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Although the idea may seem harsh to some, Nietzsche saw the "will to power" -- or, as he famously put it, the ability to "say yes! to life" -- as life-affirming. Creatures affirm the instinct in exerting their energy, in venting their strength. The suffering borne of conflict between competing wills and the efforts to overcome one's environment is not evil, but a part of existence to be embraced. It signifies the healthy expression of the natural order, whereas failing to act in one's self-interest is seen as a 'sickness'. Enduring satisfaction and pleasure result from living creatively, overcoming oneself, and successfully exerting the Will to Power.
Nietzsche's work addresses ethics from several perspectives; in today's terms, we might say his remarks pertain to meta-ethics, normative ethics, and descriptive ethics. As far as meta-ethics is concerned, Nietzsche can perhaps most usefully be classified as a moral skeptic; that is, he claims that all ethical statements are false, because any kind of correspondence between ethical statements and "moral facts" is illusory. (This is part of a more general claim that all facts are false, roughly because none of them more than appear to correspond to reality.) Instead, ethical statements (like all statements) are mere "interpretations." Sometimes, Nietzsche may seem to have very definite opinions on what is moral or immoral. Note, however, that Nietzsche's moral opinions may be explained without attributing to him the claim that they are true. For Nietzsche, after all, we needn't disregard a statement merely because it is false. On the contrary, he often claims that falsehood is essential for "life." In the juncture between normative ethics and descriptive ethics, Nietzsche distinguishes between "master morality" and "slave morality". Although he recognizes that not everyone holds either scheme in a pure fashion, he presents them in contrast to one another. Some of the contrasts in master vs. slave morality:
Nietzsche's assessment of both the antiquity and resultant impediments presented by the ethical and moralistic teachings of the world's monotheistic religions eventually led him to his own epiphany about the nature of God and morality, resulting in his work Also sprach Zarathustra.
Nietzsche is also well-known for the statement " God is dead." While in popular belief it is Nietzsche himself who blatantly made this declaration, it was actually placed into the mouth of a character, a "madman," in The Gay Science, and later was proclaimed by Nietzsche's Zarathustra. This largely misunderstood statement does not proclaim a physical death, but a natural end to the belief in God being the foundation of western cosmology. It is more of an observation than a declaration. Nietzsche believed this "death" would eventually undermine the foundations of morality and lead to moral relativism and nihilism. To avoid this, he believed in re-evaluating the foundations of morality and placing them on a natural foundation.
According to Dr. Norman Ravitch, professor of history at U.C. Riverside, "What Spengler, Toynbee, and Nietzsche can teach us is how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, despite superficial differences, were all forged and/or altered by a religious revolution in ancient Iran associated with the name Zoroaster or Zarathustra. The central notions of dualism between Good and Evil, Salvation through an Expected Messiah, and the Final Battle between St Michael and Satan animate these world religions and their devotees. Pragmatism, reason, and common sense have little place in these primitive Semitic world views. All conflict is interpreted as part of a cosmic struggle between Good and Evil and there is no room for compromise or tolerance."
In his important work The Anti-Christ Nietzsche frontally attacked German scholarly Christianity for what he called its "transvaluation" of healthy instinctive values. He went beyond agnostic and atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment who felt that Christianity may simply be an untrue religion to claiming it may have been deliberately propagated as an inherently bad and subversive religion (or in late 20th century parlance: a "psychological warfare weapon" or " memetic virus") within the Roman Empire by the Apostle Paul as a form of covert revenge for the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple during the Jewish War . However, in the Anti-Christ, Nietzsche has a remarkably high view of Jesus, claiming the scholars of the day fail to pay any attention to the man, Jesus, and only look to their construction, Christ. According to the American writer H.L. Mencken, Nietzsche felt that the religion of the ancient Greeks of the heroic and classical era was superior to Christianity because it portrayed strong, heroic, smart, and muscular men as role models and did not try to demonize healthy natural desires, such as creativity and writing poetry.
Nietzsche's works have also been valued as a religious "deprogramming tool", such as in the large tome Which Way Western Man? by former American Christian minister and co-founder of the ACLU William Gayley Simpson in which he recounts in great theological detail how Nietzsche's works allowed him to see the light of Darwin and overcome the dysfunctional "slave morality" that had been programmed into him by society and co-religionists.
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