[Noumenon]

Take a tour through Voegelin's assessment of Nietzsche - you might find an interesting and informative perspective there.

I never claimed that Nietzsche was a Nazi or proto-Nazi. That's a trope for lesser minds. And a strawman from you.

Sure, Nietzsche was a philologist - one of his greatest works was Beyond Good and Evil where his philological background came into play in this interpretation of those words. But you must also remember that Nietzsche also called for the transvaluation of all values in an attempt to liberate the concepts of good and evil from what he believed were the unnecessary and foolish constraints of moral and religious thought. I recall that Nietzsche was inordinately fond of the term 'religious naiserie' - a bit of a giveaway with respect to his attitude towards traditional morality.

But there's no dispute that Nietzsche's ideas were co-opted and wrongly interpreted by the National Socialists to serve their own ends.

I stand by my original claims with respect to Nietzsche's insight that, with the waning of the Christian virtues of mercy and restraint, something would fill that vacuum. That something, according to Nietzsche, was the will to power. History has proven him - and me - correct.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

For example... The teaching that matrimony is a sacrament gives to a clergy the judging of the lawfulness of marriages and ecclesiastical censure for divorce... The government of men's external actions by religion, pretending the change of nature in their consecrations cannot be esteemed a work extraordinary, it is no other than a conjuration or incantation, whereby they would have men to believe an alteration of nature that is contrary to the testimony of sight and of all the rest of the senses.

[Borges]

He was describing an existing condition in the Europe of his time. The late 19th century saw everything in terms of evolutionary development and not just biological. Everything was getting bigger and better and the Church did not have the sway that it had in the pre-Industrial age. It’s not his fault that his ideas were co-opted. He was an imaginative writer and is not to be taken at completely face value.