Our world is littered with examples of the cannibalisation by secondary authors of the thoughts of original thinkers, rehashed as rule-books and manuals on how to live our lives. No such distortion of an idea has had the lasting success of Saint Paul’s corruption of the life and thoughts of Jesus of Nazareth—man or myth we’ll never know. Nietzsche’s over quoted remark, “God is dead,” belies his frustration that in 2,000 years, Western civilisation has not invented for itself a new (...) god. His project of exposing Paul as a charlatan in his penultimate work, The Anti-Christ, hardly disguises Nietzsche’s belief that he could have done a better job, in his case celebrating everything that Christianity stood against: the lost glories of our ancient past symbolising our ‘natural’ human instincts. This essay reassesses assumptions about Nietzsche and his intentions in writing The Anti-Christ to reveal the philosopher’s deep affinity for the original, pre-Christian sage,who provided the main character and plot for Paul’s fiction. (shrink)

Ian Cutler introduces the history and philosophy of cynicism. [T]rue cynics are often the kindest people, for they see the hollowness of life, and from the realization of that hollowness is generated a kind of cosmic pity. Raymond Federman.