Proposition II.: The prerequisites of a strong, exuberant life—strong desires and passions—are reckoned as objections against strong and exuberant life.
Proposition III.: Everything which threatens danger to man, and which can overcome and ruin him, is evil—and should be torn root and branch from his soul.
Proposition IV.: Man converted into a weak creature, inoffensive to himself and others, crushed by humility and modesty, and conscious of his weakness,—in fact, the "sinner,"—this is the desirable type, and one which one can produce by means of a little spiritual surgery....
249.
What is it I protest against? That people should regard this paltry and peaceful mediocrity, this spiritual equilibrium which knows nothing of the fine impulses of great accumulations of strength, as something high, or possibly as the standard of all things.
Bacon of Verulam says: Infimarum virtutum apud vulgus laus est, mediarum admiratio, supremarum sensus nullus. Christianity as a religion, however, belongs to the vulgus: it has no feeling for the highest kind of virtus.
250.
Let us see what the "genuine Christian" does of all the things which his instincts forbid him to do:—he covers beauty, pride, riches, self-reliance, brilliancy, knowledge, and power with suspicion and mud—in short, all culture: his object is to deprive the latter of its clean conscience.
251.
The attacks made upon Christianity, hitherto, have been not only timid but false. So long as Christian morality was not felt to be a capital crime against Life, its apologists had a good time. The question concerning the mere "truth" of Christianity—whether in regard to the existence of its God, or to the legendary history of its origin, not to speak of its astronomy and natural science—is quite beside the point so long as no inquiry is made into the value of Christian morality. Are Christian morals worth anything, or are they a profanation and an outrage, despite all the arts of holiness and seduction with which they are enforced? The question concerning the truth of the religion may be met by all sorts of subterfuges; and the most fervent believers can, in the end, avail themselves of the logic used by their opponents, in order to create a right for their side to assert that certain things are irrefutable—that is to say, they transcend the means employed to refute them (nowadays this trick of dialectics is called "Kantian Criticism").