How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

I find the same insight again in Nietzsche, in a late book like The Antichrist, the Devil’s title, if ever there was one. Nietzsche’s understanding of Jesus is eerily similar to what I have voiced above (before ever reading his text). “The most spiritual” for Nietzsche are precisely those who see that “the world is perfect.”19 Hence the philosopher’s “psychology” of the gospel, or what he calls in his older Protestant language the “evangel.” In the whole psychology of the “evangel” the concept of guilt and punishment is lacking; also the concept of reward. “Sin”—any distance separating God and man—is abolished: precisely this is the “glad tidings.” Blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to conditions: it is the only reality—the rest is a sign with which to speak of it. The consequence of such a state projects itself into a new practice, the genuine evangelical practice. It is not a “faith” that distinguishes the Christian: the Christian acts, he is distinguished by acting differently: by not resisting, either in words or in his heart, those who treat him ill; by making no distinction between foreigner and native, between Jew and non-Jew (“the neighbor”—really the coreligionist, the Jew); by not growing angry with anybody, by not despising anybody; by not permitting himself to be seen or involved at courts of law (“not swearing”); by not divorcing his wife under any circumstances, not even if his wife has been proved unfaithful. All of this, at bottom one principle; al...