Spiritual religions flourished, and dominated daily life. Everything revolved
around the Church (or synagogue or temple or mosque or whatever). Priests
and holy men were the arbiters of social life because they were the arbiters of
hope. They were the only ones who could tell you what God wanted, and God
was the only one who could promise any salvation or a better future.
Therefore, these holy men dictated everything that was of value in society.
Then science happened, and shit got cray-cray. Microscopes and printing
presses and internal combustion engines and cotton gins and thermometers
and, finally, some goddamn medicine that actually worked. Suddenly, life got
better. More important, you could see life getting better. People used better
tools, had access to more food, were healthier, and made more money. Finally,
you could look back ten years and say, “Whoa! Can you believe we used to
live like that?”
And that ability to look back and see progress, see growth happen,
changed how people viewed the future. It changed how they viewed
themselves. Forever.
Now, you didn’t have to wait until death to improve your lot. You could
improve it here and now. And this implied all sorts of wonderful things.
Freedom, for one: How were you going to choose to grow today? But also
responsibility: because you could now control your own destiny, you had to
take responsibility for that destiny. And of course, equality: because if a big
patriarchal God isn’t dictating who deserves what, that must mean that either
no one deserves anything or everyone deserves everything.
These were concepts that had never been voiced before. With the prospect
of so much growth and change in this life, people no longer relied on spiritual
beliefs about the next life to give them hope. Instead, they began to invent and
rely upon the ideological religions of their time.
This changed everything. Church doctrines softened. People stayed home
on Sundays. Monarchs conceded power to their subjects. Philosophers began
to openly question God—and somehow weren’t burned alive for doing so. It
was a golden age for human thought and progress. And incredibly, the
progress begun in that age has only accelerated and continues to accelerate to
this day.
The scientific revolution eroded the dominance of spiritual religions and
made way for the dominance of ideological religions. And this is what
concerned Nietzsche. Because for all of the progress and wealth and tangible
benefits that ideological religions produce, they lack something that spiritual
religions do not: infallibility.
Once believed in, a supernatural deity is impervious to worldly affairs.