Nietzsche
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Ahanu
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Nietzsche disdained the masses. For example, he was against universal education. He saw education as something only an elite few should partake in. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, he writes: "That everyone is allowed to learn to read at length spoils not only writing but also thinking." Educating the masses is a form of degeneration. Aristocratic rule would preserve various forms of culture. He writes: "In order that there may be a broad, deep and fruitful soil for the development of art, the enormous majority must, in the service of a minority, be slavishly subjected to life's struggle, to a greater degree than their own wants necessitate."
Nietzsche justifies slavery. And of course he does. He sees humanity as a bridge to the Superman. What he doesn't seem to anticipate is technological change and the effects it would have for such a view. Aristotle made a sharp obervation a few millennia before Nietzsche that is the question of our age:
"If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticpating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workment would not want servants, nor masters slaves."
I wonder what Nietzsche would think of the above quote and our modern society, in which new technology is on the verge of making Aristotle's observation a reality.
Ahanu
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Yes, you're correct. Nietzsche argues the concept of God comes from the feeling we owe our ancestors for their sacrifices. Our ancestors are our creditors. As the feats of each generation become greater and greater, so does the feeling of debt to them also increase in proportion to the greatness of their accomplishments. Eventually the ancestor is transfigured into a god. Thus spoke Nietzsche.
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Nietzsche seems to define religion as pop moral psychology--with the concept of God attached to it. He says in the hands of the masses religion is poisonous. Knowing Nietzsche's disdain of the masses, he considers them to be in an ever-present state of disease, for they employ unfit weapons to fight their ever-present depression.
The origins of their depression has a broad spectrum. It may originate from moving to a new environment they can't adapt to, falling victim to diseases (like malaria and syphilis), and so on. In other words, any type of suffering. The religious fight their feeling of depression in various ways, and the primary weapon forged by them is self-annihilation, or, as Nietzsche would define it in physiological language:
"the attempt to find some approximate human equivalent for what hibernation is for certain animals . . . a minimum of assimilation and metabolism in which life just manages to subsist without really coming into the consciousness."
This creates a self-contradiction for Nietzsche. It's what he calls "life turned against life," because the diseased groan in response to life itself, grow tired of being what they are, and become sick of themselves. He says these people possess a will to power since they want to be the representatives of righteousness and desire this as their way of being superior. It is these weaklings, as Nietzsche calls them, that wage war on the strong, the noble, the aristocrats. He believes the weak pollute everything. Essentially they will nothingness.
He views religious people as skewing the world around us into something grotesque. Here are some examples. He attacks the idea of sin in Christianity, saying it's just an interpretation of a fact, not a fact itself. Just because some people feel sinful isn't proof these people are sinful. So one way the religious misconstrue the world is through thinking they are sinful. Suffering is transformed into guilt through the eye of one that believes in sin. Another way they misconstrue the world is through seeing it as an illusion, because they desire a different existence, an afterlife.
For Nietzsche a religion ends in society when you arrive at those whose moral values differ from another group in society. According to him, these moral values change by social status.
Snoopy wrote:
"The value of it [religion] is gone, but there remains a need for something to replace it."
Religion has lost its value for Nietzsche because the lower class polluted it. For example, he praises the Old Testament, writing: "I do not like the New Testament . . . The Old Testament--yes, that is something quite different, all honor to the Old Testament!" Here you find "the strong heart," as he calls them--the kings and other people of power. There he seems to identify something of value. This seems to be what he believed from my reading of On the Genealogy of Morals.
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voiceofwood
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So, that's 3 people that failed to understand Nietzsche
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voiceofwood
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Rather both works that they and many have interpreted incorrectly to support their belief