Religion, beauty, and creation

Editor's note: it's SSF again.

"To love humanity for God's sake: this remains the noblest and most remote feeling ever attained among men. That the love of human beings, without some kind of hallowed intention behind it, is just one more stupidity and brutishness, that the inclination to this love of humanity must first get its measure, its subtlety, its grains of salt and its specks of ambergris from a higher inclination: whichever person it was who first discovered and 'experienced' these things, however much his tongue may have stumbled as he tried to express such a delicate matter, let him remain for all time holy and venerable among us, as the man who has hitherto flown the highest and has erred the most beautifully!"

-Nietsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 3.60 (trans. SSF)

However much we may disagree about God, the afterlife, the soul, or the purpose of our lives, we can at least agree that religion is very closely bound up with the creation of, and the response to, beauty in the world: without religion, the world would be incomparably uglier. We must always recognize our debt to religion, offering our most heartfelt gratitude for its having provided us with a great number of uplifting, ennobling, and aesthetically powerful images and stories, among which we might especially note the following:

" 75,000,000 years ago, Xenu, the head of the then 20,000,000 million- year-old Galactic Federation used renegades to remove 'people' from the 76 planets of the Federation in order to alleviate overpopulation. These people were frozen, brought to Earth (then called Teegeeack), placed near volcanoes, exploded with H-bombs, subjected to 36 days of picture implants, and then transported to Hawaii or Las Palmas for packaging."

Whoever first discovered and 'experienced' the truth of this story must be admired as the man who has hitherto tripped the most bizarrely and has strayed the furthest from his rocker! (It was this guy, of course.)