The Twilight of the Idols · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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In Christianity neither morality nor religion comes in touch at all with reality. Nothing but imaginary _causes_ (God, the soul, the ego, spirit, free will—or even non-free will); nothing but imaginary _effects_ (sin, salvation, grace, punishment, forgiveness of sins). Imaginary beings are supposed to have intercourse (God, spirits, souls); imaginary Natural History (anthropocentric: total lack of the notion “natural causes”); an imaginary _psychology_ (nothing but misunderstandings of self, interpretations of pleasant or unpleasant general feelings; for instance of the states of the _nervus sympathicus,_ with the help of the sign language of a religio-moral idiosyncrasy,—repentance, pangs of conscience, the temptation of the devil, the presence of God); an imaginary teleology (the Kingdom of God, the Last Judgment, Everlasting Life).—This purely fictitious world distinguishes itself very unfavourably from the world of dreams: the latter _reflects_ reality, whereas the former falsifies, depreciates and denies it Once the concept “nature” was taken to mean the opposite of the concept God, the word “natural” had to acquire the meaning of abominable,—the whole of that fictitious world takes its root in the hatred of nature (—reality!—), it is the expression of profound discomfiture in the presence of reality.... _But this explains everything._ What is the only kind of man who has reasons for wriggling out of reality by lies? The man who suffers from reality. But in order to suffer from reality one must be a bungled portion of it. The preponderance of pain over pleasure is the _cause_ of that fictitious morality and religion: but any such preponderance furnishes the formula for decadence.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.