Friedrich Nietzsche - On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 3.21) lyrics

So much for a brief and rough preface concerning the connection between the ideas “guilt” and “obligation” with religious a**umptions. Up to this point I have deliberately set aside the actual moralizing of these ideas (the repression of them into the conscience, or more precisely, the complex interaction of the bad conscience with the idea of god). At the end of the previous section I even talked as if there were no such thing as this moralizing and thus as if those ideas were now necessarily coming to an end after the collapse of their presuppositions, the faith in our “creditor,” in God. But to a terrifying extent the facts indicate something different. The moralizing of the ideas of debt and duty, with their repression into the bad conscience, actually gave rise to the attempt to reverse the direction of the development I have just described, or at least to bring its motion to a halt. Now, in a fit of pessimism, the prospect of a final installment must once and for all be denied; now, our gaze must bounce and ricochet back despairingly off an iron impossibility, now those ideas of “debt” and “duty” must turn back. But against whom? There can be no doubt: first of all against the “debtor,” in whom from this point on bad conscience sets itself firmly, gnaws away, spreads out, and, like a polyp, grows wide and deep to such an extent that finally, with the impossibility of discharging the debt, people also come up with the notion that it is impossible to remove the penance, the idea that it cannot be paid off (“eternal punishment”):—finally however, those ideas of “debt” and “duty” turn back even against the “creditor.” People should, in this matter, now think about the causa prima [first cause] of humanity, about the beginning of the human race, about their ancestor who from now on is loaded down with a curse (“Adam,” “original sin,” “no freedom of the will”) or about nature from whose womb human beings arose and into which the principle of evil is now inserted (“the demonizing of nature”) or about existence in general, which remains something inherently without value (nihilistic turning away from existence, longing for nothingness, or a desire for its “opposite,” in an alternate state of being, Buddhism and things like that)—until all of a sudden we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity: God sacrificing himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem—the creditor sacrificing himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor! . . .