There is a great ladder of religious cruelty,
and, of its many rungs,
three are the most important.

People used to make
human sacrifices to their god,
perhaps even sacrificing those they loved the best
– this sort of phenomenon can be found in the sacrifice of the firstborn
(a practice shared by all prehistoric religions),
as well as in Emperor Tiberius’ sacrifice
in the Mithras grotto on the Isle of Capri,
that most gruesome of all Roman anachronisms.

Then, during the moral epoch of humanity,
people sacrificed the strongest instincts they had,
their “nature,” to their god;

the joy of this particular festival
shines in the cruel eyes of the ascetic,
that enthusiastic piece of “anti-nature.”

Finally: what was left to be sacrificed?
In the end, didn’t people have to sacrifice all comfort and hope,
everything holy or healing,
any faith in a hidden harmony
or a future filled with justice and bliss?

Didn’t people have to sacrifice God himself
and worship rocks, stupidity, gravity, fate, or nothingness
out of sheer cruelty to themselves?

To sacrifice God for nothingness
– that paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty
has been reserved for the race that is now approaching:
by now we all know something about this. –

Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Judith Butler, aphorism 55

Nietzsche has a reputation. He is regarded as a “flaming” atheist, a nihilist, a surly partisan of negativity. Nietzsche understood the reaction which his point of view was bound to provoke. He persisted to write his truth. Each of us is, who we happen to be. Fate, our arrival at a certain time, to particular parents, into the circumstance of place – all contribute to the thinker that you and I and Nietzsche became.

Nietzsche recognized the veiled cruelty of religion, a stealthy insidious cruelty developing over time.  Once in antiquity human sacrifice was “normal.” In our own time many have sacrificed psychological well being in order to earn a passing grade on the moral scale of evaluation.

The ultimate sacrifice though, is the will to renounce the notion of divinity. Or as Nietzsche wrote: all comfort and hope, everything holy or healing, any faith in a hidden harmony or a future filled with justice and bliss. The ultimate sacrifice is felt as unavoidable obligation. This I must do in exchange for what? abject nihilism. One might as well now worship rocks. Or stupidity, gravity, fate, or nothingness.

Friedrich Nietzsche was no nihilist. He speaks of the arrival of widespread nihilism with a palpable sense of grief. This is the final, terminal cruelty which religion reserves for future individuals, communities,  entire societies.

The future has arrived