The Essence of Christianity

The essence of Christianity is a copy of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, from the year 1841. Considered the central work of his critique of religion. In this work, Feuerbach explains his theory of projection.

Content

• Animals have no religion.
• The difference between animals and humans is the consciousness, not in the sense of self-esteem, but the ability to see themselves in relation to the genus. The animal has only an inner essence of the human being, however, an inner and an outer. The inner life of man 's life in relation to its genre.

• Man can perform the functions of genus thought and speech without another. Man is both I and You, he can put himself in the place of another.

• Limited consciousness is no consciousness. The awareness of a caterpillar, for example, who lives on certain plants, not thinking beyond these plants. You can only distinguish these plants from others. Such a limited consciousness is just instinct. Real consciousness is infinite.

• To a perfect man belongs the power of thinking, the power of will and the power of the heart. Man is to detect, to love, to want. Reason, will and love are not what man has, but what he is. Without it, man is nothing.

• Mercury, Venus and Mars have the same sun. But every planet they appear different. As the sun illuminates the Uranus, has no meaning on Earth. As the sun for the earth, is a self-expression of the earth, because the sun shines on the earth, says something about the distance from Earth to the sun. The consciousness of the sun is thus the self- consciousness of Earth.

• Likewise, man is self-confident on the subject of his: The awareness of the object is the self- consciousness of man. As man sees something, show him his own nature. What we will therefore only ever aware of an object: we are always at the same time our own being aware.

• The caterpillar who knows nothing about their world beyond, can not recognize it as finite. The sheet on which the caterpillar lives, is for them a world, an infinite space, because it knows nothing beyond. A limited beings is its limited mind is not a barrier, it is rather perfectly happy and satisfied.

• The man recognizes himself in the knowledge of the infinite to the genus as a finite being.

• The man, however, tends to explain his own barriers to barriers of genre. What is an even incomprehensible to the other people must be incomprehensible: I must not be ashamed, because my understanding is finite.

• Music is a monologue of emotion. If I have in me no feeling for music, I can not recognize it as such music, for me it is just noise.

• The same applies to the religious feeling. If I have no religious feeling in me, I can not see anything religious. So religion is just a feeling in myself The Religious arises in myself, thus is the object that triggers in me the religious feeling, outside of my variable. The feeling is atheistic in the sense of the Orthodox faith as any religion ties in an external object; it denies an objective God - he is himself God.

• The same explanation as with the feeling it has with any other power, ability, power, reality, activity.

• The essence of others, of a higher kind, the man introduces himself, are always equipped with essential determinations, which he draws from his own nature, provisions in which he depicts himself only.

• The object of man is nothing else than his objective essence itself as man thinks, how he is disposed, so is his God. The knowledge of God is therefore the self-knowledge of man. The man, however, whose is not aware of. He moved his first being beside himself, before he finds it in himself. The man objectifies his nature and worships it in the form of an object.

• The religion concedes that the essentials of God are human. However, this says nothing about God. Man can imagine under God only what is God. Therefore, the image of God is human-like, which does not mean that God is so.

• The man, however, assumes that his idea of ​​God corresponds to the reality of God. If man does not have this claim to be God's image, the belief would be arbitrary.

• Anyone who doubts the truth of God's image, must also doubt the existence of God at all.

• The Highest for humans is the existing one. Therefore, for him God is a God existing.

• God is the greatest thing you can imagine. Would a bird imagine God, it would be God wings, because for a bird there is nothing greater than to have wings.

• The gods of the people comply with them himself, the God who lives in a temple, there is only since the man lives in houses. For the ancient Germanic virtue of the war was her highest virtue. Odin - therefore their supreme god was the god of war.

• A true atheist is therefore only the one to whom these predicates such as love, wisdom, justice mean nothing.

• The predicate is the real subject of human worship. This has been forgotten by connecting multiple predicates in a divine subject.

• The religions justify the parallelism of estimated human and divine predicates so that this is only the choice of the divine predicates that recognizes the human. God had moreover infinitely many more.

• The religion are the anthropomorphism ( awarding human characteristics to gods ) no anthropomorphism.

• A quality is not divine, because God, but God has, because she herself is divine because God without it is a flawed beings.

• The monks compensated her chastity with the Virgin Mary. It was so important to them that they occupied almost the place of God.

• In the mirror of the infinitely good God, man knows himself to be limited. To worship God, man makes himself small and admits that he, unlike God, only limited good, loving, wise, etc.. Man what he himself is not recognized by God, but should be, and therefore may be. For an ought without skills would be ridiculous.

• As long as man worships God as the good, he sees himself as good as God 's only the worn outward qualities of man.

• The Israelite left it to God to make all the decisions for him. The law was all until then regulated as to wash and what he had to eat. The Christian, however, decides these externals itself The Christian is in himself what the Israelite sat beside himself in God. So God changed in the story, depending on what the person retains in himself, or transfers out of themselves Sprung on a subject of imagination.

Expenditure

• Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, publishing by Otto Wigand, Leipzig 1841 ( digitized and full text in German Text Archive )
• Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity. Afterword by Karl Lowith. Stuttgart: Reclam 1994, ISBN 3-15-004571-1