February 12 - Is Kindness Intelligible Apart from the Gospel?

Is kindness intelligible apart from the gospel?

For Fredrick Nietzsche, virtues like grace, mercy, and kindness are “merely an honorable form of stupidity.” Those who practice them simply “project their own honorable stupidity and goodness into the heart of things.” The “things” to which Nietzsche refers is the mystery of the universe - God, namely. A loving God is the work of fiction produced by the sentimental pining of a kind person. Our internal kindness simply gets reflected back onto the external world - next thing you know, there is a God willing to forgive sins.