Religious Experience(2)

Feuerbach’s Religious Illusion

These are some excerpts from the first half of this page:

According to the Hebrew scriptures, humans were made in the image and likeness of God. But the perceived kinship between deity and humanity lends itself only too readily to the possibility of inversion. What if the gods are human creations, fashioned after the image and likeness of humanity?
But in the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) the privileging of Christian discourse and the distinction between vulgar religion and rational theism both dissolve, and all talk of God is unmasked as the product of human invention. "Some day," he predicted, "it will be universally recognized that the objects of Christian religion, like the pagan gods, were mere imagination." And he had no interest in saving the "utterly superfluous, unnecessary God," whose activity adds nothing to the law-governed processes of nature.
Can religion be plausibly explained without the assumption that "God" denotes a being of a higher ontological rank than the mundane objects of our daily experience?

"Man—this is the mystery of religion—projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself thus converted into a subject." What the devout mind worships as God is accordingly nothing but the idea of the human species imagined as a perfect individual.

But taken at face value, they are alienating insofar as they betray us into placing our own possibilities outside of us as attributes of God and not of humanity, viewing ourselves as unworthy objects of a projected image of our own essential nature

(posted by Farid)



Posted:Monday, May 19, 2003 |