Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach on Religion (1804-1872)

 By: DaboEuclid
Feuerbach, leader of the left wing Hegelians was profoundly influenced by Hegel’s challenge to the Christian God. He had driven much pleasure in Hegel’s doctrine of the religious alienation of man in the master-slave relationship with the Christian God, but he debunked Hegel’s solution to such a problem. To Feuerbach, the God of the Christian do not need to be reformed, but in the other way, man need to be reformed. Man need not to be rescued from these Christian God, but he needs to be rescued from his own illusions about God. Religion does not make man, but man makes religion, it dogmas and principles are all man’s subjective thought. Man is a God on earth, any thought about a divine being called God, according to Feuerbach is a sheer sophistry and illusion.
Feuerbach drew a logical conclusion of Hegel’s work in his book “The Essence of Christianity” published in 1845, in this book; He claimed that he had discovered the true the true nature of Religion. “All my writings” he wrote “have had strictly speaking, one purpose, one intention, one theme. This is nothing else than religion and theology and whatever is connected with them” (Das Wasen Der Religion, Feuerbach, p.3).
Feuerbach claims that he had discovered the key that could be used to Un-envelop or unwrap the true meaning and essence of religion. His teachings were essentially sermons or proclamations, written with the main aim of “restoring man to his innate dignity”. The collapse of super natural belief will result to a fall in moral convictions, and the moment such happens, man will gain a full grasp of the true essence of thinks as the really are in reality. That day will mark a real moral decline. We are only living in an elusive perfume of empty beliefs or the perfume of an empty vast.
“Because of its indecisive half-heartedness and lack of character…. The super human and supernatural essence of ancient Christianity still haunts the heart and minds of men, at least, as a ghost, erasing this most rotten stain, the stain of our present history” (Feuerbach 1957, p.15).
Here He plan to dissolve the ghost and dispel the perfume in order to restore back man’s spiritual coherence, with the main aim of breaking man’s ties from both God and Christianity, and also from all the various myth and spiritual entities that had caged man and rendered him vulnerable and weak.
According to Feuerbach, God is for man, the complete placed 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, ma dispossesses himself simultaneously and enriches his ideas which he termed as “God”, in affirming God, he denies himself, the poorer man becomes, the richer and more powerful his God tends to grow. “Nothing really exists in God, except what belongs, and actually really exist in man”. There for, ”who ever loves man for the sake of man, who ever love the human species for the sake of the species, is the universal, he is the adequate, the divine man; he is the true Christian, he is Christ himself” (Feuerbach 1957, p.388). Concerning miracles, miracles to Feuerbach are “magical creations resulting from fantasies, which work ceaselessly to satisfy the human heart”. A finite being can never have the knowledge of the infinite entity higher than him; you can never give what you don’t have, because the nature of a thing is the limits of its own vary nature. Logic had affirmed the existence of the infinite since by debunking or denying a thing, we tends to affirm certain things about that same thing also, but this finite being means nothing, but man’s collective ideas and his own vary nature.
Feuerbach had brought down not only fire to earth, but God, and he had ascended above the throne of God, every being is limited to its very nature, no other being can conceive anything higher than its own perfect nature, this Feuerbach had claimed. Man only prays and worships himself, “the divine essence is nothing other than the essence of man”. Feuerbach had successfully swept out all atoms of God, broke down forever all theological, fatalistic tyrants, master slave domination of men, restored divinity to its rightful owner, librated humanity and rendered the thousands of years discussions about God henceforth pointless. “Our consciousness and thinking however supra sensuous they may seem, are the product of a material, bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not the product of the mind, but the mind itself is merely the highest product of matter, Feuerbach had realized.” (Engels, Locicit, p.371)