Ludwig Feuerbach: Religion as an Illusion - raised in a solidly Christian family, went

to Heidelberg University, because he wanted to become a protestant minister but later

moved away from theology toward philosophy. Saw as unquestionably situated solely
in reason perfections such as unity, universality and infinity, which were formerly and
normally attributed solely to God. considered religion merely as a past phase in man's
intellectual progression, called for a new religion of action, and insisted on man's
undivided concentration on this world so that an "efficient, spiritually and physically
sound people could be formed from this revolutionizing liberation from the absolutist
God.”

1. Hegelian influence - Georg W.F. Hegel was far from being an atheist himself but
he set the stage for the assault upon God. He questioned whether the philosophers
or the theologians had succeeded in attaining the real God. He protested that the
God of the Christian experience was an inadequate, a premature, not-yet-developed
God. He thus set himself the mission of rescuing the God of Christianity from the
vagueness of imagery, the symbolism of myths, the simplistic charm of parables.

Moreover, Hegel had a bill of particulars against the christian God. The trouble with
the christian God is that he is only experienced and remembered when the human
conscience is sick or in trouble. But this jewish-christian God, who is
unapproachable and inscrutable in his aloof transcendence and unattainable by the
imagination, mind or heart of man, arouses in man resentment against the only
choice he is offered by this mysterious God - obedience or revolt. frustrated by the
demoralizing experience of failing futilely to satisfy his hunger for communion with
the transcendent God, humbled by the degrading knowledge of his abject
powerlessness, man resents the situation that equates God's glorification with his
own depreciation. In effect, says Hegel, the Judeo-Christian God is a cruel tyrant
who fosters between himself and men the infamous dialectical relationship of
master and slave.

Despite the apparent liberation of the spirit found in the new testament, the
apparent snapping of the bonds of fate, the seemingly magnificent release from the
master-slave degradation, Hegel brands Judeo-Christianity as a backward religion, a
religion of endless, hopeless waiting whose devotees are either wandering in a
desert looking for a land flowing with milk and honey or sighing in a vale of tears
scanning the horizon for the advent of the new heaven and earth beyond time.
Jews and Christians suffer from unhappy consciences which beget not true religion
but sentimental religiosity. Both insist God is apart, beyond, divorced from this
world which at best is a sinners' prison, an exiles' passing and dying city.

Hegel's basic opposition to the Jewish and Christian religions is that they create men
who can be witnesses and martyrs for the next world, but never "heroes of action"
in this. He concluded that Christianity was a social and historical failure. For souls
who are withdrawn by religious conviction from their age can never create a great
civilization; they can only produce a spiritless era in which men reluctantly endure
the happenings of time for the happiness of eternity. The Judeo-Christian God is all
too purely transcendent, so far out of this world as to be irrelevant. All modern
atheism will thus be seen to be rooted in Hegel's rejection of the God of the master-
slave relationship, the God who begets an unhappy conscience in man, the God who
reduces man from being a hero to being a beautiful soul.

2. Critique of Christianity - Christianity broke upon an ancient, pagan world,

burdened down with countless Gods, spirits, demons and controlled implacably by
the tyrannical stars and fates above, as the great liberator. It’s good news
proclaimed that man is the effect of infinite, creative love. A divine seal within
man's nature reflects, however dimly yet unmistakably, the ineffable nature of his
absolute creator. Reason, liberty, immortality, providence over cosmos and
community are divine endowments which God shares with man, his favorite image.
Man, having been liberated by Christianity, found reason to rejoice in a world
expanded with newly revealed horizons for intelligence, freedom, love. Each man,
one by one, was now seen to be the known, the chosen, the person individually
embraced by the absolute lover. "I have loved you with an everlasting love,
therefore have I chosen you, taking pity on you." so the initial emotions that
Christianity released in a converted world that was formerly pagan and idolatrous
were those of intense, exhilarating gladness, radiant joy, triumphant applause,
inexpressibly peaceful relief at the deliverance from fatalism and the reception of
new human life in the divine family of the holy trinity. From now on man's
greatness was to consist in his grateful recognition of his divine origins and in his
enthusiastic cooperation for the attainment of his divine destiny - eternal,
supernatural communion within the unveiled family of God.

Though Christianity reminded man that he was and would ever remain during his life
on earth wounded by sin, yet it also assured him that in Christ, the redeemer, and in
his message and mission entrusted to his living church man would find all the power
needed to overcome his debilities and the superabundant graces needed for his
sanctification. here was a message and mission capable of keeping man young in
spirit, vital, free, creative and, above all, joyously striving to grow up in Christ,
despite the rampant ravages of sin in history all around him. Here was a message
and mission that would develop man and his cosmos to divine greatness, while it
overthrew the powers of evil in the visible and invisible worlds.

When Feuerbach looked at the world of his times, alas, he discovered an astonishing
phenomenon. Illusion, indecision, immorality were rampant in a supposedly
Christian civilization. He wrote: “we are living on the perfume of an empty vase.”
yet, even though men were no longer moved by the Christian ideal and no longer
strove for supernatural greatness, they were, nevertheless, still haunted it.
Feuerbach himself testified that “because of its indecisive half-heartedness and lack
 of character... the superhuman and supernatural essence of ancient Christianity still
haunts the minds of men - at least as a ghost.” He planned to dissolve the ghost,
dispel the perfume. He made it his sacred mission to restore man's spiritual
coherency by "erasing this most rotten stain, the stain of our present history." He
would break man's ties to both God and Christianity, myths that held a guilt-ridden
society in total bondage.

3. Atheistic humanism - Feuerbach was convinced that he could account for the
Christian illusion in particular, and for the illusion of religion in general, through
psychological and anthropological causes. In his essence of religion, he proclaimed
that God is merely a myth which embodies the highest aspirations of the human
consciousness. “Those who have no desires have no Gods… Gods are men’s wishes
in corporeal form.” So he vowed to make it his mission to displace religion.

a. negative thesis – alienation: according to Feuerbach alienation arises in man

when man discovers that, in his struggle for a better life, his existence is
dependent, limited, threatened; he is agitated by needs, ideals, desires, fears; he
is buffeted by loves and hates, attractions and abhorrence’s, values and
disvalues; he is forced to sift the good from the evil, all the time realizing from
distressing experience that he finds in himself unstableness and weakness yet, at
the same time, an attraction for noble virtues and deeds. In his desire to
stabilize the noble qualities he finds in his nature, man hypostasizes, idolizes,
absolutizes them outside his own changeable being into an absolute other who is
unchangeable. This other is endowed with wisdom, will, justice, love, all the
noble feelings and virtues which man himself experiences from time to time,
both in himself and in his fellowmen. Thus the absolutized attributes appear to
man as if they were the exclusive ornaments of another, an infinitely more
perfect being than himself. Spontaneously, religiously, man projects and
objectifies his own goodness and greatness in the fantastic being he calls God.
God is thus the product of pure human imagination.

God is for man the commonplace book where he registers his highest feelings
and thoughts, the genealogical album into which he enters the names of the
things most dear and sacred to him.

in this way man simultaneously dispossesses himself and enriches his God; in
affirming God he denies himself; the poorer he becomes, the richer his God
becomes; nothing really exists in God except what belongs and actually really
still is in man's heart.

God as the epitome of all realities or perfections is nothing other than a

compendious summary devised for the benefit of the limited individual, an
epitome of the generic human qualities distributed among men, in the self-
realization of the species in the course of world history.
 Thus man strips himself and the human species of his highest attributes and
creates with these virtues the essence of his own God. Man must die that God
may be born.

b. positive thesis – repossession: following the Hegelian dialectic, Feuerbach

contended that every antithesis must rise to the synthesis; every rejection must
move to a higher reception; every alienation becomes a more perfect
repossession. Man has reached that point in his historical development where he
has to take back from religion and God that nature which he had rejected in their
favor. Feuerbach saw himself as the prophet and the expediter of this process of
reclamation and the herald of the advent of the kingdom of man. Thus he set
out to destroy the vampire of God, to dispel the phantom of religion, to liberate
man from the mighty myth of the absolute other, to restore man to man and
hence to his own greatness. Feuerbach indicated that the principal aim of his
mission was to present mankind to the greatness of his own essence and
thereby to inspire men to have faith in their humanity.

God was my first thought, reason my second and man my third and last - 1 deny
only in order to affirm. I deny the fantastic projection of theology and religion in
order to affirm the real essence of man. - while i do reduce theology to
anthropology, I exalt anthropology to theology; very much as Christianity while
lowering God into man, made man into God.

i aim to change the friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers,
worshippers into workers, candidates for the other world into students of this
world, Christians, who on their own confession, are half-animal and half-angel,
into men - whole men… theologians into anthropologians… religious and political
footmen of a celestial and terrestrial monarchy and aristocracy into free, self-
reliant citizens of earth.

Here was an atheistic humanism that destroyed God as the absolute other; yet
simultaneously here was a theistic humanism that divinized man.

The divine essence is the glorified human essence transfigured from the death of
abstraction. in religion man frees himself from the limitations of life; here he
throws off what oppresses, impedes or adversely affects him; God is man's self-
awareness, emancipated from all actuality; man feels himself free, happy,
blessed only in his religion because here only does he live in his true genius;
here he celebrates his Sunday.

Feuerbach did not divinize individual man in his particularity, but he identified
God with the essence of man, with humanity. His is a religion of humanity, the
apotheosis of man though the apotheosis of mankind.
 it is the essence of man that is the supreme being… if the divinity of nature is
the basis of all religions, including Christianity, the divinity of man is its final
aim… the turning point in history will be the moment when man becomes aware
that the only God of man is man himself. ‘Homo homini deus! Man
spontaneously conceives of his own essence as individual in himself and generic
in God; as limited in himself and infinite in God.

But when man finally sheds this mythical view and accepts personal participation
in his common humanity, man finally realizes the divine dimension of his own
being.

I have only found the key to the cipher of the Christian religion, only extricated
its true meaning from the web of contradictions and delusions called theology;
but in doing so I have certainly committed sacrilege. if therefore my work is
negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism - at least in the
sense in this work - is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed
on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own
supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the
truth and divinity of human nature.

4. Authentic atheism - thus what theology and philosophy have held to be God,
the absolute, the infinite, is not God; but that which they have held not to be God is
God: namely, the attribute, the quality, whatever has reality. hence he alone is the true
atheist to whom the predicates of the divine being - for example, love, wisdom, justice -
are nothing; not he to whom merely the subject of these predicates is nothing. And in
no wise is the negation of the subject necessarily also a negation of the predicates
considered in themselves. These have an intrinsic, independent reality; they force their
recognition upon man by their very nature; they are self-evident truths to him; they
prove, they attest themselves. it does not follow that goodness, justice, wisdom are
chimeras because the existence of God is a chimera ...the fact is not that a quality is
divine because God has it, but that God has it because it is in itself divine: because
without it God would be a defective being… but if God as subject is the determined,
while the quality, the predicate, is the determining, then in truth the rank of the
Godhead is due not to the subject, but to the predicate.

The essential message of all religion and of the gospels of Christianity is that they
are treating fundamentally about man and human greatness under the myth-
symbols of God and supernaturalism.