Is religion the cause of evil?

According to Nietzsche, as my relativly young mind understand him, the majority, the stupid, the weak, the last man, is the creator of evil by choosing their enemy in the Übermensch out of jealousy etc. They decide that the Übermensch is "evil", just because he is.

I'm not trying to discuss Nietzsche here, though I'd like to do that sometime aswell.

My point being, religion may not be the cause of all war (but has a part in that aswell), but the creator of the "us & them" (good & evil) attitude, which itself is the reason for most wars. Discuss...

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[I]It is dangerous to be right in matters where the established society is wrong.[/I]

[I]God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.[/I]
- Henry Louis Mencken

Can you clarify the "last man" concept. I have only read a little bit of Nietzsche from Thus Spake Zarathustra.

From my perspective, it is not Religion, per se. but merely suboptimal policy decisions that have not always gone as planned.

I am not sure we would have our current religious dogma if there were a greater diversity of religions and religious thought.

Not at all logical, if man created religion, and he did, then it is not religion that is inhearntly evil, its man.

Evil is the total presence of selfishness to the point of hurting someone else to do what you please, nothing more, and this has nothing to do with religion. All sinfull nature derives from the root of selfishness, Love however is the polar opposite in that it is about someone elses feelings that are put first, thus selflessness. As with all things here on earth, selfish is at one end of the scale and selfless is on the other end and people choose how far to lean towards one or the other end.

The "creator of 'us and them'" is, in my opinion, human nature. Religion is not a prerequisite. You need only to watch the fistfights at a Yankees-Red Sox game or to recall the various "race riots" throughout recent US history to see it on display. Most people feel a strong need to 'belong' and are susceptible to varying degrees to "mob mentality". Religion can certainly provide this, but absent religion, people will find other excuses to behave this way.

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[b][SIZE=2]"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."[/b][/SIZE]

-Thomas Jefferson

So there is no Satan?

I believe that Nietzsche also wrote

"For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposties at all, and seconly whether these popular valuaions and opposite values on which the metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps erely foreground estimates, only provisional perpsectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from belo, frog perspectives, as it were , to borrow an expression painters use. For all the value that true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possilbe that a higher and more fundametnal value for life might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness, and lust. It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiusly related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things - maybe even one with them in essence. Maybe!"

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, section 2, Walter Kaufmann translation)

In this forray into almost Eastern monism, Nietzsche is pointing out that Evil is really just a counterpoint to good. That the connection between equates that the two do not exist seperately. Furthermore, he goes on to talk about how Good is really based on a synthetic judgement a priori that is common among metaphysicians. The implication of this is would then by that niether good nor evil really exist, it's just our percetpion of things that brings them into existence.

Existentialism is going to deny the existence of pretty much anything that is not readily apperent in the physical world, but in Nietzsche's case there is the notable exeception of the Will to Power. Assuming that the Will to Power, though, is more or less equivalent to Freud's "unconcious mind" (while there are of course significant differences between the two concepts, the primary tenents are the same) that would mean that the Will to Power has a physical expression in the mind of individuals, just not in the concious mind, giving it the right to claim existence in an Existential world. Then, according to Nietzsche and indirectly according to Freud, all of our actions/thoughts are directed by the "Will to Power" that means all of our synthetic judgments a priori are also and expression of the Will to Power. This takes us back to "Good" being a synthetic judgement a priori and "Evil" being merely a logical counterpoint to "Good." This means that "Evil" is also a just a description of a synthetic judgment a priori and therefore has no external existence. So, yes, it's all just in our heads.

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Yes, the little green fist up there is a symbol of Earth First! No, I'm not an eco-terrorist, nor do I agree with eco-terrorism...I just thought it looked cool.

Yes, if there is a God then there is a Satan, where did you get the idea I insenuated that there wasnt?

Satan was the author of Selfishness which was in direct opposition to Gods Love and therefore he was seperated.

You are assuming that the two opposite values must be distinct entities, why couldn't God and Satan be one?

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Yes, the little green fist up there is a symbol of Earth First! No, I'm not an eco-terrorist, nor do I agree with eco-terrorism...I just thought it looked cool.

I don't know, maybe it was the part where you said religion was made by man so it's man that's evil. No need to get all huffy about it, especially if you can't spell insinuated

Because a house divided falls, that’s not just a parable, there is much evidence of this universal law.