Over the last week or so I've been plowing my way through the Kaufman collection of Nietzsche's writings, and several of them have struck me as particularly poignant. Now Nietzsche has quite a reputation for coming up with evil and villainous conceptions of human nature. He has been used as an excuse for racism, Nazism, general Antisemitism, and maligned for his philosophic atheism.
Thus far, I have seen nothing racist beyond what was typical for a nineteenth-century European, and, in fact, Nietzsche defends Judaism - in a racist way, admittedly, but in a way that clearly marks him as not Antisemitic, especially not in a way that should encourage the kind of Antisemitism practiced by the Nazi party in twentieth-century Germany.
His atheism, however, is quite evident, but this I have no problem with. And, given some more recent atheistic tracts and works I have recently read, Nietzsche is downright mild and non-confrontational. He phrases his atheism specifically in terms of truth, self-delusion, and hypocrisy.
One of the early points in the book is from On Truth and Lie:
We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all... (47)
First, of course, Nietzsche raises the question of whether truth - objective, singular truth - actually exists at all. The understanding of truth he here presents indicates an awareness of the subjectivity of human morality (the idea that "truth" varies according to circumstances) but also implicitly asks whether if basic truth does not exist, then how can we claim that there is a higher moral truth.
Nietzsche compounds this question with the now-infamous assertion that "God is dead," but also with claims of religious hypocrisy, as when he writes, "when one opens the Bible one does so for 'edification'" (The Dawn 76). In other words, those who read the Bible - and, presumably, any holy book - do so because they already know what they think of it and are looking to it to confirm their beliefs. Of course, this applies to the non-believer as well as the believer and says more about the problematic nature of holy works and human contradictions than it does of the claims made by those books.
But Nietzsche is ultimately more interested in the hypocrisy of believers than he is in their books. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the titular philosopher says "Behold the believers of all faiths! Whom do they hate most? The man who breaks their tables of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker; yet he is the creator" (135-136). What is most interesting about this idea is that it begins the introduction of the Ubermench (the Overman), the better future-human. Here, we see not only a critique of the faithful, but also a recognition that any creator - the deity that is worshiped, the founder of a religion, etc. - must by necessity violate the very rules of that religion.
It also establishes the idea that any future founder of something great - be it religion, scientific thought, government, etc. - must violate the rules of what already exists in order to do so. Implicitly, then, Nietzsche himself, in creating and articulating these new ideas, is a willing violator of the status quo. So break a few rules and make something new.