A Great Ladder With Many Rungs
There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rungs; but three of these are the most important.
Once men sacrificed human beings to their God, and perhaps just those they loved the best–to this category belong the first-born sacrifices of all primitive religions, and also the sacrifice of the Emperor Tiberius in the Mithra-Grotto on the Island of Capri, that most terrible of all Roman anachronisms.
Then, during the moral epoch of mankind, they sacrificed to their God the strongest instincts they possessed, their “nature”; this festive joy lights up the cruel eyes of ascetics and “anti-natural” fanatics.
Finally, what still remained to be sacrificed? Was it not necessary in the end for men to sacrifice everything comforting, holy, healing, all hope, all faith in hidden harmonies, in future blessedness and justice? Was it not necessary to sacrifice God himself, and out of cruelty to themselves to worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness–this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the rising generation; we all know something thereof already.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, What is Religious #55
And are we not that generation?
