The concept ‘God’ invented as the antithetical concept to life – everything harmful, poisonous, slanderous, the whole mortal enmity against life brought into one terrible unity! The concept ‘the Beyond’, ‘real world’ invented so as to deprive of value the only world which exists — so as to leave over no goal, no reason, no task for our earthly reality! The concept ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, finally even ‘immortal soul’, invented so as to despise the body, so as to make it sick – ‘holy’ – so as to bring to all the things in life which deserve serious attention, the questions of nutriment, residence, spiritual diet, clealiness, weather, a horrifying frivolity! Instead of health ‘salvation of the soul’ – which is to say a folie circulaire between spasms of atonement and redemption hysteria! The concept ‘sin’ invented together with the instrument of torture which goes with it, the concept of ‘free will’, so as to confuse the instincts, so as to make mistrust of the instincts into second nature! In the concept of the ‘selfless’, of the ‘self-denying’ the actual badge of décadence, being lured by the harmful, no longer being able to discover where one's advantage lies, self-destruction, made the sign of value in general, made ‘duty’, ‘holiness’, the ‘divine’ in man!
— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Ecce Homo (XV. 8)
