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The Essence of Christianity
by Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
by George Eliot -
Delphi Classics (Illustrated)
(Delphi Parts Edition (George Eliot))
by Ludwig Feuerbach, George Eliot (Translator).
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Feuerbach might never have realised just how much of this book us simply play on not even concepts, but words.
Wonder if all philosophy of West is just that and no more.
Having read a biography of George Eliot where that author said she was impressed by writing and philosophy of Feuerbach, as one proceeds to read this with not a little expectation, one is at first perplexed; but then one begins to see that this is sort of key to what surprises and dismay a reader about her works. She was very intelligent, and simply wasn't fortunate enough to find better guides for her mind, let alone soul. All she had was empty verbosity of West, of Germany, and lies of church that she left behind couldn't be rooted out completely.
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Table of Contents
Preface.
Chapter I. Introduction.
Part I. The True or Anthropological Essence of Religion.
Chapter II. God as a Being of the Understanding.
Chapter III. God as a Moral Being, or Law.
Chapter IV. The Mystery of the Incarnation; or, God as Love, as a Being of the Heart.
Chapter V. The Mystery of the Suffering God. Chapter VI. The Mystery of the Trinity and the Mother of God.
Chapter VII. The Mystery of the Logos and Divine Image.
Chapter VIII. The Mystery of the Cosmogonical Principle in God.
Chapter IX. The Mystery of Mysticism, or of Nature in God.
Chapter X. The Mystery of Providence, and Creation Out of Nothing.
Chapter XI. The Significance of the Creation in Judaism.
Chapter XII. The Omnipotence of Feeling, or the Mystery of Prayer.
Chapter XIII. The Mystery of Faith—The Mystery of Miracle.
Chapter XIV. The Mystery of the Resurrection and of the Miraculous Conception.
Chapter XV. The Mystery of the Christian Christ, or the Personal God.
Chapter XVI. The Distinction Between Christianity and Heathenism.
Chapter XVII. The Christian Significance of Voluntary Celibacy and Monachism.
Chapter XVIII. The Christian Heaven, or Personal Immortality.
Part II. The False or Theological Essence of Religion.
Chapter XIX. The Essential Standpoint of Religion.
Chapter XX. The Contradiction in the Existence of God.
Chapter XXI. The Contradiction in the Revelation of God.
Chapter XXII. The Contradiction in the Nature of God in General.
Chapter XXIII. The Contradiction in the Speculative Doctrine of God.
Chapter XXIV. The Contradiction in the Trinity.
Chapter XXV. The Contradiction in the Sacraments.
Chapter XXVI. The Contradiction of Faith and Love.
Chapter XXVII. Concluding Application.
Appendix. Explanations—Remarks—Illustrative Citations.
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REVIEWS
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Preface.
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Reading this preface gives a clue to why a doctoral thesis has to be "defended".
"The clamour excited by the present work has not surprised me, and hence it has not in the least moved me from my position. On the contrary, I have once more, in all calmness, subjected my work to the severest scrutiny, both historical and philosophical; I have, as far as possible, freed it from its defects of form, and enriched it with new developments, illustrations, and historical testimonies,—testimonies in the highest degree striking and irrefragable. Now that I have thus verified my analysis by historical proofs, it is to be hoped that readers whose eyes are not sealed will be convinced and will admit, even though reluctantly, that my work contains a faithful, correct translation of the Christian religion out of the Oriental language of imagery" into plain speech. ... "
When he says "Oriental language of imagery", presumably he's speaking of Judaism in particular and Levant in general - things related to bible.
" ... And it has no pretension to be anything more than a close translation, or, to speak literally, an empirical or historico-philosophical analysis, a solution of the enigma of the Christian religion. ... "
Wonder if he realised how much of suppression of facts, hiding of truth under layers of lies, and more, was involved, even before inquisition.
"This philosophy has for its principle, not the Substance of Spinoza, not the ego of Kant and Fichte, not the Absolute Identity of Schelling, not the Absolute Mind of Hegel, in short, no abstract, merely conceptional being, but a real being, the true Ens realissimum—man; its principle, therefore, is in the highest degree positive and real. It generates thought from the opposite of thought, from Matter, from existence, from the senses; it has relation to its object first through the senses, i.e., passively, before defining it in thought. Hence my work, as a specimen of this philosophy, so far from being a production to be placed in the category of Speculation,—although in another point of view it is the true, the incarnate result of prior philosophical systems,—is the direct opposite of speculation, nay, puts an end to it by explaining it."
" ... In the first part I prove that the Son of God is in religion a real son, the son of God in the same sense in which man is the son of man, and I find therein the truth, the essence of religion, that it conceives and affirms a profoundly human relation as a divine relation; on the other hand, in the second part I show that the Son of God—not indeed in religion, but in theology, which is the reflection of religion upon itself,—is not a son in the natural, human sense, but in an entirely different manner, contradictory to Nature and reason, and therefore absurd, and I find in this negation of human sense and the human understanding, the negation of religion. Accordingly the first part is the direct, the second the indirect proof, that theology is anthropology: hence the second part necessarily has reference to the first; it has no independent significance; its only aim is to show that the sense in which religion is interpreted in the previous part of the work must be the true one, because the contrary is absurd. In brief, in the first part I am chiefly concerned with religion, in the second with theology: I say chiefly, for it was impossible to exclude theology from the first part, or religion from the second. ... "
"But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence, this change, inasmuch as it does away with illusion, is an absolute annihilation, or at least a reckless profanation; for in these days 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. Religion has disappeared, and for it has been substituted, even among Protestants, the appearance of religion—the Church—in order at least that “the faith” may be imparted to the ignorant and indiscriminating multitude; that faith being still the Christian, because the Christian churches stand now as they did a thousand years ago, and now, as formerly, the external signs of the faith are in vogue. That which has no longer any existence in faith (the faith of the modern world is only an ostensible faith, a faith which does not believe what it fancies that it believes, and is only an undecided, pusillanimous unbelief) is still to pass current as opinion: that which is no longer sacred in itself and in truth is still at least to seem sacred. Hence the simulated religious indignation of the present age, the age of shows and illusion, concerning my analysis, especially of the Sacraments. ... Therefore—this is the moral of the fable—we should not, as is the case in theology and speculative philosophy, make real beings and things into arbitrary signs, vehicles, symbols, or predicates of a distinct, transcendent, absolute, i.e., abstract being; but we should accept and understand them in the significance which they have in themselves, which is identical with their qualities, with those conditions which make them what they are:—thus only do we obtain the key to a real theory and practice. I, in fact, put in the place of the barren baptismal water, the beneficent effect of real water. How “watery,” how trivial! Yes, indeed, very trivial. But so Marriage, in its time, was a very trivial truth, which Luther, on the ground of his natural good sense, maintained in opposition to the seemingly holy illusion of celibacy. But while I thus view water as a real thing, I at the same time intend it as a vehicle, an image, an example, a symbol, of the “unholy” spirit of my work, just as the water of Baptism—the object of my analysis—is at once literal and symbolical water. It is the same with bread and wine. Malignity has hence drawn the conclusion that bathing, eating, and drinking are the summa summarum, the positive result of my work. I make no other reply than this: If the whole of religion is contained in the Sacraments, and there are consequently no other religious acts than those which are performed in Baptism and the Lord’s Supper; then I grant that the entire purport and positive result of my work are bathing, eating, and drinking, since this work is nothing but a faithful, rigid, historico-philosophical analysis of religion—the revelation of religion to itself, the awakening of religion to self-consciousness."
"I say an historico-philosophical analysis, in distinction from a merely historical analysis of Christianity. The historical critic—such a one, for example, as Daumer or Ghillany—shows that the Lord’s Supper is a rite lineally descended from the ancient cultus of human sacrifice; that once, instead of bread and wine, real human flesh and blood were partaken. I, on the contrary, take as the object of my analysis and reduction only the Christian significance of the rite, that view of it which is sanctioned Christianity, and I proceed on the supposition that only that significance which a dogma or institution has in Christianity (of course in ancient Christianity, not in modern), whether it may present itself in other religions or not, is also the true origin of that dogma or institution in so far as it is Christian."
Is that why we had a German teacher, assigned to us in Germany, speak on and on about human sacrifices in previous era? And other books, dealing with pyramids in Mexico, speak of them as places where young males were sacrificed at top? Having had such a history, they cannot imagine any culture that was civilised long before Roman empire, and did not have human sacrifices.
" ... Again, the historical critic, as, for example, Lützelberger, shows that the narratives of the miracles of Christ resolve themselves into contradictions and absurdities, that they are later fabrications, and that consequently Christ was no miracle-worker, nor, in general, that which he is represented to be in the Bible. I, on the other hand, do not inquire what the real, natural Christ was or may have been in distinction from what he has been made or has become in Supernaturalism; on the contrary, I accept the Christ of religion, but I show that this superhuman being is nothing else than a product and reflex of the supernatural human mind. I do not ask whether this or that, or any miracle can happen or not; I only show what miracle is, and I show it not à priori, but by examples of miracles narrated in the Bible as real events; in doing so, however, I answer or rather preclude the question as to the possibility or reality of necessity of miracle. ... "
That certainly places him not with Strauss and others but apart.
"Thus much concerning the distinction between me and the historical critics who have attacked Christianity. As regards my relation to Strauss and Bruno Bauer, in company with whom I am constantly named, I merely point out here that the distinction between our works is sufficiently indicated by the distinction between their objects, which is implied even in the title-page. Bauer takes for the object of his criticism the evangelical history, i.e., biblical Christianity, or rather biblical theology; Strauss, the System of Christian Doctrine and the Life of Jesus (which may also be included under the title of Christian Doctrine), i.e., dogmatic Christianity, or rather dogmatic theology; I, Christianity in general, i.e., the Christian religion, and consequently only Christian philosophy or theology."
"Lastly, as a supplement to this work with regard to many apparently unvindicated positions, I refer to my articles in the Deutsches Jahrbuch, January and February 1842, to my critiques and Charakteristiken des modernen After-christenthums, in previous numbers of the same periodical, and to my earlier works, especially the following:—P. Bayle. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Menschheit, Ausbach, 1838, and Philosophie und Christenthum, Mannheim, 1839. In these works I have sketched, with a few sharp touches, the historical solution of Christianity, and have shown that Christianity has in fact long vanished, not only from the reason but from the life of mankind, that it is nothing more than a fixed idea, in flagrant contradiction with our fire and life assurance companies, our railroads and steam-carriages, our picture and sculpture galleries, our military and industrial schools, our theatres and scientific museums.
"LUDWIG FEUERBACH.
"Bruckberg,
"Feb. 14, 1843."
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November 03, 2021 - November 03, 2021.
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Chapter I. Introduction.
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It's rather irritating to see other people's highlights on kindle, and be unable to turn them off. This is the beginning sentence, and inauspicious to be irritated. One can turn them off, after accidentally discovering how - it's well hidden!
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§ 1. The Essential Nature of Man.
"Religion has its basis in the essential difference between man and the brute—the brutes have no religion."
And it's incorrect to boot - humour, and smile and laughter, are first.
" ... It is true that the old uncritical writers on natural history attributed to the elephant, among other laudable qualities, the virtue of religiousness; but the religion of elephants belongs to the realm of fable. Cuvier, one of the greatest authorities on the animal kingdom, assigns, on the strength of his personal observations, no higher grade of intelligence to the elephant than to the dog."
He's also wrong about elephants, of course. But then what can one expect from arrogance and ignorance blend that's Europe!
Feuerbach next claims consciousness as Mark of man, vs brute - for one, he ignores woman, or assumes she's included; very biblical! - and another, makes a hash of explaining how consciousness of a brute is less, bringing in science but unable to make a clear delineation between consciousness, science, et al.
Feuerbach also assumes that species, other than human, are incapable of thought and consciousness of infinite; this is an assumption by West, with really no evidence. It's on the level of the assumption most average people make when they visit a patient in coma or otherwise unable to respond to the usual formalities of greeting, and conclude that such a person is either unable to hear or unconscious. This is as likely to be untrue as concluding that a baby or a foetus does not hear or feel, but that is just as untrue!
" ... theory begins with the contemplation of the heavens. The first philosophers were astronomers. It is the heavens that admonish man of his destination, and remind him that he is destined not merely to action, but also to contemplation."
For some reason, Feuerbach confuses feeling with Divine. Perhaps Europe, or West in general, or Germany in particular, compartmentalise reason, will and feeling, and divine is compartmentalize with feeling.
"It is already clear from this that where feeling is held to be the organ of the infinite, the subjective essence of religion,—the external data of religion lose their objective value. And thus, since feeling has been held the cardinal principle in religion, the doctrines of Christianity, formerly so sacred, have lost their importance. ... If feeling in itself is good, religious, i.e., holy, divine, has not feeling its God in itself?"
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§ 2. The Essence of Religion Considered Generally.
" ... What was at first religion becomes at a later period idolatry; man is seen to have adored his own nature. Man has given objectivity to himself, but has not recognised the object as his own nature: a later religion takes this forward step; every advance in religion is therefore a deeper self-knowledge. But every particular religion, while it pronounces its predecessors idolatrous, excepts itself—and necessarily so, otherwise it would no longer be religion—from the fate, the common nature of all religions: it imputes only to other religions what is the fault, if fault it be, of religion in general. ... "
He's obviously speaking of only those of his own background. And his limitations, or those of most of his ilk, are evident in the following when he says -
" ... But that which has no predicates or qualities, has no effect upon me; that which has no effect upon me has no existence for me. To deny all the qualities of a being is equivalent to denying the being himself. A being without qualities is one which cannot become an object to the mind, and such a being is virtually non-existent. Where man deprives God of all qualities, God is no longer anything more to him than a negative being. To the truly religious man, God is not a being without qualities, because to him he is a positive, real being. The theory that God cannot be defined, and consequently cannot be known by man, is therefore the offspring of recent times, a product of modern unbelief."
" ... because it is necessary to man to have a definite conception of God and since he is man he can form no other than a human conception of him. ... "
Again, he speaks only of what he knows, when he says -
" ... To every religion the gods of other religious are only notions concerning God, but its own conception of God is to it God himself, the true God—God such as he is in himself. ... "
But at least he's considering "other", and not as unquestionably lower.
Again, the following may be amusing to some -
" ... If God were an object to the bird, he would be a winged being: the bird knows nothing higher, nothing more blissful, than the winged condition. How ludicrous would it be if this bird pronounced: To me God appears as a bird, but what he is in himself I know not. To the bird the highest nature is the bird-nature; take from him the conception of this, and you take from him the conception of the highest being. How, then, could he ask whether God in himself were winged? ... "
But whether it's true is quite uncertain - for one, at base of that is the certainty that West has of every species being far beneath "man" (and West doesn't usually say human instead either) - unlike some other cultures where life in diverse species of the planet isn't viewed as a matter of competitive race, much less combat, but a complex pattern involving a good deal of possibilities of, not only cooperation, but even more intimate relationships, which in fact are experienced by West but not recognised when it comes to philosophy and more.
"To ask whether God is in himself what he is for me, is to ask whether God is God, is to lift oneself above one’s God, to rise up against him."
Nonsense. But then, West perhaps knows only combat, conquest, enslavement of the conquered - and views every relationship in that light!
"Wherever, therefore, this idea, that the religious predicates are only anthropomorphisms, has taken possession of a man, there has doubt, has unbelief, obtained the mastery of faith. And it is only the inconsequence of faint-heartedness and intellectual imbecility which does not proceed from this idea to the formal negation of the predicates, and from thence to the negation of the subject to which they relate. If thou doubtest the objective truth of the predicates, thou must also doubt the objective truth of the subject whose predicates they are. ... "
Doesn't that translate into more comprehensible language as "science has vaporised claims of church"?
" ... To know God and not oneself to be God, to know blessedness and not oneself to enjoy it, is a state of disunity, of unhappiness. Higher beings know nothing of this unhappiness; they have no conception of that which they are not. "
Didn't he, just a few sentences ago, say something to the effect that other species cannot have any concepts higher than themselves? And, taken together with that, doesn't this translate to "no species can conceive anything higher than itself"?
"Thou believest in love as a divine attribute because thou thyself lovest; thou believest that God is a wise, benevolent being because thou knowest nothing better in thyself than benevolence and wisdom; ... Thou knowest no higher human good than to love, than to be good and wise; and even so thou knowest no higher happiness than to exist, to be a subject; for the consciousness of all reality, of all bliss, is for thee bound up in the consciousness of being a subject, of existing. ... "
" ... The heathen did not doubt the existence of Jupiter, because he took no offence at the nature of Jupiter, because he could conceive of God under no other qualities, because to him these qualities were a certainty, a divine reality. ... "
Feuerbach forgets - when one perceives Reality, one does not impose concepts needed for oneself; replacing Reality by "Idea" is where trouble for defining perfection begins.
One begins to get a faint clue about thought process of Feuerbach, perhaps about German philosophy.
" ... Therefore, God is an existent, real being, on the very same ground that he is a particular, definite being; for the qualities of God are nothing else than the essential qualities of man himself, and a particular man is what he is, has his existence, his reality, only in his particular conditions. Take away from the Greek the quality of being Greek, and you take away his existence. On this ground it is true that for a definite positive religion—that is, relatively—the certainty of the existence of God is immediate; for just as involuntarily, as necessarily, as the Greek was a Greek, so necessarily were his gods Greek beings, so necessarily were they real, existent beings. Religion is that conception of the nature of the world and of man which is essential to, i.e., identical with, a man’s nature. ... "
But then, how does king of Jews fit in as messiah of, not just Jews, but virulently antisemitic Europe, in particular Germany?
Interesting, Feuerbach's analysis here.
"The identity of the subject and predicate is clearly evidenced by the progressive development of religion, which is identical with the progressive development of human culture. So long as man is in a mere state of nature, so long is his god a mere nature-god—a personification of some natural force. Where man inhabits houses, he also encloses his gods in temples. The temple is only a manifestation of the value which man attaches to beautiful buildings. Temples in honour of religion are in truth temples in honour of architecture. With the emerging of man from a state of savagery and wildness to one of culture, with the distinction between what is fitting for man and what is not fitting, arises simultaneously the distinction between that which is fitting and that which is not fitting for God. God is the idea of majesty, of the highest dignity: the religious sentiment is the sentiment of supreme fitness. The later more cultured artists of Greece were the first to embody in the statues of the gods the ideas of dignity, of spiritual grandeur, of imperturbable repose and serenity. But why were these qualities in their view attributes, predicates of God? Because they were in themselves regarded by the Greeks as divinities. Why did those artists exclude all disgusting and low passions? Because they perceived them to be unbecoming, unworthy, unhuman, and consequently ungodlike. The Homeric gods eat and drink;—that implies eating and drinking is a divine pleasure. Physical strength is an attribute of the Homeric gods: Zeus is the strongest of the gods. Why? Because physical strength, in and by itself, was regarded as something glorious, divine. To the ancient Germans the highest virtues were those of the warrior; therefore their supreme god was the god of war, Odin,—war, “the original or oldest law.” Not the attribute of the divinity, but the divineness or deity of the attribute, is the first true Divine Being. ... "
But the following -
" ... 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. ... "
- tells us why church adherents and followers are so disturbed about atheism; it's more than merely stoppage of contributions to the club membership.
"It does not follow that goodness, justice, wisdom, are chimæras because the existence of God is a chimæra, nor truths because this is a truth. The idea of God is dependent on the idea of justice, of benevolence; a God who is not benevolent, not just, not wise, is no God ... "
- that, again, is a prejudice, based on assuming God is merely an idea, and man has right to decide what attributes god has; this view is chiefly limited to monotheism, which to begin with isn't any more than the other side of atheism, as illustrated by this arrogant presumption of dictating what a god should or should not be - on quite the same level as a pet deciding what a human master can and cannot be, at the very least.
"In Rome even the passions of fear and terror had their temples. The Christians also made mental phenomena into independent beings, their own feelings into qualities of things, the passions which governed them into powers which governed the world, in short, predicates of their own nature, whether recognised as such or not, into independent subjective existences. Devils, cobolds, witches, ghosts, angels, were sacred truths as long as the religious spirit held undivided sway over mankind."
Next tells us much -
" ... It is the personal predicates alone which constitute the essence of religion—in which the Divine Being is the object of religion. Such are, for example, that God is a Person, that he is the moral Lawgiver, the Father of mankind, the Holy One, the Just, the Good, the Merciful. It is, however, at once clear, or it will at least be clear in the sequel, with regard to these and other definitions, that, especially as applied to a personality, they are purely human definitions, and that consequently man in religion—in his relation to God—is in relation to his own nature; for to the religious sentiment these predicates are not mere conceptions, mere images, which man forms of God, to be distinguished from that which God is in himself, but truths, facts, realities. ... "
And more than anything else, it tells us about the deep misogyny of cultures of Europe and Levant both, which, when brought together in the church of Rome, crystallized it for ever.
" ... The monks made a vow of chastity to God; they mortified the sexual passion in themselves, but therefore they had in heaven, in the Virgin Mary, the image of woman—an image of love. They could the more easily dispense with real woman in proportion as an ideal woman was an object of love to them. The greater the importance they attached to the denial of sensuality, the greater the importance of the heavenly virgin for them: she was to them in the place of Christ, in the stead of God. The more the sensual tendencies are renounced, the more sensual is the God to whom they are sacrificed. ... The Hebrews did not offer to Jehovah unclean, ill-conditioned animals; on the contrary, those which they most highly prized, which they themselves ate, were also the food of God (Cibus Dei, Lev. iii. 2). Wherever, therefore, the denial of the sensual delights is made a special offering, a sacrifice well-pleasing to God, there the highest value is attached to the senses, and the sensuality which has been renounced is unconsciously restored, in the fact that God takes the place of the material delights which have been renounced. The nun weds herself to God; she has a heavenly bridegroom, the monk a heavenly bride."
Do they not see how revolting that is?
" ... In brief, man in relation to God denies his own knowledge, his own thoughts, that he may place them in God. Man gives up his personality; but in return, God, the Almighty, infinite, unlimited being, is a person; he denies human dignity, the human ego; but in return God is to him a selfish, egoistical being, who in all things seeks only himself, his own honour, his own ends; he represents God as simply seeking the satisfaction of his own selfishness, while yet he frowns on that of every other being; his God is the very luxury of egoism. Religion further denies goodness as a quality of human nature; man is wicked, corrupt, incapable of good; but, on the other hand, God is only good—the Good Being. Man’s nature demands as an object goodness, personified as God; but is it not hereby declared that goodness is an essential tendency of man? ... "
That explains the church insistence on sin! And heres a bit of racist diatribe from Feuerbach, perhaps thought of Europe generally -
"As with the doctrine of the radical corruption of human nature, so is it with the identical doctrine, that man can do nothing good, i.e., in truth, nothing of himself—by his own strength. For the denial of human strength and spontaneous moral activity to be true, the moral activity of God must also be denied; and we must say, with the Oriental nihilist or pantheist: the Divine being is absolutely without will or action, indifferent, knowing nothing of the discrimination between evil and good. But he who defines God as an active being, and not only so, but as morally active and morally critical,—as a being who loves, works, and rewards good, punishes, rejects, and condemns evil,—he who thus defines God only in appearance denies human activity, in fact, making it the highest, the most real activity. He who makes God act humanly, declares human activity to be divine; he says: A god who is not active, and not morally or humanly active, is no god; and thus he makes the idea of the Godhead dependent on the idea of activity, that is, of human activity, for a higher he knows not."
But then he puts his god down, too, of course.
" ... It is true that man places the aim of his action in God, but God has no other aim of action than the moral and eternal salvation of man: thus man has in fact no other aim than himself. The divine activity is not distinct from the human."
And this is why West stagnated in ability to perceive Reality -
" ... God is the highest subjectivity of man abstracted from himself; hence man can do nothing of himself, all goodness comes from God. The more subjective God is, the more completely does man divest himself of his subjectivity, because God is, per se, his relinquished self, the possession of which he however again vindicates to himself."
" ... Every tendency of man, however natural—even the impulse to cleanliness, was conceived by the Israelites as a positive divine ordinance. From this example we again see that God is lowered, is conceived more entirely on the type of ordinary humanity, in proportion as man detracts from himself. ... "
Certainly, in abrahmic faiths. But Feuerbach tells us of a difference -
" ... The Christian religion distinguishes inward moral purity from external physical purity; the Israelites identified the two. ... "
So that's why Bavarian boast of not bathing more than once a month, and not even change underwear more than once a week! Of course, they think that it's because Germany is so clean, there's no need to do it softener- until informed that by that logic, China must be far cleaner since according to Han Suyin, Chinese think that bathing more than once a year is quite unnecessary.
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November 03, 2021 - November 04, 2021.
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Part I. The True or Anthropological Essence of Religion.
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Chapter II. God as a Being of the Understanding.
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" ... Men in whom the intellect predominates, who, with one-sided but all the more characteristic definiteness, embody and personify for us the nature of the understanding, are free from the anguish of the heart, from the passions, the excesses of the man who has strong emotions; they are not passionately interested in any finite, i.e., particular object; they do not give themselves in pledge; they are free. ... "
That isn't reality, but an abstract state considered ideal for men in West, chiefly in North Europe, and achieved seemingly in England and Prussia.
" ... “To want nothing, and by this freedom from wants to become like the immortal gods;”—“not to subject ourselves to things, but things to us;”—“all is vanity;”—these and similar sayings are the mottoes of the men who are governed by abstract understanding. ... "
Shows how very limited is West's understanding!
" ... The understanding is that part of our nature which is neutral, impassible, not to bribed, not subject to illusions—the pure, passionless light of the intelligence. It is the categorical, impartial consciousness of the fact as fact, because it is itself of an objective nature. It is the consciousness of the uncontradictory, because it is itself the uncontradictory unity, the source of logical identity. It is the consciousness of law, necessity, rule, measure, because it is itself the activity of law, the necessity of the nature of things under the form of spontaneous activity, the rule of rules, the absolute measure, the measure of measures. ... "
That has to be the part of intelligence necessary for abstract mathematics.
" ... Philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, physics, in short, science in general, is the practical proof, because it is the product of this truly infinite and divine activity. ... "
Philosophy depends far more on thinker, unlike the rest he mentions; as evidenced by his own writing, philosophy can be very short of others that are science. And here's evidence, from this philosopher, Strauss.
" ... God as God, that is, as a being not finite, not human, not materially conditioned, not phenomenal, is only an object of thought. He is the incorporeal, formless, incomprehensible—the abstract, negative being: he is known, i.e., becomes an object, only by abstraction and negation (viâ negationis). Why? Because he is nothing but the objective nature of the thinking power, or in general of the power or activity, name it what you will, whereby man is conscious of reason, of mind, of intelligence. There is no other spirit, that is (for the idea of spirit is simply the idea of thought, of intelligence, of understanding, every other spirit being a spectre of the imagination), no other intelligence which man can believe in or conceive than that intelligence which enlightens him, which is active in him. ... God, said the schoolmen, the Christian fathers, and long before them the heathen philosophers,—God is immaterial essence, intelligence, spirit, pure understanding. Of God as God no image can be made; but canst thou frame an image of mind? Has mind a form? Is not its activity the most inexplicable, the most incapable of representation? God is incomprehensible; but knowest thou the nature of the intelligence? Hast thou searched out the mysterious operation of thought, the hidden nature of self-consciousness? Is not self-consciousness the enigma of enigmas? Did not the old mystics, schoolmen, and fathers, long ago compare the incomprehensibility of the divine nature with that of the human intelligence, and thus, in truth, identify the nature of God with the nature of man?1 God as God—as a purely thinkable being, an object of the intellect—is thus nothing else than the reason in its utmost intensification become objective to itself. It is asked what is the understanding or the reason? The answer is found in the idea of God. Everything must express itself, reveal itself, make itself objective, affirm itself. God is the reason expressing, affirming itself as the highest existence. To the imagination, the reason is the revelation of God; but to the reason, God is the revelation of the reason; since what reason is, what it can do, is first made objective in God. God is a need of the intelligence, a necessary thought—the highest degree of the thinking power. ... "
That would be convincing to anyone without a clue, and such a person woukd be lost in admiration of Feuerbach to boot, of German philosophy, of West!
One could find more examples of this frustratingly limited understanding and erroneous conclusions, such as
" .... The understanding is to itself the criterion of all reality. That which is opposed to the understanding, that which is self-contradictory, is nothing; that which contradicts reason contradicts God. For example, it is a contradiction of reason to connect with the idea of the highest reality the limitations of definite time and place; and hence reason denies these of God as contradicting his nature. .... "
- but one would like to see Feuerbach come to a better level!
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November 04, 2021 - November 04, 2021.
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Chapter III. God as a Moral Being, or Law.
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" ... The Christians scorned the pagan philosophers because, instead of thinking of themselves, of their own salvation, they had thought only of things out of themselves. The Christian thinks only of himself. ... "
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November 04, 2021 - November 04, 2021.
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Chapter IV. The Mystery of the Incarnation;
or,
God as Love, as a Being of the Heart.
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To begin with, it's unclear why "The Mystery of the Incarnation" has any relation with ;
"God as Love, as a Being of the Heart", whatsoever. Obviously he's extrapolating from assumptions founded on teachings of church, and exclusivity inherent in those, of denying everything else.
And he has it not only upside down, but halfway, speaking only of man.
" ... But the incarnate God is only the apparent manifestation of deified man; for the descent of God to man is necessarily preceded by the exaltation of man to God. Man was already in God, was already God himself, before God became man, i.e., showed himself as man.1 How otherwise could God have become man? ... "
And now the overt racism that was missing, from the ignorant diatribe saturated with arrogance -
" ... It may be objected to the import here assigned to the Incarnation, that the Christian Incarnation is altogether peculiar, that at least it is different (which is quite true in certain respects, as will hereafter be apparent) from the incarnations of the heathen deities, whether Greek or Indian. These latter are mere products of men or deified men; but in Christianity is given the idea of the true God; here the union of the divine nature with the human is first significant and “speculative.” Jupiter transforms himself into a bull; the heathen incarnations are mere fancies. In paganism there is no more in the nature of God than in his incarnate manifestation; in Christianity, on the contrary, it is God, a separate, superhuman being, who appears as man. ... "
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November 04, 2021 - November 04, 2021.
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Chapter V. The Mystery of the Suffering God.
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And the racism repeats right off the bat in this chapter.
"An essential condition of the incarnate, or, what is the same thing, the human God, namely, Christ, is the Passion. Love attests itself by suffering. ... "
"To suffer is the highest command of Christianity—the history of Christianity is the history of the Passion of Humanity."
As evidenced during centuries of burning at stake anyone not successfully terrorised by church of Rome into a cowering silence.
And heres racism again -
" ... While amongst the heathens the shout of sensual pleasure mingled itself in the worship of the gods, amongst the Christians, we mean of course the ancient Christians, God is served with sighs and tears. ... "
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November 04, 2021 - November 04, 2021.
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Chapter VI. The Mystery of the Trinity and the Mother of God.
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" ... The third Person in the Trinity expresses nothing further than the love of the two divine Persons towards each other; it is the unity of the Son and the Father, the idea of community, strangely enough regarded in its turn as a special personal being. ... "
Thus the successful cutting out if feminine principle of mot only divinity in female but the very concept of what is family, without which there can be no family.
And this justification of the lie by Rome takes the cake in stupidity -
" ... How can God be the Father of men, how can he love other beings subordinate to himself, if he has not in himself a subordinate being, a Son, if he does not know what love is, so to speak, from his own experience, in relation to himself? ... "Following is stupid enough.
" ... The Father and Son in the Trinity are therefore father and son not in a figurative sense, but in a strictly literal sense. The Father is a real father in relation to the Son, the Son is a real son in relation to the Father, or to God as the Father. The essential personal distinction between them consists only in this, that the one begets, the other is begotten. If this natural empirical condition is taken away, their personal existence and reality are annihilated. The Christians—we mean of course the Christians of former days, who would with difficulty recognise the worldly, frivolous, pagan Christians of the modern world as their brethren in Christ—substituted for the natural love and unity immanent in man a purely religious love and unity; they rejected the real life of the family, the intimate bond of love which is naturally moral, as an undivine, unheavenly, i.e., in truth, a worthless thing. But in compensation they had a Father and Son in God, who embraced each other with heartfelt love, with that intense love which natural relationship alone inspires. ... "
But this artificial relation and condescending attitude to feminine, to maternal, is really what amounts to worse than covering face as in another religion -
"It was therefore quite in order that, to complete the divine family, the bond of love between Father and Son, a third, and that a feminine person, was received into heaven; for the personality of the Holy Spirit is a too vague and precarious, a too obviously poetic personification of the mutual love of the Father and Son, to serve as the third complementary being. It is true that the Virgin Mary was not so placed between the Father and Son as to imply that the Father had begotten the Son through her, because the sexual relation was regarded by the Christians as something unholy and sinful; but it is enough that the maternal principle was associated with the Father and Son."
- this is not only depriving women of respect by elevating one with no family for her, but not giving her godly status, only an admission on suffrage.
"And the idea of the Mother of God, which now appears so strange to us, is therefore not really more strange or paradoxical, than the idea of the Son of God, is not more in contradiction with the general, abstract definition of God than the Sonship."
Why should it be strange to think of "Mother of God", if father is identified with God in abstract isn't strange? Merely misogyny natural to West?
"The son—I mean the natural, human son—considered as such, is an intermediate being between the masculine nature of the father and the feminine nature of the mother; he is, as it were, still half a man, half a woman, inasmuch as he has not the full, rigorous consciousness of independence which characterises the man, and feels himself drawn rather to the mother than to the father. ... "
More misogyny there.
" ... If then the worship of the Son of God is no idolatry, the worship of the Mother of God is no idolatry. ... "
Well, protestants differ.
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November 04, 2021 - November 04, 2021.
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Chapter VII. The Mystery of the Logos and Divine Image.
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" ... The point in question was the co-equality and divine dignity of the second Person, and therefore the honour of the Christian religion itself; for its essential, characteristic object is the second Person; and that which is essentially the object of a religion is truly, essentially its God. The real God of any religion is the so-called Mediator, because he alone is the immediate object of religion. He who, instead of applying to God, applies to a saint, does so only on the assumption that the saint has all power with God, that what he prays for, i.e., wishes and wills, God readily performs; that thus God is entirely in the hands of the saint. ... "
That gives a clue - early followers of the king of Jews saw him, of course, as the king, rabbi, preacher and messiah, that he was born, coming in the line of David and Solomon; but before the church invented the whole virgin birth story, for a while he was seen, not only as all of that Jews expected and saw, but as a saint, invented by church before he was made into god.
" ... The religious object is only a pretext, by means of which art or imagination can exercise its dominion over men unhindered. For the religious consciousness, it is true, the sacredness of the image is associated, and necessarily so, only with the sacredness of the object; but the religious consciousness is not the measure of truth. Indeed, the Church itself, while insisting on the distinction between the image and the object of the image, and denying that the worship is paid to the image, has at the same time made at least an indirect admission of the truth, by itself declaring the sacredness of the image."
And yet accusations of idolatry continue, ferocious, against others, branded heathen or pagan - none of which are intrinsically abusive epithets any more than "grotesque ", which relates to grotto, which used to be his mother goddesses were shrines and worshipped throughout Europe.
"But the ultimate, highest principle of image-worship is the worship of the Image of God in God. The Son, who is the “brightness of his glory, the express image of his person,” is the entrancing splendour of the imagination, which only manifests itself in visible images. Both to inward and outward contemplation the representation of Christ, the Image of God, was the image of images. The images of the saints are only optical multiplications of one and the same image. The speculative deduction of the Image of God is therefore nothing more than an unconscious deduction and establishing of image-worship: for the sanction of the principle is also the sanction of its necessary consequences; the sanction of the archetype is the sanction of its semblance. If God has an image of himself, why should not I have an image of God? If God loves his Image as himself, why should not I also love the Image of God as I love God himself? If the Image of God is God himself, why should not the image of the saint be the saint himself? If it is no superstition to believe that the image which God makes of himself is no image, no mere conception, but a substance, a person, why should it be a superstition to believe that the image of the saint is the sensitive substance of the saint? If it is no superstition to believe that the image which God makes of himself is no image, no mere conception, but a substance, a person, why should it be a superstition to believe that the image of the saint is the sensitive substance of the saint? The Image of God weeps and bleeds; why then should not the image of a saint also weep and bleed? Does the distinction lie in the fact that the image of the saint is a product of the hands? Why, the hands did not make this image, but the mind which animated the hands, the imagination; and if God makes an image of himself, that also is only a product of the imagination. Or does the distinction proceed from this, that the Image of God is produced by God himself, whereas the image of the saint is made by another? Why, the image of the saint is also a product of the saint himself: for he appears to the artist; the artist only represents him as he appears."
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November 04, 2021 - November 04, 2021.
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Chapter VIII. The Mystery of the Cosmogonical Principle in God.
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" ... All religious cosmogonies are products of the imagination. Every being, intermediate between God and the world, let it be defined how it may, is a being of the imagination. The psychological truth and necessity which lies at the foundation of all these theogonies and cosmogonies is the truth and necessity of the imagination as a middle term between the abstract and concrete. And the task of philosophy in investigating this subject is to comprehend the relation of the imagination to the reason,—the genesis of the image by means of which an object of thought becomes an object of sense, of feeling. ... "
Feuerbach, as others, go wrong when they generalise, especially so when one generalised from a narrow religion, to all others.
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November 04, 2021 - November 04, 2021.
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Chapter IX. The Mystery of Mysticism, or of Nature in God.
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" ... But it is self-contradictory that the impure should proceed from the pure, darkness from light. How then can we remove these obvious difficulties in the way of assigning a divine origin to Nature? Only by positing this impurity, this darkness in God, by distinguishing in God himself a principle of light and a principle of darkness. In other words, we can only explain the origin of darkness by renouncing the idea of origin, and presupposing darkness as existing from the beginning.1 ... "
How short West falls!
" ... “How should there be a fear of God if there were no strength in him? But that there should be something in God which is mere force and strength cannot be held astonishing if only it be not maintained that he is this alone and nothing besides.” ... "
Singularly stupid, wrong concept and attitude, this "fear of God" crap, especially from those that claim their god is about mercy, forgiveness, kindness, love!
Feuerbach discourses on writings of Jacob Böhme.
"The abstraction expresses a judgment,—an affirmative and a negative one at the same time, praise and blame. What man praises and approves, that is God to him;9 what he blames, condemns, is the non-divine. Religion is a judgment. The most essential condition in religion—in the idea of the divine being—is accordingly the discrimination of the praiseworthy from the blameworthy, of the perfect from the imperfect; in a word, of the positive from the negative. The cultus itself consists in nothing else than in the continual renewal of the origin of religion—a solemnising of the critical discrimination between the divine and the non-divine."
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November 04, 2021 - November 04, 2021.
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Chapter X. The Mystery of Providence, and Creation Out of Nothing.
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" ... As the eternity of the world or of matter imports nothing further than the essentiality of matter, so the creation of the world out of nothing imports simply the non-essentiality, the nothingness of the world. ... "
Neither.
" ... But we 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 men an example of the power of faith over Nature;—and again, that when the tormenting devils were driven out of men, they were driven into brutes. ... "
Roman lies to terrorise people, or true stories kept amonst many lies, to the same objective - either way, story about the fig tree us neither godly nor just, definitely not kindness or mercy, but simply wanton destruction by someone out to exhibit power.
" ... Jonah in the whale, Daniel in the den of lions, are examples of the manner in which Providence distinguishes (religious) men from brutes. ... "
This is to terrorise people into submission to church, enforced onto people's minds as the only route to the supposedly only saviour, supposedly son of supposedly only god; for, with hundreds of men perishing via attacks by beasts, in course of everyday activities in forests and oceans, it's easy to tell people of the few who escaped and terrorise them that not submitting to church would have them perish by attacks from beasts.
Feuerbach speaks of creation, and man as end thereof. Neither is true, of course. Evolution hasn't finished, and whether bible belt accepts it or not, it's as much reality as earth not being flat.
Nor is his arguing about providence impressive.
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November 04, 2021 - November 04, 2021.
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Chapter XI. The Significance of the Creation in Judaism.
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Feuerbach begins by being a bit obviously antisemitic and a whole lot more racist.
"The doctrine of the Creation sprang out of Judaism; indeed, it is the characteristic, the fundamental doctrine of the Jewish religion. The principle which lies at its foundation is, however, not so much the principle of subjectivity as of egoism. The doctrine of the Creation in its characteristic significance arises only on that stand-point where man in practice makes Nature merely the servant of his will and needs, and hence in thought also degrades it to a mere machine, a product of the will. Now its existence is intelligible to him, since he explains and interprets it out of himself, in accordance with his own feelings and notions. The question, Whence is Nature or the world? presupposes wonder that it exists, or the question, Why does it exist? But this wonder, this question, arises only where man has separated himself from Nature and made it a mere object of will. The author of the Book of Wisdom says truly of the heathens, that, “for admiration of the beauty of the world they did not raise themselves to the idea of the Creator.” To him who feels that Nature is lovely, it appears an end in itself, it has the ground of its existence in itself: in him the question, Why does it exist? does not arise. Nature and God are identified in his consciousness, his perception, of the world. Nature, as it impresses his senses, has indeed had an origin, has been produced, but not created in the religious sense, is not an arbitrary product. And by this origin he implies nothing evil; originating involves for him nothing impure, undivine; he conceives his gods themselves as having had an origin. ... "
Did he ever realise creation is incorrect, evolution is fact, and more? But here's an amazing turn.
"Utilism is the essential theory of Judaism. The belief in a special Divine Providence is the characteristic belief of Judaism; belief in Providence is belief in miracle; but belief in miracle exists where Nature is regarded only as an object of arbitrariness, of egoism, which uses Nature only as an instrument of its own will and pleasure. Water divides or rolls itself together like a firm mass, dust is changed into lice, a staff into a serpent, rivers into blood, a rock into a fountain; in the same place it is both light and dark at once, the sun now stands still, now goes backward. And all these contradictions of Nature happen for the welfare of Israel, purely at the command of Jehovah, who troubles himself about nothing but Israel, who is nothing but the personified selfishness of the Israelitish people, to the exclusion of all other nations,—absolute intolerance, the secret essence of monotheism.
"The Greeks looked at Nature with the theoretic sense; they heard heavenly music in the harmonious course of the stars; they saw Nature rise from the foam of the all-producing ocean as Venus Anadyomene. The Israelites, on the contrary, opened to Nature only the gastric sense; their taste for Nature lay only in the palate; their consciousness of God in eating manna. The Greek addicted himself to polite studies, to the fine arts, to philosophy; the Israelite did not rise above the alimentary view of theology. “At even ye shall eat flesh, and in the morning ye shall be filled with bread; and ye shall know that I am the Lord your God.”3 “And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God.”4 Eating is the most solemn act or the initiation of the Jewish religion. In eating, the Israelite celebrates and renews the act of creation; in eating, man declares Nature to be an insignificant object. When the seventy elders ascended the mountain with Moses, “they saw God; and when they had seen God, they ate and drank.”5 Thus with them what the sight of the Supreme Being heightened was the appetite for food.
"The Jews have maintained their peculiarity to this day. Their principle, their God, is the most practical principle in the world,—namely, egoism; and moreover egoism in the form of religion. Egoism is the God who will not let his servants come to shame. Egoism is essentially monotheistic, for it has only one, only self, as its end. Egoism strengthens cohesion, concentrates man on himself, gives him a consistent principle of life; but it makes him theoretically narrow, because indifferent to all which does not relate to the well-being of self. Hence science, like art, arises only out of polytheism, for polytheism is the frank, open, unenvying sense of all that is beautiful and good without distinction, the sense of the world, of the universe. The Greeks looked abroad into the wide world that they might extend their sphere of vision; the Jews to this day pray with their faces turned towards Jerusalem. In the Israelites, monotheistic egoism excluded the free theoretic tendency. Solomon, it is true, surpassed “all the children of the East” in understanding and wisdom, and spoke (treated, agebat) moreover “of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall,” and also of “beasts and of fowl, and of creeping things and of fishes” (1 Kings iv. 30, 34). But it must be added that Solomon did not serve Jehovah with his whole heart; he did homage to strange gods and strange women; and thus he had the polytheistic sentiment and taste. The polytheistic sentiment, I repeat, is the foundation of science and art."
But then again he turns to rubbish.
"The much-belied doctrine of the heathen philosophers concerning the eternity of matter, or the world, thus implies nothing more than that Nature was to them a theoretic reality.6 The heathens were idolaters, that is, they contemplated Nature; they did nothing else than what the profoundly Christian nations do at this day when they make Nature an object of their admiration, of their indefatigable investigation. ... "
Before he turns again.
" ... The study of Nature is the worship of Nature—idolatry in the sense of the Israelitish and Christian God; and idolatry is simply man’s primitive contemplation of Nature; for religion is nothing else than man’s primitive, and therefore childish, popular, but prejudiced, unemancipated consciousness of himself and of Nature. The Hebrews, on the other hand, raised themselves from the worship of idols to the worship of God, from the creature to the Creator; i.e., they raised themselves from the theoretic view of Nature, which fascinated the idolaters, to the purely practical view which subjects Nature only to the ends of egoism. “And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldst be driven to worship them and serve them, which the Lord thy God hath divided unto (i.e., bestowed upon, largitus est) all nations under the whole heaven.”7 Thus the creation out of nothing, i.e., the creation as a purely imperious act, had its origin only in the unfathomable depth of Hebrew egoism."
" ... Jehovah is Israel’s consciousness of the sacredness and necessity of his own existence,—a necessity before which the existence of Nature, the existence of other nations, vanishes into nothing; Jehovah is the salus populi, the salvation of Israel, to which everything that stands in its way must be sacrificed; Jehovah is exclusive, monarchical arrogance, the annihilating flash of anger in the vindictive glance of destroying Israel; in a word, Jehovah is the ego of Israel, which regards itself as the end and aim, the Lord of Nature. Thus, in the power of Nature the Israelite celebrates the power of Jehovah, and in the power of Jehovah the power of his own self-consciousness. “Blessed be God! God is our help, God is our salvation.”—“Jehovah is my strength.”—“God himself hearkened to the word of Joshua, for Jehovah himself fought for Israel.”—“Jehovah is a God of war.”
"If, in the course of time, the idea of Jehovah expanded itself in individual minds, and his love was extended, as by the writer of the Book of Jonah, to man in general, this does not belong to the essential character of the Israelitish religion. The God of the fathers, to whom the most precious recollections are attached, the ancient historical God, remains always the foundation of a religion."
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November 04, 2021 - November 04, 2021.
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Chapter XII. The Omnipotence of Feeling, or the Mystery of Prayer.
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