zo zijn er meer van dit soort dingen. Alle grote religies hier op aarde delen wel degelijk voor een groot deel dezelfde principes van 'goed' en 'kwaad', moreel besef.
Dat is ten eerste niet waar. Als je gaat kijken naar Christendom en Islam vs. bepaalde takken van het Hindoeisme dan zal je zien dat de eersten grossieren in dingen als oorlogen en lijfstraffen, terwijl de tweede puur pacifistisch is. Dat is wel een heel groot verschil.
Maar zelfs al zou het zo zijn dat alle godsdiensten ongeveer dezelfde moraal onderschreven... wat zou dat dan nog meer betekenen dan dat alle godsdiensten zijn opgesteld door, of voor, een
bepaald type mens? Zoals Nietzsche zei in 'Beyond Good and Evil:
Quite apart from the value of such assertions as `there exists in us a categorical imperative' one can still ask: what does such an assertion say of the man who asserts it? There are moralities which are intended to justify their authors before others; other moralities are intended to calm him and make him content with himself; with others he wants to crucify and humiliate himself; with others he wants to wreak vengeance, with others hide himself, with others transfigure himself and set himself on high; this morality serves to make its author forget, that to make him or something about him forgotten; many moralists would like to exercise power and their creative moods on mankind; others, Kant perhaps among them, give to understand with their morality: `what is worthy of respect in me is that I know how to obey - and things ought to be no different with you!' - in short, moralities too are only a sign-language of the emotions.
Het probleem van de moraliteit is prachtig uitgedrukt in deze passage uit 'The Genealogy of Morals':
But let us return: the problem of the other origin of the "good," of the good as conceived by the man of ressentiment, demands its solution.
That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no grounds for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves: "these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lambwould he not be good?" there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say: "we don't dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb."
To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength. A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effectmore, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a "subject," can it appear otherwise. For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deedthe deed is everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a deed: it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect. Scientists do no better when they say "force moves," "force causes," and the likeall its coolness, its freedom from emotion notwithstanding, our entire science still lies under the misleading influence of language and has not disposed of that little changeling, the "subject" (the atom, for example, is such a changeling, as is the Kantian "thing-in-itself"); no wonder if the submerged, darkly glowering emotions of vengefulness and hatred exploit this belief for their own ends and in fact maintain no belief more ardently than the belief that the strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lambfor thus they gain the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey.
When the oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one another with the vengeful cunning of impotence: "let us be different from the evil, namely good! And he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil and desires little from life, like us, the patient, humble, and just"this, listened to calmly and without previous bias, really amounts to no more than: 'we weak ones are, after all, weak; it would be good if we did nothing for which we are not strong enough"; but this dry matter of fact, this prudence of the lowest order which even insects possess (posing as dead, when in great danger, so as not to do "too much"), has, thanks to the counterfeit and self-deception of impotence, clad itself in the ostentatious garb of the virtue of quiet, calm resignation, just as if the weakness of the weakthat is to say, their essence, their effects, their sole ineluctable, irremovable realitywere a voluntary achievement, willed, chosen, a deed, a meritorious act. This type of man needs to believe in a neutral independent "subject," prompted by an instinct for self-preservation and self-affirmation in which every lie is sanctified. The subject (or, to use a more popular expression, the soul) has perhaps been believed in hitherto more firmly than anything else on earth because it makes possible to the majority of mortals, the weak and oppressed of every kind, the sublime self-deception that interprets weakness as freedom, and their being thus-and-thus as a merit.
Ik zie moraal als een puur persoonlijk iets. Je noemt die dingen 'goed' die jouw doelen dichterbij brengen, en je noemt die dingen 'evil' die jouw doelen verder af brengen. Op geen enkele wijze is moraal bovenpersoonlijk of objectief. Straf en wetten zijn werktuigen van de meerderheid om haar doelen veilig te stellen tegenover de minderheid. (En als zodanig zeer nuttig.) Rechtvaardigheid is niets anders dan het uitoefenen van macht door de meerderheid tegen de minderheid. Zonde is een leeg begrip, een fictie verzonnen door priesters om macht te verkrijgen over de gelovigen.