quote:
Why do I know more than other people? Why, in general, am I so clever? I have never pondered over questions that are not really questions. I have never wasted my strength. I have no experience, for instance, of actual religious difficulties. I am quite unfamiliar with the feeling of "sinfulness." Similarly I lack a reliable criterion for determining a prick of conscience: from what one hears, a prick of conscience does not seem to me anything very worthy of veneration. . . . I dislike to leave an action of mine in the lurch; I prefer to omit utterly the bad result, the consequences, from any problem involving values. In the face of evil . consequences it is too easy to lose the proper standpoint from which to view an action. A prick of conscience seems to me a sort of "evil eye." Something that has failed should be all the more honored just because it has failed-this agrees much better with my morality.-"God," "the immortality of the soul," tcsalvation," a "beyond"-these are mere notions, to which I paid no attention, on which I never wasted any time, even as a child-though perhaps I was never enough of a child for that-I am quite unacquainted with atheism as a result, and still less as an event: with me it is instinctive. I am too inquisitive, too skeptical, too arrogant ', to let myself be satisfied with an obvious and crass solution of things. God is such an obvious and crass solution; a solution which is a sheer indelicacy to us thinkers-at bottom He is really nothing but a coarse commandment against us: ye shall not think! . . . I am much more interested in another question which the "salvation of humanity" depends much more than upon any piece of theological curiosity: the question of nutrition.
(Ecce Homo)