Assignment 9

Philosophy and Popular Culture

July 28, 2022
 Christianity is a slave morality
Friedrich Nietzsche regarded Christianity as a slave morality and one may
wonder why the most prominent religion across the globe that teaches people to love
one another, promote peace across the globe as well as teaching people on the need of
avoiding sins accused to harbor enslavement. To understand Friedrich Nietzsche’s
point of view on why he termed Christianity as a slave morality, one need to understand
his background and he was probably right on a number of perspectives.
To begin with, the author depicts Christianity as a religion of downtrodden, poor
as well as the slaves and therefore filled with lot of hatred. In fact, nothing is as
explosive as kind of bottled up hatred which the oppressed develops and feels towards
the people or person oppressing them. The bible itself in the book of psalms 137
commences with the grief and cry from the enslaved individuals when it states that “By
the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion…. The
verse continues and states the following ‘For there our captors required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion’”(Vlassopoulos,
2021).In such a scenario, the fantasies of both revenge as well as violence are
depicted.
The same book goes ahead and claim that the happy will be he ho takes their
children and smashes their heads on the rock. When the Christianity provides such
content, it makes Nietzsche conclude that the Christian morality is based on the
frustrated anger and Christianity remains a religion of hatred (Comfort, 2014).
Furthermore, the enslaved people are given hope through the invention concept
of hell whereby the weak are provided an imagination of how there will be
compensatory revenge against the strong. In this case, the rich who mistreat their poor
will be punished by going to hell while the rich will proceed to hell. On the poor have
been to believe that their riches and wealth will be attained on other world after death.
The poor are promised to be rich in heaven while those with earthly riches will face
punishment for mistreating the poor.
Nietzsche goes ahead and prove how the Christianity is a slave morality by
showing how the Jews rejected the aristocratic value equation which involved good =
noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed (Snelson, 2017)). According to the
Jews, the good people are the one who are suffering, the sick, the deprived and
salvation seems to belong to the poor while wealthy class who seems powerful and
noble are depicted as wicked and godless.
From the bible, the slavery concept is introduced from the myth of the fall
whereby the human beings failed to heed or adhere to God wishes of living life without
sinning or doing evil. The God who is said to be God of abundance and loving all human
beings, is transformed to be God of vengeance and as a result, all the values are
reversed (Vlassopoulos, 2021). Instead, every concept that was vibrant as well as life-
affirming re-narrated as not good with the ultimate aim of undermining the power or the
authority of the strong. Therefore, the morality end been put down and this makes
Nietzsche term Christianity as a religion which degrades humanity.
 References
Comfort, R. (2014). Mark Twain: A Christian Response to His Battle With God. New
Leaf Publishing Group.
Vlassopoulos, K. (2021). Christianity and slavery: towards an entangled history?. Post
Augustum, 5, 62-103.
Snelson, A. (2017). The history, origin, and meaning of Nietzsche’s slave revolt in
morality. Inquiry, 60(1-2), 1-30.