--I have been understood. At the opening of the Bible there is the _whole_ psychology of the priest.--The priest knows of only one great danger: that is science--the sound comprehension of cause and effect. But science flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditions--a man must have time, he must have an _overflowing_ intellect, in order to "know."... "_Therefore_, man must be made unhappy,"--this has been, in all ages, the logic of the priest.--It is easy to see just _what_, by this logic, was the first thing to come into the world:--"_sin_."... The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole "moral order of the world," was set up _against_ science--_against_ the deliverance of man from priests.... Man must _not_ look outward; he must look inward. He must _not_ look at things shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them; he must not look at all; he must _suffer_.... And he must suffer so much that he is always in need of the priest.--Away with physicians! _What is needed is a Saviour._--The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrines of "grace," of "salvation," of "forgiveness"--_lies_ through and through, and absolutely without psychological reality--were devised to destroy man's _sense of causality_: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and effect!--And _not_ an attack with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one inspired by the most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of _priests_! An attack of _parasites_! The vampirism of pale, subterranean leeches!... When the natural consequences of an act are no longer "natural," but are regarded as produced by the ghostly creations of superstition--by "God," by "spirits," by "souls"--and reckoned as merely "moral" consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons, then the whole ground-work of knowledge is destroyed--_then the greatest of crimes against humanity has been perpetrated_.--I repeat that sin, man's self-desecration _par excellence_, was invented in order to make science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the priest _rules_ through the invention of sin.-- 50.