But that I may reveal my heart entirely unto you, my friends: IF there were gods, how could I endure it to be no God! THEREFORE there are no Gods.
Yea, I have drawn the conclusion; now, however, doth it draw me.—
God is a conjecture: but who could drink all the bitterness of this conjecture without dying? Shall his faith be taken from the creating one, and from the eagle his flights into eagle-heights?
God is a thought—it maketh all the straight crooked, and all that standeth reel. What? Time would be gone, and all the perishable would be but a lie?
To think this is giddiness and vertigo to human limbs, and even vomiting to the stomach: verily, the reeling sickness do I call it, to conjecture such a thing.
Evil do I call it and misanthropic: all that teaching about the one, and the plenum, and the unmoved, and the sufficient, and the imperishable!
All the imperishable—that’s but a simile, and the poets lie too much.—
But of time and of becoming shall the best similes speak: a praise shall they be, and a justification of all perishableness!
Creating—that is the great salvation from suffering, and life’s alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation.
Yea, much bitter dying must there be in your life, ye creators! Thus are ye advocates and justifiers of all perishableness.