THE JO-TEL … illegal blog downfield

I have no reliable criterion for what a pang of conscience is: from what one hears about it, a pang of conscience seems to me unworthy of respect… I would not want to abandon an action after the event; I would prefer to leave the bad outcome, the consequence out of the question of value altogether. If the outcome is bad, it is all too easy to lose the correct perspective on what you have done: a pang of conscience seems to me a kind of ‘evil eye’. Cherishing something that goes all the more because it went wrong– that is more my kind of morality.– ‘God’, ‘immortality of the soul’, ‘redemption’, ‘hereafter’: all of them concepts to which I have never paid attention, or given any time, even as a child– perhaps I was never childish enough for them?– Atheism is not at all familiar to me as a result, still less as an event: it is self-evident to me from instinct. I am too curious, too dubious, too high-spirited to content myself with a rough-and-read answer. God is a rough-and-ready answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers– basically even just a rough-and-ready prohibition on us: you shall not think!

-Nietzsche, from Ecce Homo