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The old God, all ‘spirit’,…all perfection,
promenades in his garden:
but he is bored.
Against boredom the gods themselves
fight in vain.
What is he to do?
He invents man – man is entertaining…..
But behold, man too is bored.
God’s sympathy with the only kind of distress
found in paradise knows no bounds:
He forthwith creates other animals.
God’s first blunder:
man did not find the animals entertaining.
— he dominates them, he did not even
want to be an ‘animal’, —
Consequently God created woman.
And then indeed there was
an end an end to boredom. –
but also to something else!
Woman was god’s second blunder.
Woman is in her essence serpent, Heva’* –
Every priest knows that; ‘every evil
comes into the world through woman.’

‘Consequently science too
comes into the world through her’
…only through woman did man learn
to taste the tree of knowledge. –
What had happened?
A mortal terror seized upon the old God.
Man himself had become God’s
greatest blunder.
God had created for himself a rival,
science makes equal to God –
it is all over with priests and Gods
if man becomes scientific!
Moral: science is forbidden in itself.
It alone is forbidden.
Science is the first sin,
the germ of all sins, the original sin.
This alone constitutes morality, —
‘Thou shalt not know’
the rest follows.

*Eve, seductress

Excerpt the Anti-Christ by Friedrich Nietzsche

More from Nietzsche.  This is a quotation of some length.  Why this? 

There is a distinct growing ‘anti-science’ feeling/conviction in our society.  We will know if this bias against science, is growing — when it is too late, and there is no exit from this vale of ignorance.  There is the anti-climate change faction, motivated by greed, financially invested in fossil fuels.  There are the anti-vaxers, who are suspicious of big pharma, suspicious of big govm’t, — refusing mandated vaccines for their children.  Also, there is the QAnon conspiracy loving crowd.  They are partial to a tyranny with religious overtones, for a priestly father-figure who knows what is best, and will bring back the greatness of yesteryear.

I offer the excerpt written by Nietzsche, as a clue to fertile ground for the growth of the anti-science frame of mind.  Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ writes with all guns blazing, firing salvo after salvo against organized Christianity.  Nietzsche thinks that Christendom, is a fabrication of priest-craft, a construction of magic and superstition which is necessarily a mortal enemy of a scientific mind-set. 

This excerpt is a criticism of the creation story as told in Genesis chapter two.  According to Nietzsche, the Genesis chapter 2 story is a priestly point of view of the origin of humanity, and of the male and female dynamic.  Nietzsche is relentless in his criticism of a blundering deity, and a blundering, mistake prone, bored male that is ensnared in an antagonistic relationship with the female.  The female, naturally, is the ‘fall-guy’ because she taught the male how to acquire knowledge by experimentation, through direct engagement with the external world.  And then, the dominoes fall, — one after another.  The scientific method is the product, the result of female seduction.  Both male and female are banned, excluded from paradise forthwith.

By Nietzsche’s lights an ethos of priest-craft, palpable guilt, the shame of seeking knowledge by disciplined interrogation of Nature, the search for answers of the natural world, is the rival, the antithesis of priest-craft, a religious orientation, a seeking of questions and answers from divine revelation.

Nietzsche’s account is worth contemplation when you consider that the evangelicals in multiple small rural communities, as well as mega-churches in the urban areas of our country make up the core of the presidents support. 

Did not the President say, the coronavirus, “will just go away?”