I perused the New York Times email of today’s headlines.

We are two weeks out from election day. Have you ever found yourself watching a prize fight that lasted too many rounds?  At the final bell, judges render their decision and in the case of Trump v. Harris the judges will be the American people. A nagging question embeds in the mind: whether “the people” will be the losers, no matter which candidate wins…

I have been asked on occasion, I also ponder how it is possible for Evangelicals to be “all in” to support the Trump movement, to make common cause with Silicon Valley moguls, even with America’s traditional adversary, Russia. How to plausibly describe the Bible toting, pious, devotion-minded-people’s association with such a cast of unlikely characters,…

By Nietzsche’s lights the association is not as odd as it seems. As long as you are feeling  “love for the Lord” anything goes. Go ahead and hate your neighbor if he/she is gay. Make it your business to deny medical care for a pregnant woman. Silently approve the expulsion of a non-Caucasian immigrant,  – as nakedly unreasonable as all that is, etc., etc.,

Make no mistake every act of aggression derived from dark rhetoric causes an individual man, a woman or a child suffering.

Feelings and values are reserved for your relationship with the Lord. I’m just feel’n the Lord’s love… 

And rally with the MAGA mob intent on disposing of others…

In Christianity
we may see a great popular protest
against philosophy:

the reasoning of the sages of antiquity
had withdrawn men
from the influence
of the emotions,

but Christianity
would fain give men/women
their emotions back again.

With this aim in view,
it denies any moral value to virtue
such as philosophers understood it
—as a victory of the reason over the passions

—generally condemns every kind of goodness,

and calls upon the passions
to manifest themselves in their full power and glory:
     as love of God,
          fear of God,
               fanatic belief in God,
                    blind hope in God.

The Dawn Of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 58