Assuming that he believes at all, the everyday Christian is a pitiful figure, a man who really cannot count up to three, and who besides, precisely because of his mental incompetence, would not deserve such a punishment as Christianity promises him.
Comparing man and woman on the whole, one may say: woman would not possess a genius for ornamentation if she did not also possessan instinct for the secondary role.
And this do I call immaculate perception of all things: to want nothing else from them, but to be allowed to lie before them as a mirror with a hundred facets.
Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.
People buy their necessities in shops and have to pay dearly for them because they have to assist in paying for what is also on sale there but only rarely finds purchasers: the luxury and amusement goods. So it is that luxury continually imposes a tax on the simple people who have to do without it.
A belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a species, has nothing to do with truth. The falseness of a judgment is not for us necessarily an objection to a judgment. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species preserving, perhaps even species cultivating. To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.
How much rationality and higher protection there is in such self-deception, and how much falseness I still require in order to allow myself again and again the luxury of my sincerity.
Christianity has a hunter's instinct for finding out all those who by one means or another may be driven to despair -although only a part of mankind is capable of such despair. Christianity lies in wait for such as those and pursues them