This paper will seek to demonstrate that the primary charges raised against Christianity from Nietzsche's book The Antichrist are unfounded. Verbatim quotes from the book itself will be employed to make clear what Nietzsche is saying and to verify my interpretations of his statements. Quotes from The Antichrist are simply referenced by the aphorism number that they are given in the book, not the page number since Nietzsche's book has gone though numerous publications and is readily available on the internet for free without page numbers. Although virtually all of Nietzsche's works have anti-Christian language (selections of which have been included in this paper), I chose The Antichrist because it is Nietzsche's most militant writing against Christianity. I have not sought to give any particular order to the particular topics of disagreement. At times, there is some logical progression or I follow the order given in the book, but the overall the order, in typical Nietzsche fashion, is random.

I recognize that an endeavor to deal with an entire book, albeit a small one, in a single small paper is quite optimistic and perhaps a little overzealous and naive. Still, my motive for writing such a paper is to show the common misconceptions raised against Christianity by followers of Nietzsche, predominantly postmodern thinkers, to be weak at best and definitely not sufficient reasons for rejecting Christianity. These objections are very common, so I want to dialogue with the world outside of Christianity. It is my contention that the church speaks to itself too much of the time. Debates about arbitrary issues of Biblical and theological interpretation such as the millennium and other related eschatological issues do little good for the church and quite possibly do harm to the name of Christ among the nations. No one outside of Christianity cares (and many in the camp don't care either, including me) about such insignificant issues. So, I address this paper to Nietzsche, and his disciples.

I picked Nietzsche because it is apparent that so much of the prevailing thought against Christianity stems from him and his famous declaration of the "death of God." One only has to set foot on any college, high school or even middle school campus to see for oneself the tangible affects of Nietzsche's thought. For example, I've seen several students wearing shirts that say "no bad religion." When asked what the shirt meant, I was told that the message denounces the Christian idea of God. My conversations with students typically reveal a deep rooted but quite obvious angst against Christianity. When I hand out flyers advertising an event that our student ministry is sponsoring, I get comments like, "I don't go to anything having to do with Christianity" and looks telling me to "go to hell." Whether it's Leftover Crack screaming "your God is dead to me" or Maynard Keenan of Tool and A Perfect Circle writing a song entitled "Eulogy" (God's eulogy, nonetheless), the bands that are popular with students today depict acts and speak in ways clearly intended as polemics against Christianity. Nietzsche's "God is dead" is becoming more and more of a buzz word around campuses and his charges against Christianity remain objections today.

Perhaps the best way to begin this paper is to start where Nietzsche ends:

I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul. Let any one dare to speak to me of its "humanitarian" blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish distress; it lives by distress; it creates distress to make itself immortal. . . . For example, the worm of sin: it was the church that first enriched mankind with this misery!--The "equality of souls before God"--this fraud, this pretext for the rancunes of all the base-minded--this explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modern idea, and the notion of overthrowing the whole social order--this is Christian dynamite. . . . The "humanitarian" blessings of Christianity forsooth! To breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for all good and honest instincts! All this, to me, is the "humanitarianism" of Christianity!--Parasitism as the only practice of the church; with its anemic and "holy" ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love, all the hope out of life; the beyond as the will to deny all reality; the cross as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever heard of,--against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness of soul--against life itself. . . .

This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found--I have letters that even the blind will be able to see. . . . I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,--I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race. . . .

And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this fatality befell--from the first day of Christianity!--Why not rather from its last?--From today?--The transvaluation of all values!

With these words, Nietzsche throws down the gauntlet. My reason for quoting the entire last aphorism of the book is to make it obvious to those who try to portray Nietzsche as some sort of friend of the church, that Nietzsche loathes Christianity and has no tolerance for it at all.

Why does Nietzsche hate Christianity so? There are four primary objections I find in Antichrist and one other that is common among postmoderns and finds roots in Nietzsche. First, Christianity, as a system of thought is intellectually inferior. Second, Christianity is unnatural in the sense that it values things (sympathy, pity, etc.) that promote destruction instead of life. Third, Christianity is delusional, in that it ignores the harsh reality of life and sees things through rose colored glasses. Fourth, Christianity is a power play (will to power) by the priests (apostles, pastors, clergy, etc.) for the weak masses. The other objection is that Christians themselves are culturally conditioned to be Christian as a result of the success of the power play.

1. Christianity is only for the weak.
"If you want to attain peace of mind and happiness, then you should have faith; if you want to be a disciple of truth, then you should probe." Nietzsche labels Christianity "a staff for the weary." This is similar to the Marxist claim that "religion is the opiate of the people." Freud's label is "wish fulfillment." The idea is that belief in the Christian God is for the intellectually incompetent, inferior and/or lazy. "Christianity also stands in opposition to all intellectual well-being,--sick reasoning is the only sort that it can use as Christian reasoning; it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it pronounces a curse upon "intellect," upon the superbia of the healthy intellect." "What is more harmful than any vice?--Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak-Christianity."

The intellectual aristocrat knows better and rejects such silly, childish claims of the herd mentality. "[T]he domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man--the Christian." The sophisticated and enlightened recognize this truth:

The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God, either in history, or in nature, or behind nature--but that we regard what has been honoured as God, not as "divine," but as pitiable, as absurd, as injurious; not as a mere error, but as a crime against life. . . We deny that God is God . . . If any one were to show us this Christian God, we'd be still less inclined to believe in him.--In a formula: deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio.--Such a religion as Christianity, which does not touch reality at a single point and which goes to pieces the moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably the deadly enemy of the "wisdom of this world," which is to say, of science--and it will give the name of good to whatever means serve to poison, calumniate and cry down all intellectual discipline, all lucidity and strictness in matters of intellectual conscience, and all noble coolness and freedom of the mind. "Faith," as an imperative, vetoes science--in praxi, lying at any price. . . . Paul well knew that lying--that "faith"--was necessary; later on the church borrowed the fact from Paul.--The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who "reduced to absurdity" "the wisdom of this world" (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute determination to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own will the name of God, thora--that is essentially Jewish. Paul wants to dispose of the "wisdom of this world": his enemies are the good philologians and physicians of the Alexandrine school--on them he makes his war. As a matter of fact no man can be a philologian or a physician without being also Antichrist. That is to say, as a philologian a man sees behind the "holy books," and as a physician he sees behind the physiological degeneration of the typical Christian. The physician says "incurable"; the philologian says "fraud."

Nietzsche accuses the Christian as having ignored the entirety of ancient writing (philology) and the accomplishments of medicine.

In light of his vast knowledge of ancient texts, Nietzsche offers this enlightened account of the Biblical narrative of creation: God was bored so he created man. Man was bored too, so God created animals. The animals did not cure man's boredom, so God created woman. Woman ate of the tree of knowledge (a.k.a. science) and is therefore guilty of making man a competitor with God. Therefore, God made the people fight each other and live in a continual state of discord, suffering and chaos. God screwed up. So, why not just discard such a stupid notion of God? It takes someone who is genuinely stupid to believe in such obvious lunacy. Of course, Nietzsche does not tell us exactly how he came to know this interpretation is the real, underlying meaning of the text of Scripture. As is commonly the case with Nietzsche, he simply asserts that it is so and expects people to believe him without any reasoning or evidence. I only wish he would accommodate Christians the same liberty.

Another contributing factor to Nietzsche's charge of intellectual inferiority is his belief that skepticism is the only true intellectualism. "Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are skeptical." Nietzsche blindly endorses Descartes' epistemology of doubt. One of the problems with this position is that it fails to hold itself to the same criteria. Does the epistemology of doubt hold up to its own doubts? I doubt it.

The most obvious and recurring contradiction in Nietzsche's thought is the problem of truth. Nietzsche cannot claim that Christians idiots for not accepting what is so obviously true precisely because "there is, according to Nietzsche, no absolute truth. The concept of absolute truth is an invention of philosophers who are dissatisfied with the world of Becoming and seek an abiding world of Being." "Truth is that sort of error without which a particular type of living being could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive." Reflecting in 1888 on the significance of The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche wrote: "The relation between art and truth is the first one I reflected on. Even today their enmity fills me with a sacred dread. My first book was devoted to this fact; The Birth of Tragedy believes in art, within the background, another belief, that we cannot live with the truth; that the will to know the true is already a symptom of degeneracy." Art for Nietzsche not only excludes, it must exclude, the possibility of truth: "Art in the service of illusion-that is our cult." How can one maintain that Christianity is intellectually inferior and not believe in truth? Is the statement, "Christianity is stupid and is for stupid people" true? I think Nietzsche would answer, "yes." Has he not then contradicted himself?

Furthermore, I'm not so sure (as Nietzsche believed) how art is an acceptable substitute for religion as the redemptive substance of culture. His claim is that Christianity is not only stupid but is a crutch, a kind of coping mechanism. By exchanging religion for art, one only changes the object of belief, not the fact that belief, even arbitrary belief, is necessary. So you substitute one opiate for another, one coping mechanism for another, the truth is that coping is still necessary and humans use and rely upon ideologies, even nihilistic ones, to do so. Sure, one psychological salve may be preferable to another, but that is strictly a matter of pragmatic concern, to which we will address below. But, in principle, one has not accomplished anything by denying Christianity because it is a crutch, only to take up another crutch.

However, the real issue here is that of intellectual respectability. If Nietzsche wants to claim that Christianity is only for the weak and makes people weaker while keeping them in submission to the powers that be, he needs to give some reasons for believing so. If he wants to say that God is dead, and we (Christians) have killed him, he needs to give some explanation and not merely write inflammatory polemics denouncing Christianity and rejoicing in its supposed failure. I will give him this: if there is no truth, except what we create, and Nietzsche has chosen that God is dead is true, even though that is not the case, he is consistent. On the other hand, I think God gets the last laugh: Nietzsche is most assuredly dead while God seems to be quite alive. I know I've made a huge jump by saying that God is dead is not the case and that I am equivocating on the word "dead." I am aware that rhetorical satire is not always appreciated in academic circles, nonetheless my point remains: Nietzsche has not proven his point, only announced it, and the point is a weak one at that. The claim is that "God is dead" is becoming more and more popular. I wasn't aware that popularity had anything to do with truth. Perhaps I should read my Rorty more carefully and be convinced that "truth is what our peers will let us get away with saying."

Another response to this attack is to show the absolute absurdity of what it does propose. If Christianity is intellectually inferior because it is false, advocates of postmodernism have at least two philosophical options for explaining the purpose of humanity: 1) Nietzsche's overman (ubermensche), or 2) the cultural relativist. At first glance, these two options are juxtaposed to one another, for the overman is intolerant of anyone but himself whereas the cultural relativist seeks to advocate the incorporation of all systems of thought as being equally valid and helpful. The overman is not clearly defined by Nietzsche, but "we can say perhaps that it is the concept of the highest possible development and integration of intellectual power, strength of character and will, independence, passion, taste, and physique." Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra gives the most developed view of this idea. The overman is consistent with Nietzsche's overt social egoism which advocated the enslavement of the masses for the preservation of the state of the aristocracy. The essays written by Nietzsche in the last five years of his sane life are suffused with contempt for the broad masses of humanity, diatribes against equality and "inferior" humanity, hymns of praise to militarism and the merits of war together with his advocacy of the "new man"-the Übermensch. According to Nietzsche, slavery and exploitation corresponded to the natural state of affairs: "Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortune of others, the lust to rob and dominate and whatever else is called evil belongs to the most amazing economy of the preservation of the species." "Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker's sense of satisfaction with his small existence-who make him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of "equal" rights."

Let us be absolutely clear about what Nietzsche is saying in this passage. According to his thesis socialists, democrats and the broad masses of society are the products of the most primitive form of pre-Aryan society. Their very existence threatens the purity of the Aryan master race, the blond beast. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche has already declared that the preservation of the overman is the highest good and justifies: "the greatest evil".

Apologists for Nietzsche seek to distance him from the policy and activities of the Nazis. But is Nietzsche's position here so remote from Adolph Hitler's entreaty, in an internal memo of 1922, for the: "most uncompromising and brutal determination to destroy and liquidate Marxism"? Adolph Hitler was certainly no philosopher, just as Nietzsche was not merely a politician. But who can reasonably doubt that the former had little difficulty in seamlessly incorporating the latter's thoroughly backward-looking program of biological racism, hatred of socialism and the concept of social equality-together with his advocacy of militarism and war-into the eclectic baggage of ideas which constituted the program of the Third Reich?

The outcome of Nietzsche's philosophy is not only ludicrous, to put it bluntly, it is putrefying: "In order to have a broad, deep and fertile soil for artistic development, the overwhelming majority must be slavishly subjected to the necessities of life in order to serve a minority beyond the measure of its individual needs." "You wretched species, children of chance and drudgery, why do you force me to tell you what you would greatly benefit from not hearing? The very best is far beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. The second best for you, however is to die soon." The overman is a monster.

The other option, the cultural relativist put forth by the postmoderns, isn't really any better. He is just a wolf in sheep's clothing. It seems as if postmoderns are just reinventing the overman with a more palatable outer shell. It is almost as if they want to say that all cultures have their truth claims, but the postmodern cultural relativist knows better and pats all the ignorant imbeciles on the head as he parasitically lives off their labor of ignorant enslavement. The postmodern love affair with Nietzsche's death of God and the characteristic rejection of all things bourgeois is inconsistent. Nietzsche himself recognized this and that is why he was cultural elitist. He promoted the enslavement of the masses for the support of bourgeois culture, of which he was privileged partaker and advocate. There is an obvious self contradiction by those who employ Nietzsche's "Death of God" who would surely oppose his grounds for stating such an atrocity.

Nietzsche hasn't proven anything regarding the intellectual climate of Christianity. He has however, made an impassioned diatribe of a straw man argument. He could just as well have said, "I think all people who are Christians are morons and the best attempt I can give you for a reason for my belief would be pure conjecture and speculation." Nietzsche chastises Christianity for its apparent weakness but has failed to demonstrate exactly what those weaknesses are.

2. Christianity is Unnatural
This is an ethical claim in that Nietzsche is saying that whatever does not cooperate with the nature of survival and existence of humanity is evil. There are two sides to this objection. The first is that it subverts raw will and promotes humility and love. Therefore, Christianity is contrary to nature. It suppresses the most vital of human characteristics which are necessary for survival. And yet Christianity itself is an exercise in the will to power and nihilism.

We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts--the strong man as the typical reprobate, the "outcast among men." Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity!

"Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism, than Christian pity." Christianity not only promotes people to be weak by having pity on others but it ensures the future of the weak who are pitied instead of being done away with by natural selection.

Maybe the best way to respond to this charge is to simply state that Christians have a foundational disagreement with Nietzsche about what is good. I suspect that the disagreement is spawned by a difference of epistemology. Where Nietzsche appears to be an empiricist, Christianity is based on revelation. Christianity starts with presuppositions regarding the nature of the world as being created by God and the essence of good and evil. Nietzsche rejects those presuppositions. Here we come to an impasse.

The other side of the charge of perversion is a pragmatic objection: namely, that Christianity doesn't work. It doesn't bring comfort, healing and utopia. It is uncertain that Christianity produces anything tangible:

In the last analysis it comes to this: what is the end of lying? The fact that, in Christianity, "holy" ends are not visible is my objection to the means it employs. Only bad ends appear: the poisoning, the calumniation, the denial of life, the despising of the body, the degradation and self-contamination of man by the concept of sin--therefore, its means are also bad.

If anything, it brings evil. One only has to look to the crusades to see the carnage of pain, destruction and hell on earth brought about by Christianity. "Christian, too; is a certain cruelty toward one's self and toward others; hatred of unbelievers; the will to persecute." It has accommodated itself to the various cultures, and become even more evil:

Christianity had to embrace barbaric concepts and valuations in order to obtain mastery over barbarians: of such sort, for example, are the sacrifices of the first-born, the drinking of blood as a sacrament, the disdain of the intellect and of culture; torture in all its forms, whether bodily or not; the whole pomp of the cult.

For Nietzsche, the Christian project has been tried and found wanting. The pages of history books are covered in the blood that has been spilled in the name of the Christian God. Christianity is self defeating or self referentially incoherent on the basis that it doesn't accomplish its aims. In layman's terms, Christianity is not preferable because its followers are all hypocrites.

Such a position hardly needs a response given the fact that all ideologies, philosophies and religions have adherents who live somewhat inconsistent with the practical implications of their system of thought. No one feels the need to abandon postmodernism, nihilism, or any other nonfoundationalist religion or philosophy because the "believers" in such thought live their daily lives hypocritically. For example, by assuming their words have meaning these postmoderns contradict themselves and live hypocritically. These very people speak and write with the assumption that other people will know what they are saying (and mean!) and hope that their language will not be misrepresented. How can one misrepresent another by using words, if words don't mean anything? Is it possible to call a system of thought worthless or dead ("death of God") if such talk is meaningless and futile? The point is that you don't defeat a belief by giving an ad hominem fallacy.

3. Christianity is Delusional
Another protest against Christianity is that it is naive about the true state or essence of the world. The delusional nature of Christianity, namely the denial of hostility within humanity renders it untenable and nihilistic. It is interesting to note that in spite of much talk of Nietzsche's endorsement of nihilism, Nietzsche always uses "nihilism" in the context of Christianity. He is NOT advocating nihilism, rather, he is attacking it. For Nietzsche, Christianity is nihilistic. That is to say, it is worthless and pointless.
Nietzsche focuses on the dark nature of life. For Nietzsche, suffering, pain, hopelessness, meaninglessness, and futility are all part of the essence of life. The overman not only recognizes this but employs his "will to power" to overcome and rise above the meaninglessness to create his own meaning. Faith contradicts and forbids truth. Faith, is by nature, a lie.

At the bottom of Christianity there are several subtleties that belong to the Orient. In the first place, it knows that it is of very little consequence whether a thing be true or not, so long as it is believed to be true. Truth and faith: here we have two wholly distinct worlds of ideas, almost two diametrically opposite worlds--the road to the one and the road to the other lie miles apart. To understand that fact thoroughly--this is almost enough, in the Orient, to make one a sage. The Brahmins knew it, Plato knew it, every student of the esoteric knows it. When, for example, a man gets any pleasure out of the notion that he has been saved from sin, it is not necessary for him to be actually sinful, but merely to feel sinful. But when faith is thus exalted above everything else, it necessarily follows that reason, knowledge and patient inquiry have to be discredited: the road to the truth becomes a forbidden road.

Since, no objective truth is available or even existent; to say that the Christian worldview doesn't correspond to reality is self refuting. Nietzsche contradicts himself. Again, how can something be a lie if there is no objective truth or reality to which it corresponds?

For Nietzsche, Christianity makes people weak, timid and delusional, being blind to the harshness of reality. It discounts the inherent darkness and pointlessness of life (nihilism). Christianity paints a pretty picture of a sterile, good, and happy world that obviously isn't the case. The world has been waking up from this deceptive slumber to the harsh reality of life. This has been termed by Nietzsche, the "death of God."

Raschke argues that Nietzsche's claims (death of God) are an existential observation, not well formed arguments. Nietzsche's observation (according to Raschke) is that scholastic Christianity, with its adoption of the presumption of rationalism, has itself, killed God. But Nietzsche is far more specific than only attacking rationalistic Christianity, he applies it to the whole:

Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes ("God" "soul," "ego," "spirit," "free will"--or even "unfree"), and purely imaginary effects ("sin" "salvation" "grace," "punishment," "forgiveness of sins"). Intercourse between imaginary beings ("God," "spirits," "souls"); an imaginary natural history (anthropocentric; a total denial of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology (misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of agreeable or disagreeable general feelings--for example, of the states of the nervus sympathicus with the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical balderdash--, "repentance," "pangs of conscience," "temptation by the devil," "the presence of God"); an imaginary teleology (the "kingdom of God," "the last judgment," "eternal life").--This purely fictitious world, greatly to its disadvantage, is to be differentiated from the world of dreams; the later at least reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheapens it and denies it.

In other words, Christianity is a total make believe world and is inconsistent with reality on every imaginable account. For Nietzsche, Christianity is unnatural in that it doesn't line up with reality; i.e. it is not true. Nevertheless, how can Christianity fail to have "any point of contact with actuality" if one cannot say that such a point of contact is knowable?

4. Self preservation
Christianity is a self serving, circular, will to power by its propagators, on behalf of the weak masses of society. Its officers (pastors, apostles, priests, clergy) have a vested interest in preserving an oppressive and obsolete, and deceptive religion. "I repeat that sin, man's self-desecration par excellence, was invented in order to make science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the priest rules through the invention of sin."

The priest knows, as every one knows, that there is no longer any "God," or any "sinner," or any "Saviour"--that "free will" and the "moral order of the world" are lies--: serious reflection, the profound self-conquest of the spirit, allow no man to pretend that he does not know it. . . All the ideas of the church are now recognized for what they are--as the worst counterfeits in existence, invented to debase nature and all natural values; the priest himself is seen as he actually is--as the most dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous spider of creation. . - - We know, our conscience now knows--just what the real value of all those sinister inventions of priest and church has been and what ends they have served, with their debasement of humanity to a state of self-pollution, the very sight of which excites loathing,--the concepts "the other world," "the last judgment," "the immortality of the soul," the "soul" itself: they are all merely so many in instruments of torture, systems of cruelty, whereby the priest becomes master and remains master. . .Every one knows this,but nevertheless things remain as before. What has become of the last trace of decent feeling, of self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise an unconventional class of men and thoroughly anti-Christian in their acts, now call themselves Christians and go to the communion table? . . . A prince at the head of his armies, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and arrogance of his people--and yet acknowledging, without any shame, that he is a Christian! . . . Whom, then, does Christianity deny? what does it call "the world"? To be a soldier, to be a judge, to be a patriot; to defend one's self; to be careful of one's honour; to desire one's own advantage; to be proud . . . every act of everyday, every instinct, every valuation that shows itself in a deed, is now anti-Christian: what a monster of falsehood the modern man must be to call himself nevertheless, and without shame, a Christian!

The priest had formulated, once and for all time and with the strictest meticulousness, what tithes were to be paid to him, from the largest to the smallest (--not forgetting the most appetizing cuts of meat, for the priest is a great consumer of beefsteaks); in brief, he let it be known just what he wanted, what "the will of God" was.... From this time forward things were so arranged that the priest became indispensable everywhere; at all the great natural events of life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death, not to say at the "sacrifice" (that is, at meal-times), the holy parasite put in his appearance, and proceeded to denaturize it--in his own phrase, to "sanctify" it. . . . For this should be noted: that every natural habit, every natural institution (the state, the administration of justice, marriage, the care of the sick and of the poor), everything demanded by the life-instinct, in short, everything that has any value in itself, is reduced to absolute worthlessness and even made the reverse of valuable by the parasitism of priests (or, if you chose, by the "moral order of the world").

The priests invented were the proprietors or pimps of religion, whoring it out to the masses for the purposes of self preservation and self prosperity. In other words, the clergy are just peddlers of religion for material gain. They continue the charade for job security.

Nietzsche takes this indictment a step further by claiming that the apostles created a religion opposed by Jesus himself. He says that Jesus himself was in a power struggle and that's what got him killed, which from a purely human standpoint (not knowing what God was doing behind the scenes), makes sense. "This is what brought him to the cross: the proof thereof is to be found in the inscription that was put upon the cross. He died for his own sins--there is not the slightest ground for believing, no matter how often it is asserted, that he died for the sins of others." Jesus was a political figure who by asserting his will to power got himself killed by the powers that be of his day.

Surely there are those who are guilty of what Nietzsche claims. In fact, I'm quite confident that I know some of them. Ironically, Paul, whom Nietzsche accuses of the will to power, acknowledges the existence of those who "preach Christ out of envy and rivalry" in Phil. 1:15. Yet, the presence of impostors does not discount the truth of those who are sincere. Furthermore, the will to power does not explain the phenomenon of those who feel "called" or "arrested" to preach the Gospel. In other words, there are those who previously did not want to surrender to vocational ministry but felt irresistibly called by God to do so. I happen to be one of those people. In addition, my supposed will to power has not gotten me fame, recognition, riches, popularity, or anything else valued by the world. In fact, me being in ministry has been a monumental sacrifice, not only for me but for my family as well. The point is the same that was made previously regarding the issue of practicality: hypocrites do not provide evidence of a failed belief system.

Additional Charge: Christianity is Culturally Conditioned
This accusation amounts to saying that Christian belief is unwarranted based on the fact that if a Christian had been born in another country in another time then he would not have been a Christian but would have bought into whatever the dominant religion or ideology was. This objection is the assumed (and highly resented, nonetheless) result of Nietzsche's will to power by the Christian church. This cultural determinism however is ironic for at least two reasons. First, Christians are finding themselves in an ever increasing minority in many sections of postmodern society, and yet they continue to remain Christian, in spite of the dominant cultural relativism. One would think that if this claim were true, Christianity would be completely extinct and everyone would necessarily become cultural relativists, like the rest of society. Secondly, if the claim that one is bound by his cultural epistemology is true, then it is also true of that statement. In other words, if the following statement is true: everyone is culturally conditioned to believe certain things and those beliefs cannot be trusted, then that statement cannot be trusted either, for it is a culturally determined statement. The charge is simply self refuting if taken seriously. It provides as much a reason for abandoning any belief whatsoever (which is an impossibility) as it does for Christian belief.

Conclusion
I have attemped to articulate and respond to Nietzsche's issues with Christianity. In addition to the responses already given to the individual charges, I would now like to give a brief general response. Simply stated, Nietzsche's problems with Christianity, intellectual inferiority, opposed to nature, delusional, and will to power, can be shown to be absurd by considering his alternative. It seems plain to me that Nietzsche's own will to power, Aryan racism, cultural egoism, and endorsement of the slavery of the masses speak for themselves. Despite, what Kaufmann argues, if you take what he says seriously, adopt and internalize it, then German Fascism is not a far stretch. Let us for a moment consider what the Nazis did and how it would be evaluated in light of Nietzschian philosophy and then do the same with Christianity. The Nazis brutally murdered 6 million Jews because they viewed the Jews as an inferior race. That's perfectly consistent with Nietzsche, for he himself was a racist and believed in the total annihilation of others, if necessary, for the sake of the overman. Christianity, on the other hand, views the acts of the Nazis as atrocities. Which is preferable?

Epilogue:
On a very different note, I would like to wax psychological, and put forth a theory about the mental condition of Nietzsche. Although these ideas have not been thoroughly researched and lie beyond the boundaries of this paper, I would still like to articulate them for later investigation. The more I read and read about Nietzsche, the more I think that he himself is very much a product of his own environment. The irony is that Nietzsche despises any form of determinism and would thoroughly reject behavior psychology. He almost appears to be envious of the success of Christianity. Nevertheless, he seemed to be a man racked with all types of pain, physical (probably syphilis), emotional (loneliness, due to a lack of friends or family of his own), and spiritual (his conscience seems to bother him as evidenced by his reluctance to talk about his atheistic philosophical development with his mother.) Perhaps there is some correlation between the death of his father (who happened to be a pastor) and his pronouncement of the death of God. Since his primary representative for God (his earthly father) was dead, perhaps the young Nietzsche developed a sense that the absence of the representative implied an absence of God Himself. Maybe Nietzsche was angry with God for all his pain, so he developed a philosophy where he could return the favor. I am aware that the famous scholar and translator of Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann rejects this line of thinking in his introduction to his biography about Nietzsche, but he doesn't seem to give any reasons for doing so other than his apparent liking of Nietzsche. Maybe Kaufmann had some absent father issues too.