Friedrich Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world,
and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
-Karl Marx
During a period in which masses of people clung to religion and believed in its power of salvation and the existence of a heavenly afterlife, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was making waves with his theories that religion and Christianity are nothing more than the “opiate for the masses.” Nietzsche denounced Christianity on the basis of its contradiction to human nature and in many of his discourses, explained why religion was a backwards way of thinking and faulty in its concepts. His “transvaluation of values” was among these theories that Nietzsche elaborated upon in his book titled “The Antichrist”. In this philosophical work, he explains why religion and especially Christianity is a mistaken way of thinking that goes against human nature by comparing it against other religions and using basic understandings of philosophy, logic, and human evolution.
Firstly, Nietzsche lays the foundation for what he believes to be “good” and what must therefore be “bad.” In his personal morality system, he defines “good” as anything that “heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, and power itself,”(Nietzsche, 1895). He then proceeds to explain that bad is anything that promotes or encourages weakness. He explained that religion has bred a race that is fearful, weak and morally ill, encouraging followers to believe that traits of weakness and humility are favored. Nietzsche derides Christianity for numbing peoples’ human instincts and encouraging them to prefer ideas that go against it.
Nietzsche’s concepts are based on the foundation that religious ideas are an inverted perception of nature and the way things are fundamentally meant to be. When looking at evolutionary theories such as Darwinism, religion contradicts the basic idea of survival of the strong and fittest. It does so by proposing that traits such as humility, weakness and pity should be held above natural characteristics of survival such as strength, power and force. Indeed religions such as Christianity and Catholicism uphold those who are weak over those who are strong, and encourage weakness and meekness over virility and energy.
In Christianity’s embrace of the pity and their supporting of pity as a value, they have in turn led people who are easily depressed and low in vitality. Pity allows the weak to survive, a concept that contradicts the essence of human evolution wherein only the strong and vivacious survive. Nietzsche thought that “pity multiplies misery and conserves all that is miserable” (Nietzsche, 1895).

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