With this I am at the end and I pronounce my judgment. I
condemn Christianity. I raise against the Christian church the most terrible of all accusations that any accuser ever uttered. It is to me the highest of all conceivable corruptions. It has had the will to the last corruption that is even possible. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its corruption; it has turned every value into an un-value, every truth into a lie, every integrity into a vileness of the soul. Let anyone dare to speak to me of its “humanitarian” blessings! To
abolish any distress ran counter to its deepest advantages: it lived on distress, it
created distress to eternalize
itself.
The worm of sin, for example: with this distress the church first enriched mankind. The “equality of souls before God,” this falsehood, this pretext for the rancor of all the base-minded, this explosive of a concept which eventually became revolution, modern idea, and the principle of decline of the whole order of society—is Christian dynamite. “Humanitarian” blessings of Christianity! To breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-violation, a will to lie at any price, a repugnance, a contempt for all good and honest instincts. Those are some of the blessings of Christianity!
Parasitism as the only practice of the church, with its ideal of anemia, of “holiness,” draining all blood, all love, all hope for life; the beyond as the will to negate every reality; the cross as the mark of recognition for the most subterranean conspiracy that ever existed — against health, beauty, whatever has turned out well, courage, spirit, graciousness of the soul, against life itself.
This eternal indictment of Christianity I will write on all walls, wherever there are walls —
I have letters to make even the blind see.
I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, stealthy, subterranean, small enough — I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.
And time is reckoned from the dies nefastus with which this calamity began—after the first day of Christianity!
Why not rather after its last day? After today?
Revaluation of all values!
From The Antichrist, Section 62, first published in 1895.