What Nietzsche Really Said Quotes

“Nietzsche’s background makes sense of his convictions that the loss of faith in God is a calamitous cultural crisis. Although writing as one who has lost faith and who sees his own religious tradition as having many pernicious effects on its adherents, he experienced the loss of faith as a personal trauma. He was shocked that others seemed to throw off their religious backgrounds so casually, and he eventually concluded that many of his contemporaries had not really shed their religion but instead continued their old habits in disguised forms. Because he was convinced that the Christian worldview had harmful psychological effects, he endeavored to show how much damage continued to affect his contemporaries who maintained habits of the old worldview, even though they no longer endorsed it.

We see Nietzsche not as the ‘atheist by instinct’ he claims to be in his autobiography but as a religious desperado. If one understands by ‘religious’ the effort to integrate one’s life with what is larger than oneself, Nietzsche rejects Christianity for religious reasons. His many complaints about the ideology that the Christian Church has foisted on its members express his conviction that it harms our ability to love and to be responsive to others in the world and to nature.”
― Robert C. Solomon, What Nietzsche Really Said