker worm of
conscience....

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"?