Feuerbach Essence Of Christianity Quotes

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I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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God did not, as the Bible says, make man in His image; on the contrary man, as I have shown in The Essence of Christianity, made God in his image.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (Lectures on the Essence of Religion)
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The power of thought is the light of knowledge, the power of will is the energy of character, the power of heart is love. Reason, love and power of will are perfections of man.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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The idea of God is the ignorance which solves all doubt by repressing it.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[T]ruth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (Lectures on the Essence of Religion)
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The joys of theory are the sweetest intellectual pleasures of life
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[Theology is a] web of contradictions and delusions.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism β€” at least in the sense of this work β€” 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.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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A circle in a straight line is the mathematical symbol of miracle.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Though I myself am an atheist, I openly profess religion in the sense just mentioned, that is, a nature religion. I hate the idealism that wrenches man out of nature; I am not ashamed of my dependency on nature; I openly confess that the workings of nature affect not only my surface, my skin, my body, but also my core, my innermost being, that the air I breathe in bright weather has a salutary effect not only on my lungs but also on my mind, that the light of the sun illumines not only my eyes but also my spirit and my heart. And I do not, like a Christian, believe that such dependency is contrary to my true being or hope to be delivered from it. I know further that I am a finite moral being, that I shall one day cease to be. But I find this very natural and am therefore perfectly reconciled to the thought.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (Lectures on the Essence of Religion)
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The essence of faith … is the idea that that which man wishes actually is: he wishes to be immortal, therefore he is immortal; he wishes for the existence of a being who can do everything which is impossible to Nature and reason, therefore such a being exists[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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To know God and not oneself to be God, to know blessedness and not oneself to enjoy it, is a state of disunity or unhappiness.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Certainly my work is negative, destructive; but … only in relation to the unhuman, not to the human[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[T]he object of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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The law holds man in bondage; love makes him free.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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To every religion the gods of other religions are only notions concerning God, but its own conception of God is to it God himself, the true God.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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In the object which he contemplates … man becomes acquainted with himself.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[L]et it be remembered that atheism … is the secret of religion … ; religion … in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Consciousness consists in a being becoming objective to itself; … it is nothing apart, nothing distinct from the being which is conscious of itself.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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The consciousness of the infinite is nothing else than the consciousness of the infinity of the consciousness; … in the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Each planet has its own sun. … [I]t really is another sun on Uranus … The relation of the Sun to the Earth is therefore at the same time a relation of the Earth to itself, or to its own nature … Hence each planet has in its sun the mirror of its own nature.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Man cannot get beyond his true nature. He may indeed by means of the imagination conceive individuals of another so-called higher kind, but he can never get loose from his species, his nature; the conditions of being, the positive final predicates which he gives to these other individuals, are always determinations or qualities drawn from his own nature – qualities in which he in truth only images and projects himself.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Wherever this idea, that the religious predicates are only anthropomorphisms, has taken possession of man, there has doubt, has unbelief, obtained mastery of faith.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[M]an [has] the power of abstraction from himself[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[T]o a limited being its limited understanding is not felt to be a limitation; on the contrary, it is perfectly happy and contented with this understanding[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[T]he present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Whatever kind of object … we are at any time conscious of, we are always at the same time conscious of our own nature[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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We know the man by the object[.] Even the moon, the sun, stars, … [t]hat he sees them is an evidence of his own nature.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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God as God is feeling … yet shut up, hidden; … Christ is the unclosed, open feeling of the heart. … Christ is the joyful certainty of feeling that its wishes hidden in God have truth and reality, the actual victory over death, over all the powers of the world and Nature, the resurrection no longer merely hoped for, but already accomplished; … the Godhead made visible.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Love determined God to the renunciation of his divinity. Not because … God is love, but because of his love, of the predicate, … ; thus love is a higher power and truth[.] Love conquers God. It was love to which God sacrificed his divine majesty. … [W]hat sort of love was that? … [I]t was love to man. … [T]hough there is … a self-interested love among men, still true human love … is that which impels the sacrifice of self to another. Who then is our saviour … ? Love; for God as God has not saved us, but Love, which transcends the difference between the divine and human personality. As God has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God, and, in spite of the predicate of love, we have the God – the evil being – of religious fanaticism.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[S]o much worth … a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. By his God thou knowest the man, and by the man, his God; the two are identical.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Nature is precisely what separates man from God … [R]eligion believes that one day this wall of separation will fall away. One day there will be no Nature, no matter, no body, at least none such as to separate man from God: then there will be only God[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Faith in the power of prayer … is … faith in miraculous power; and faith in miracles is … the essence of faith in general. … [F]aith is nothing else than confidence in the reality of the subjective in opposition to the limitations or laws of Nature and reason, … The specific object of faith, therefore, is miracle; … To faith nothing is impossible, and miracle only gives actuality to this omnipotence of faith[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Man distinguishes himself from Nature. This distinction of his is his God: the distinguishing of God from Nature is nothing else than the distinguishing of man from Nature. … [S]peculations and controversies concerning the personality or impersonality of God are therefore fruitless, idle, uncritical … ; … they in truth speculate only concerning themselves, only in the interest of their own instinct of self-preservation[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence .Β .Β . truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.” β€”Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition 
of The Essence of Christianity
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Guy Debord (Society of the Spectacle)
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Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established. I can found morality on theology only when I myself have already defined the Divine Being by means of morality. In the contrary case, I have no criterion of the moral and immoral, but merely an unmoral, arbitrary basis, from which I may deduce anything I please. Thus, if I would found morality on God, I must first of all place it in God: for Morality, Right, in short, all substantial relations, have their only basis in themselves, can only have a real foundationβ€”such as truth demandsβ€”when they are thus based. (…) Where man is in earnest about ethics, they have in themselves the validity of a divine power. If morality has no foundation in itself, there is no inherent necessity for morality; morality is then surrendered to the groundless arbitrariness of religion.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[I]t implies great force of subjectivity to accept as certain something in contradiction with rational, normal experience. … Wishes own no restraint, no law, no time; they would be fulfilled without delay on the instant. And behold! miracle is as rapid as a wish is impatient. … [I]t is not in its product or object that miraculous agency is distinguished from the agency of Nature and reason, but only in its mode and process; … The power of miracle is … the power of the imagination.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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True love is sufficient to itself; it needs no special title, no authority … [I]t is … the original source of love, out of which the love of Christ himself arose. … Are we to love each other because Christ loved us? Such love would be an affected, imitative love. Can we truly love each other only if we love Christ? … Shall I love Christ more than mankind? Is not such love a chimerical love? … What ennobled Christ was love; … he was not the proprietor of love … The idea of love is an independent idea: I do not first deduce it from the life of Christ; on the contrary, I revere that life only because I find it accordant with the … idea of love.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Faith gives man a peculiar sense of his own dignity … The believer finds himself distinguished above other men, exalted above natural man … Because faith represents man's own nature as that of another being, the believer does not contemplate his dignity immediately in himself, but in this supposed distinct person. … [H]is own desire of honour is satisfied in the honour of his Lord. Faith is arrogant, but it is distinguished from natural arrogance in this, that it clothes its feelings of superiority, its pride, in the idea of another person … This distinctive person, however, is simply its own hidden self[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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I cannot so abstract myself from myself as to judge myself … ; another has an impartial judgement; through him I correct, complete, extend my own judgement, my own taste, my own knowledge.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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The idea of man as a species, and with it the significance of the life of the species, of humanity as a whole, vanished as Christianity became dominant. Herein we have … confirmation … that Christianity does not contain within itself the principle of culture. Where man immediately identifies the species with the individual, and posits this identity as his highest being, as God, where the idea of humanity is thus an object to him only as the idea of the Godhead, there the need of culture has vanished; man has all in himself, all in his God, consequently he has no need to supply his own deficiencies by others as the representatives of the species, or by the contemplation of the world generally; and this need alone is the spring of culture.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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That which I think only according to the standard of my individuality is not binding on another; it can be conceived otherwise; it is an accidental, merely subjective view.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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If I know not now what and how I shall be; if there is an essential, absolute difference between my future and my present; neither shall I then know what and how I was before, the unity of consciousness is at an end, personal identity is abolished, another being will appear in my place; and thus my future existence is not in fact distinguished from non-existence. If, on the other hand, there is no essential difference, the future is to me an object that may be defined and known[:] … I am the substance which connects the present and the future into a unity. How then can the future be obscure to me? That which irreligious-religious reflection converts into a known image of an unknown yet certain thing, is … in the primitive, true sense of religion, not an image, but the thing itself. … The future life is nothing else than life in unison with the feeling, with the idea, which the present life contradicts. … [T]he other world is nothing more than the reality of a known idea, the satisfaction of a conscious desire, the fulfilment of a wish; it is only the removal of limits which here oppose themselves to the realisation of the idea. … [A]n image, a conception; still it is not the image of a remote, unknown thing, but a portrait of that which man loves and prefers before all else[:] … his soul.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[M]arriage is not holy in Christianity; … an unholy thing … excluded from heaven. … Where his heaven is, there is his heart, - heaven is his heart laid open. Heaven is nothing but the idea of the true, the good, the valid, - of that which ought to be; earth, nothing but the idea of the untrue, the unlawful, of that which ought not to be. … [T]here [in heaven] dwell only pure sexless individuals: … the Christian excludes the life of the species from his conception of the true life[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[H]eaven … is inconceivable, … it can only be thought of by us according to the standard of this world, a standard not applicable to any other. … It is just so with God[:] what he is, or how he exists is inscrutable.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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The unwedded and ascetic life is the direct way to the heavenly, immortal life, for heaven is nothing else than life liberated from the conditions of the species, supernatural, sexless, absolutely subjective life.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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The future life is the feeling, the conception of freedom from those limits which here circumscribe the feeling of self, the existence of the individual. … The natural man remains at home because he finds it agreeable, because he is perfectly satisfied; religion … commences with a discontent, a disunion, forsakes its home and travels far, but only to feel … more vividly in the distance … home. In religion man separates himself from himself, but only to return always to the same point from which he set out [himself]. Man negatives himself, but only to posit himself again, and that in a glorified form: he negatives this life, but only, in the end, to posit it again in the future life.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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The true Christian not only feels no need of culture, because this is a worldly principle and opposed to feeling; he also has no need of (natural) love. … God supplies to him the want of love, of a wife, of a family. … [T]he man who does not deny his manhood, is conscious that he is only part of a being, which needs another part for the making up of the whole of true humanity. The Christian, on the contrary, in his excessive, transcendental subjectivity, conceives that he is, by himself, a perfect being. But the sexual instinct runs counter to this view; it is in contradiction with his ideal: the Christian must therefore deny this instinct.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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The doctrine of immortality is the final doctrine of religion; … it speaks out what it has hitherto suppressed. If elsewhere the religious soul concerns itself with the existence of another being, here it openly considers only its own existence[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[D]oubt, the principle of theoretic freedom, appears to me a crime. … [T]he highest crime is doubt in God, or the doubt that God exists. … [T]hat which I do not trust myself to doubt, … without feeling disturbed in my soul, without incurring guilt; that is no matter of theory, but a matter of conscience[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Divine grace is the power of chance beclouded with additional mystery. … Religion denies, repudiates chance, making everything dependent on God, explaining everything by means of him; … the divine will … determines or predestines some to evil and misery, others to good and happiness, has not a single positive characteristic to distinguish it from the power of chance. The mystery of the election of grace is thus the mystery of chance.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[H]eavenly personality, or the perpetuation of human personality in heaven is nothing else than personality released from all earthly encumbrances and limitations[.] [H]ere we are men, there gods[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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The belief in the immortality of man is the belief in the divinity of man[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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The religious man renounces the joys of this world, but only that he may win in return the joys of heaven; … and the joys of heaven are the same as those of earth, only that they are freed from the limits and contrarieties of this life. Religion thus arrives, though by a circuit, at the very goal, the goal of joy, towards which the natural man hastens in a direct line. To live in images or symbols is the essence of religion. Religion sacrifices the thing itself to the image.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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The heavenly life is no other than that which is, already here below, distinguished from the merely natural life … That which the Christian excludes from himself now – for example, the sexual life – is excluded from the future: the only distinction is, that he is there free from that which he here wishes to be free from … Hence this life is, for the Christian, a life of torment and pain, because he is here still beset by a hostile power, and has to struggle with the lusts of the flesh and the assaults of the devil.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Religion annexes to its doctrines a curse and a blessing … Blessed is he that believeth, cursed is he that believeth not. Thus it appeals not to reason, but to feeling, … to the passions of hope and fear. … [T]he fear of hell urges me to believe. Even supposing my belief to be in its origin free, fear inevitably intermingles itself[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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The more man alienates himself from Nature, the more subjective, i.e., supranatural or antinatural, is his view of things, the greater the horror he has of Nature, or at least of those natural objects and processes which displease his imagination, which affect him disagreeably.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Miracle is agreeable because … it satisfies the wishes of man without labour[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[I]n love, man declares himself unsatisfied in his individuality taken by itself, he postulates the existence of another as a need of the heart; … the life which he has through love to be the truly human life, … The individual is defective, imperfect, weak, needy; but love is strong, perfect, contented, free from wants, self-sufficing, infinite; … friendship is a means of virtue, and more: it is … dependent however on participation. … [I]t cannot be based on perfect similarity; on the contrary, it requires diversity, for friendship rests on a desire for self-contemplation. One friend obtains through the other what he does not himself possess. … However faulty a man may be, it is a proof that there is a germ of good in him if he has worthy men for his friends. If I cannot be myself perfect, I yet at least love virtue, perfection in others.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Because of … this concentration of all that is universal and real in one personal being, God is a deeply moving object, enrapturing to the imagination; whereas the idea of humanity has little power over the feelings, because humanity is only an abstraction; … God is … a subject; … the perfect universal being as one being, the infinite extension of the species as an all-comprehending unity. But God is only man's intuition of his own nature; thus the Christians … deify the human individual, make him the absolute being.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[T]he Christians abolished the distinction between soul and person, species and individual, and therefore placed immediately in self what belongs only to the totality of the species.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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If all men were absolutely alike, … a single man would have achieved the end of the species.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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The salvation of the soul is the fundamental idea, the main point in Christianity; … this salvation lies only in God … But God is absolute subjectivity, … separated from the world, … set free from matter, severed from … life … and … from the distinction of sex. Separation from the world, from matter, from the life of the species, is therefore the ultimate aim of Christianity. … [T]his aim had its visible, practical realisation in Monachism.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Faith in the future life is … faith in the truth of the imagination, as faith in God is faith in the truth and infinity of human feeling. … [F]aith in God is only faith in the abstract nature of man, so faith in the heavenly life is only faith in the abstract earthly life.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Man … has the wish not to die. This wish is originally identical with the instinct of self-preservation. … Subsequently, … this primary negative wish becomes the positive wish for a life, and a better life, after death. … [T]his wish involves the further wish for the certainty of its fulfilment. Reason can afford no such certainty. … Such a certainty requires an immediate personal assurance, a practical demonstration. This can only be given to me by … a dead person … rising again from the grave; and he must be no indifferent person, but … representative of all others, so that his resurrection also maybe the … guarantee of theirs. The resurrection of Christ is … the satisfied desire of man for an immediate certainty of his personal existence after death[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Religion is a dream, in which our own conceptions and emotions appear to us as separate existences, beings out of ourselves. The religious mind does not distinguish between subjective and objective, - it has no doubts; it has the faculty of not discerning other things than itself, but of seeing its own conceptions out of itself as distinct beings. What is in itself merely a theory is to the religious mind a practical belief, a matter of conscience, - a fact. [A] fact is that which one cannot criticise or attack without being guilty of a crime; … a fact is a physical force, not an argument, - it makes no appeal to the reason. … [F]acts are just as relative, as various, as subjective, as the ideas of different religions[.] … A fact … is a conception about the truth of which there is no doubt, because it is no object of theory, but of feeling, which desires that what it wishes, what it believes, should be true. … A fact is … a … conception which, for the age wherein it is held to be a fact, expresses a want, and is for that reason an impassable limit of the mind. A fact is every wish that projects itself on reality[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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I extend the horizon of the senses by the imagination; … this conception … exalts me above the limited standpoint of the senses, … affects me agreeably, I posit [it] as a divine reality. … [I]t would be impossible for me to predicate omniscience of an object or being external to myself, if this omniscience were essentially different from my own knowledge, if it were not a mode of perception of my own, if it had nothing in common with my power of cognition. … Imagination does away only with the limit of quantity, not of quality. … [W]e know only some things, a few things, not all.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Religion has no physical conception of the world; it has no interest in a physical explanation, which can never be given but with a mode of origin. Origin is a theoretical, natural philosophical idea. The heathen philosophers busied themselves with the origin of things. But the religious consciousness abhorred this idea as heathen, irreligious, and substituted the practical or subjective idea of creation, which is nothing else than a prohibition to conceive things as having arisen in a natural way … The religious consciousness connects the world immediately with God; … The question, how did God create? is an indirect doubt that he did create the world. It was the question which brought man to atheism, materialism, naturalism.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[T]he religious expression is: Man is the image of God, or a being akin to God; - for according to religion man does not spring from Nature, but is of divine race, of divine origin. … According to this, God is the father of man, man the son, the child of God. Here is posited at once the self-subsistence of God and the dependence of man, … Nevertheless this distinction is only an appearance. The father is not a father without a child; both together form a correlated being.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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To the religious spirit … God alone is the cause of all positive effects … [I]t solves … most … questions always with the same answer, making all the operations of Nature … operations of God, … God is the idea which supplies the lack of theory. … The explanation of the inexplicable - which explains nothing … ; he is the night of theory, a night, however, in which everything is clear to religious feeling, … [T]he discriminating light of the understanding is extinct; he is the ignorance which solves all doubt by repressing it, which knows everything because it knows nothing … Darkness is the mother of religion.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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The general premiss of … belief is: man of himself can know nothing of God; all his knowledge is merely vain, earthly, human. … God is known only by himself. Thus we know nothing of God; for revelation is the word of God … [I]n revelation man … places revelation in opposition to human knowledge … ; here reason must hold its peace. But nevertheless the divine revelation is determined by the human nature. God speaks not to brutes or angels, but to men; hence he uses human speech and human conceptions. … God is … free in will; … but he is not free as to the understanding; he cannot reveal to man whatever he will, but only what is adapted to man, … [W]hat God thinks in relation to man is determined by the idea of man – it has arisen out of reflection on human nature. [H]e thinks of himself, not with his own thinking power, but with man's. … That which comes from God to man, comes to man only from man in God, … only from the ideal nature of man to the phenomenal man, from the species to the individual. Thus, between the divine revelation and the so-called human reason or nature, there is no other than an illusory distinction; … so in revelation man goes out of himself, in order, by a circuitous path, to return to himself!
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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The personality of God is thus the means by which man converts the qualities of his own nature into the qualities of another being, - a being external to himself. The personality of God is nothing else than the projected personality of man.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Belief in Providence is belief in a power to which all things stand at command to be used according to its pleasure, in opposition to which all the power of reality is nothing. Providence cancels the laws of Nature; it interrupts the course of necessity, the iron bond which inevitably binds effects to causes; in short, it is the same unlimited, all-powerful will, that called the world into existence out of nothing. Miracle is aΒ creatio ex nihilo. He who turns water into wine, makes wine out of nothing, for the constituents of wine are not found in water; otherwise, the production of wine would not be a miraculous, but a natural act. The only attestation, the only proof of Providence is miracle. Thus Providence is an expression of the same idea as creation out of nothing.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity)
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The course of religious development … consists … in … that man abstracts more and more from God, and attributes more and more to himself. … That which to a later age or a cultured people is given by nature or reason, is to an earlier age, or to a yet uncultured people, given by God.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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We consume the air and we are consumed by it; we enjoy and are enjoyed.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[T]he understanding … has its essence in itself, consequently it has nothing, together with or external to itself, which can be ranged beside it; it is incapable of being compared, because it is itself the source of all combinations and comparisons; … we measure all things by understanding alone; … it is … the principle of all generalising, of all classification, … [I]t circumscribes all things and beings. The definitions which the speculative philosophers and theologians give … , all these definitions are … ideas drawn solely from the nature of the understanding.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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It certainly is the interest of religion that its object should be distinct from man; but it is also … its interest that this object should have human attributes. That he should be a distinct being concerns his existence only; … that he should be human concerns his essence.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Of all the attributes which the understanding assigns to God, that which … especially in the Christian religion … has … pre-eminence … is moral perfection. But God as a morally perfect being is nothing else than the realised idea, … the moral nature of man posited as the absolute being; … how could he otherwise tremble before the Divine Being, accuse himself before him, and make him the judge of his inmost thoughts and feelings?
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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God as God is the sum of all human perfection; God as Christ is the sum of all human misery. … If God … is … abstract philosophy: … Christ … is … pure suffering - … what makes more impression on the heart than suffering? especially the suffering … of the innocent endured purely for the good of others ..?
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Existence is one with self-consciousness; existence with self-consciousness is existence simply. If I do not know that I exist, it is all one whether I exist or not.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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To suffer is the highest command of Christianity – the history of Christianity is the history of the passion … [T]he ancient Christians … rendered the highest honour to their God by … tears of repentance and yearning. … If God himself suffered for my sake, how can I be joyful, how can I allow myself any gladness, at least on this corrupt earth, which was the theatre of his suffering?
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[T]he religious man … believes in a real sympathy of a divine being in his sufferings and wants, believes that the will of God can be determined by … prayer, … The … religious man unhesitatingly assigns his own feelings to God; God is to him a heart susceptible to all that is human.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[E]very religion which has any claim to the name presupposes that God is not indifferent to the beings who worship him, … [A]s an object of veneration, he is a human God. … God is not deaf to my complaints; he has compassion on me; hence he renounces his divine majesty[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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This [love] ought to be a furnace that should melt us all into one heart, and should create such a fervour in us … that we should heartily love each other.' But that which in the truth of religion is the essence of the fable, is to the religious consciousness only the moral of the fable, a collateral thing.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[I]n no wise is the negation of the subject necessarily also a negation of the predicates. … These have an intrinsic independent reality; they are self-evident truths to him. … It does not follow that goodness, justice, wisdom, are chimΓ¦ras because the existence of God is a chimΓ¦ra. … The fact is not that a quality is divine because God has it, but that God has it because it is in itself divine.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[I]f God as a subject is the determined, while the quality, the predicate, is determining, then in truth the rank of the godhead is due not to the subject, but to the predicate.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Religion … denies goodness as a quality of human nature; man is wicked, corrupt, incapable of good; … on the other hand, God is only good[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Thou believest in love as a divine attribute because thy thyself lovest; thou believest that God is a wise, benevolent being because thou knowest nothing better in thyself than benevolence and wisdom; and thou believest that God exists, that therefore he is a subject … because thou thyself existest, art thyself a subject[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[W]hen it is shown that what the subject is lies entirely in the attributes of the subject; … that the predicate is the true subject; it is also proved that if the divine predicates are attributes of the human nature, the subject of those predicates is also … human nature.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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God is the nature of man regarded as absolute truth, the truth of man; … God, or what is the same thing, religion, is as various as are the conditions under which man conceives his nature, … These conditions, then, under which man conceives God, are to him the truth, and for that reason they are also … existence itself.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Love determined God to the renunciation of his divinity.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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Providence has relation essentially to man. It is for man's sake that Providence makes of things whatever it pleases; it is for man's sake that it supersedes the authority and reality of a law otherwise omnipotent. … [W]e nowhere read that God, for the sake of brutes, became a brute – the very idea of this is, in the eyes of religion, impious and ungodly; or that God ever performed a miracle for the sake of animals or plants. On the contrary, we read that a poor fig-tree, because it bore no fruit at a time when it could not bear it, was cursed, purely in order to give man an example of the power of faith over Nature[.]
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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God is the mirror of man.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[P]ersonal theism conceives God as a personal being, separate from all material things; it excludes him from all development, because that is nothing else than the self-separation of being from circumstances and conditions which do not correspond to its true idea. … [I]n God … beginning, end, middle are not to be distinguished … [H]e is at once what he is, is from the beginning … ; he is the pure unity of existence and essence, reality and idea, act and will. … [T]hey [gods] have bodies like men, but bodies from which the limitations and difficulties of the human body are eliminated.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[T]hat which is the object of another being is dependent. … Thus the plant is dependent on air and light, that is, it is an object for air and light, not for itself. Physical life in general is nothing else than this perpetual interchange of the objective and subjective relation.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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The understanding is universal, pantheistic, the love of the universe; but the grand characteristic of religion, and of the Christian religion especially, is that it is thoroughly anthropotheistic, the exclusive love of man for himself, the exclusive self-affirmation of the human nature.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))
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[M]an does not stand above this his necessary conception; on the contrary, it stands above him; it animates, determines, governs him.
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Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity (Great Books in Philosophy))