“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Go Friedrich

Looking again through The Anti-Christ for Buddhaphobia, I'm struck with how my thoughts about how Christianity went wrong, and its consequent (I think) hostility to Buddhism, mirror Nietzsche's. He is appalled in exactly the same measure as myself at Paul, darling of the left “atheist Christians” (or whatever), for precisely the same reasons. Jesus was teaching about the kingdom of God on Earth, and got kicked upstairs by the church, as they say in England, when a politically powerful person is made a Lord to defang him. I'm cheering Nietzsche on.

1 comment:

Henry Warwick said...

It's actually a b it simpler. IT has to do with how the Christians, through a game of telephone, messed up the golden rule.

The original was from Confucius.

"Do not do to other what you would not want done to yourself."

The Christians interpret is as

"Do unto others what you would have others do to you."

So, if you are concerned that you are facing an eternity in hell, it really behooves you to make sure no one else shares that fate - the Golden Rule permits brutality against others in the interest of saving their souls: hence, witches were given confession, obsolved of their sins, and then burned.

Buddhism doesn't do that, because of the double negative - it works AGAINST involvement.

So, if you wonder why Christianity is such a hypocritical mess, it is because of its core tenet of the Golden Rule.