Friday, October 03, 2003

On the Genealogy of Morals

I'm fairly disturbed after reading one of Friedrich Nietzsche's books called 'On the Genealogy of Morals'. It's so anti-theistic. Basically, it's premise is that morality is genealogical, that is, decended from something else. He thinks 'good' used to mean 'noble', but now 'good' means things like 'humble' and 'selfless'. He also thinks that Jewish/Christian morality was a slave morality that prospered by undermining the master morality of the noble class. That is, the christians/jews (slaves) tricked their masters (the romans) into adopting their morality and ended up being victorious. Furthermore, he paints this slave morality as ultimately hateful and revengeful. For example, the nobles - do they hate the common people? No. But we christians hate the oppressive, the nobles, the haughty, the powerful and take revenge on them by vilifying them.

There are a few other discussion like law is just revenge, but I've said enough already. I sure hope someone can read through the book, or at least the first essay, and have a discussion with me. After reading it, I'm begining to wonder if Christian morality is all that believable!

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