The Portable Nietzsche

by Friedrich Nietzsche

26 The concept of God falsified, the concept of morality falsified: the Jewish priesthood did not stop there. The whole of the history of Israel could not be used: away with it! These priests accomplished a miracle of falsification, and a good part of the Bible now lies before us as documentary proof. With matchless scorn for every tradition, for every historical reality, they translated the past of their own people into religious terms, that is, they turned it into a stupid salvation mechanism of guilt before Yahweh, and punishment; of piety before Yahweh, and reward. We would experience this most disgraceful act of historical falsification as something much more painful if the ecclesiastical interpretation of history had not all but deafened us in the course of thousands of years to the demands of integrity in historicis. And the church was seconded by the philosophers: the lie of the “moral world order” runs through the whole development of modern philosophy. What does “moral world order” mean? That there is a will of God, once and for all, as to what man is to do and what he is not to do; that the value of a people, of an individual, is to be measured according to how much or how little the will of God is obeyed; that the will of God manifests itself in the destinies of a people, of an individual, as the ruling factor, that is to say, as punishing and rewarding according to the degree of obedience. The reality in place of this pitiful lie is this: a parasitical type of...