Thoughts of Ludwig Feuerbach

Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach was a German anthropologist and philosopher, best known for his book The Essence of Christianity, which provided a critique of Christianity that strongly influenced generations.

Feuerbach argued that human beings must have created religion in an attempt to assert themselves against their natural limitations. He saw religion as the denial of dependence and the projection of a wish (Essence, 29). Religion, he believed, is an objectification of human wishing about limitless existence.

"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."

Great Thoughts of Ludwig Feuerbach

"It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image. "

"The law holds man in bondage; love makes him free."

" The object of any subject is nothing else than subject's own anture taken objectively."

"Certainly my work is negative, destructive; but...only in relation to the unhuman, not to the human."