Unter der Federführung des Gewerbe- und Handelsverein Feuerbach findet dieses Jahr erstmalig ein Programm statt, das sich “Feuerbacher Weihnacht” nennt und insgesamt sieben Veranstaltungen beinhaltet. So finden beispielsweise am 5. Dezember neben einem aufwändigen Marktgeschehen auch ein festliches Weihnachtskonzert oder eine Aktion mit 1000 Kerzen statt. Im Vorfeld des Weihnachtsmarkts am 5. und 6. Dezember haben sich die Feuerbacher Händler einiges ausgedacht. Näheres unter http://www.feuerbach.de und in den Geschäften.

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© 2009 STUTTGARTER WOCHENBLATT

The Tears of God:

The holocaust is the bastion of contemporary theology, and forms the backdrop for a radical concern for the divine immanence. And we must wrestle with a world that feels God has abandoned it. The holocaust is the lance poking into and questioning classical theism, and its knight fueling the whole debate are questions of the emotional state of God.

I’ve written in favor of the passibility of God in the past, yet, I think I might have to reconvene and modify my position. I’ve launched an investigation into the idea, to really understand what’s at stake in the whole debate.

I think that there is a confusion of language where impassibility has come to mean incapable of emotional response or interaction. If this is the case, then surely this is not what the Bible portrays, not in the pentateuch, in the prophets, or in Jesus. Mayhap the doctrine inherited by the early church after the immediate age of the apostles is guilty of excessive neo-platonism, but might we be guilty of even among those who are radically concerned with orthodoxy being too concerned with immanence at the cost of transcendence.

What does the transcendence of God mean to and for our age? Is open theism just a symptom of our general lack of ability to speak effectively about transcendence?

If we speak of impassibility and it is synonymous with non-emotion, and divine apathy, then we must discard its value in theological discourse, because it is simply not worth laboring over in an attempt to rescue. But if by some similar term we mean that God’s life is not subject to us involuntarily, then we are correct. He is not our buddy, or our magic toolbox for fixing our problems or solving ourselves.

What’s at stake is that the world is asking for a God in her midst, and Jesus Christ is this very thing, but in non sacramental churches this has to take the form of a reformulation of the project of liberal theology that ended with Feuerbach. God has to become anthropologically stated to be immanent in many protestant circles.

Our world is looking for a God that can relate, and too often, churches across the developed world have forgotten that these “formulated truths” are much more than that and that from them we find a way of living and being in the world. I think that open theism is a necessary development of the non-sacramental communions, and maybe a welcome step towards reorienting the doctrine of God away from scholastic notions and bringing fresh life into it through considering the divine emotional life as a source of theological reflection, and drawing from it liturgy, action and response in love. The only thing we must do is to remember the divine love in such a way that it remains wholly outside human love while not unrelated to it.

While not myself a Calvinist, nor a hyper-Calvinist, I think that there is something to be said for retaining the otherness of God that the new Calvinism in Christian circles is doing. It may be horrific in some cases, but in others, like David Crowder’s music, it’s reminding Christians that we are fallible sinners. Yet, this might be best appropriated in terms of Von Balthasar’s objective divine love from the outside, not in terms of ideas about the doctrine of God. We cannot speak about God in the positive in abstract, all we know we know in Christ, and Trinity. I think Von Balthasar is the right way to go about the project of the otherness of God for the future of theology in the 21st century.

I think that impassibility is best seen as a synecdoche, as part of a whole rather than an isolated doctrine. And that what is really meant is not divine emotionlessness, but a concern for the idea that God is not contigent upon human beings for His being in essentia. Yet this whole problem is solved bot by scholastic formulations as much as by a strong doctrine of the immanent and economic Trinity. This whole shifts the locus of study from the abstract doctrine of seeming non-relationality to the location of the speaking of the divine word to us in the cross of Jesus Christ. It is there that the word of God about Himself to man is made known, and that man’s word to God is also spoken, God speaks faithfulness to humanity. Man’s word to God on the cross is trust, is faith, is hope, and all these from love of the Father, and so Christ unites faithfulness with hope, faith and love, into a mutually kenotic act towards man and God.

Historically the God of the prophets was unknowable, Heschel says that even if the prophets asserted the unknowability of God they would have insisted on the possibility of understanding through reflective intuition. (The Prophets, 288). So too, for Christians we can assert the divine transcendence as a united grammar, as a way of understanding the nature of God in which impassibility is only part of the divine whole, and the whole is understood best by reflective intuition. The impassibility is not a static unchangingness, but a dynamic perichoretic faithfulness of the persons of the Trinity to each other, it is their love that is eternal, and unchanging towards each other. The impassability is not to be conceived of a God in oneness, but in threeness, who is united in three-in-oneness. Therefore, we can jettison impassibility, as a convoluted term, but we must in some way retain the idea that God’s faithfulness to God and humans is essentially unchanging, and this we do through our basic language in the aforementioned terms, and the objective nature of divine love, not through stating that god is passable, but in dismissing the necessary intellectual exercise altogether in favor of ways that this actually applies, not in static conception but in the dynamic interaction of God and humans.

Any reflective Christian knows that knowledge of God is by interaction, by living with God and neighbor. It does not happen in analysis or induction, but living together. So too, our doctrine is crying out for the relational God in a world that is experiencing a new exile. The postmodern era is a new exile, for a people who have not found themselves grounded in the narrative of the exodus, so the linguistic strains differ, but the holocaust is the departure of the presence of reason from the world, and our world is trying to reconcile with the departure of a presence it thought might usher in the millennium through right worship in the morality of human beings and their application of reason.

I think, in closing, that the impassibility of God is a truncated doctrine filled with neo-platonic problems, and that the best thing to do is retain the otherness of God without attaching it to neo-platonic philosophy. So, I retain my original position that God’s impassibility is at least always suspect in Christian theology if not wholly rejected. The mystery of divine faithfulness and love as wholly other maintain the otherness of God in a far more constructive way that might lend itself to liberalism, but not easily if done rightly, and if God is love, it is our task to being there, and make the task of our theology assessing the scripture without too close a philosophical assumption to guide us. Anything we wish to say about God must always be mediated in Trinity, and Jesus. The life and times of Jesus Christ reveal God to us, he is the lens through which we read the bible, and our theology, any word we wish to say about the Father will not be true unless mediated to us by the life of His son, for no one knows the Father except the Son.

An immutable/impassable God is in the worst case a self-indulgent and self-contemplating monad who has no relation at all to the real world outside Himself, and it immediately undoes Trinitarian concepts from the outset. Like Aristotle’s theology assumed, it will breate an unmoved mover, a Calvinist deity, absolute, unchanging, wholly other ad nauseam. At best, the doctrine uses problematic language that begins not with inquiry into the person of Jesus or of the trinity, but one that begins in a philosophical inquiry about the nature of God, that separates the being of God from the story we know He is found in, the story mediated to us by the scriptures of the church. Christians cannot settle for a static God, even if that static response is absolute and undying love, it is invalid. Impassability and immutability remove the ability for divine choice, divine election, and divine agency if carried to their logical conclusions. Incarnation was a choice in the Godhead, a choice out of a dynamic love that relates to the outside world because it always has related to the outside world since creation.

Incarnation is a choice out of covenant faithfulness that forever altered the godhead from unknown to known. God wept for the world, not involuntarily, but voluntarily, it is the divine emotion that is able to by choice be ever capable of eternal compassions. Humans resort to callousness at a point, the divine love does no such thing, out of an eternal choice to make His love known where there is the greatest and most infuriated opposition to His love. He can and does relate to the human condition since God is now eternally both Himself and this Man Jesus, such that a real event has taken place in God, and the Divine is intimately married to humanity, that’s what the incarnation means, that’s why sacraments are important. They’re tied into what the incarnation means and speaks to us. In them we can feel the tears of God, and the Divine joy, in them we know that we are loved, not just as a matter of principle, but as a powerful and intimately connected choice, as a reaction to the necessity of man.

You cannot eat an immutable God. Case closed.

Theologies of biblical inspiration are idol factories churning out new and ever changing modes of the same sin, the absolutization of worldly things over against the revelation of God. What a ridiculous position to be in, where a text has the power to judge the son of God, where words that should witness to the divine act of love, are separated from this and used as tools of violence in a world that cannot discern its idols.

We cannot trust our examination of the text’s inspiration. We do not ask how it speaks to us as much as we know it does speak to us because we are seized by it and drawn into the witness of the divine act of love. To ask how it speaks to us, or how inspired it is is to immediately separate ourselves from the situation of faith, and no longer let it have credible voice to challenge our idolatry in the encounter with the image that destroys all others.

Looking at the text is not an acceptable substitute for looking with the text at the world that God has changed through the action that the text bears witness to. This is why the fundamentalist churches are increasingly challenged to speak to the world about Christ. They have forgotten how to look through the text, the absolutization of the text cannot help but make it opaque over against the world that God has sought to change through its witness to the church about this man Jesus.

The text is not God Himself, and to make the text an encounter with God is to forget the Word which God has spoken to us in Jesus Christ. You cannot serve the text and Jesus, either the scriptures serve him, or you do not worship Jesus the Messiah of God.

America’s fundamentalist theology is an obsession with control, with coercion, with unquestioned power. Fundamentalism belies America’s obsession with the idea of a fascist state. Looking at the text as an opaque governing body undoes the theo-dramatic beauty of the divine act of the cross and has to reduce it to a blood thirsty God who needs a sacrifice to sedate his fetish with the suffering of the innocent, be they animal or human. Nothing could be more horrific. American theology took this turn due to the absence of God’s action in creation and an objective divine revelation, in the absence of these, coercion and violence are subsumed under the guise of conversion. Thus, Evangelicalism becomes another word for imperialism. Providence as a necessary doctrine still assumes historical intervention, rather than intimate involvement. Penal substitution as the only controlling metaphor for the crucifixion betrays a culture obsessed with war and bloodshed, because the secret of these theologies is their domination by anthropology. In this sense, Feuerbach was right.

This text has become opaque through the nihilism inherent in the Enlightenment. The word for word mechanistic inspiration of scripture is just another word for lack of faith, another word for violence, ultimately it is the most sacred liturgical object of nihilism.

… ist fertig. Nachdem die nächste, neue Ausstellung in Vorbereitung und die Vernissage für Ende Mai/Anfang Juni geplant ist, wollte ich mein Ausstellungsraum einfach wieder mit “Leben” füllen.

So bat ich Herrn Metzenmacher, ob er bei mir nicht einen kleinen Showroom einrichten möchte. Ausführlicher Artikel warum/weshalb/wozu hier…

Nachdem die Besichtigung nur für geladene Gäste, Interessenten und Kunden von mir vorbehalten sind, hier ein paar Impressionen:

…here are some FREE audiobooks courtesy of LibriVox. If you click on the link, the file should start to automatically download.

Das Kapikal Vol.1 (English)
Communist Manifesto
Eleven Theses on Feuerbach
Wage Labour and Capital

All books are in MP3 format, all at 64kbps.

]]> http://fixednails.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/religion-is-just-the-imaginary-sun-which-seems-to-man-to-revolve-around-him-until-he-realizes-that-he-himself-is-the-centre-of-his-own-revolution/ Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:40:20 +0000 soulangler http://fixednails.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/religion-is-just-the-imaginary-sun-which-seems-to-man-to-revolve-around-him-until-he-realizes-that-he-himself-is-the-centre-of-his-own-revolution/

Religion is just the imaginary sun which seems to man to revolve around him, until he realizes that he himself is the centre of his own revolution…(Humans)   look for a superhuman being in the fantasy reality of heaven, and find nothing there, but their own reflection.

Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, in  Werke, 4 vols (Berlin, 1959-1961), vol.1, p.379, 488

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

ibid. Introduction

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.

ibid.

It is true that much of religion can be explained away as man’s wish fulfilment. But the gospel does not offer a god forn those who cannot explain everything (a god of the gaps). Nor does it offer a wish fulfilment (this is either the prosperity gospel or a mere ‘fire insurance’ Christianity). The gospel tells men what they don’t want to hear – not what they do want to hear. It assaults their pride by mocking their pretensions to self-righteousness or moral worth. It humbles men and is scoffed at as offensive to man’s sensibilities – cf. the Pharisees and all those who rejected the offence of Jesus’ cross.

Marx is attacking religion – but not the gospel.

Ciro Mesa

Se trata de una cuestión que vuelve una y otra vez, y no siempre mejorada por el camino. A menudo vuelve más oscurecida, sobre todo porque se cree tener la perspectiva correcta, definitiva y cosas así. A menudo se invoca la undécima de las tesis de Marx sobre Feuerbach pasa solventar el asunto. Y, en realidad, tampoco con esto se aclara la cosa.

Al tratar aquella relación, debería aclararse cómo se proyecta el sentido de lo teórico y de la praxis. Habitualmente nos movemos –sin saberlo- en la perspectiva de la interpretación de “teoría” como contemplación. Marx se opuso a esa interpretación cuando propuso una “ciencia revolucionaria”, esto es, un saber ilustrador, crítico, orientado hacia la posibilidad de transformar la objetividad establecida. Por otra parte, de “praxis” nos hacemos la representación nebulosa de un cierto activismo inmediato –y ya nos vale. Pero, ¿es defendible una acción carente de la representación clara de los fines? ¿No es también una forma de acción la inaparente, por ejemplo, la no-colaboración o el dejar-estar? ¿Es “praxis” la acción por la acción misma? Marx se refirió muchas veces al activismo desatento a las condiciones objetivas y a las consecuencias concretas de la acción como “donquijotismo”. En fin, tenemos que seguir pensando qué es teoría, qué es praxis y la dialéctica entre ambas…

 En cuanto a tesis undécima, nos encontramos un problema filológico (y hermenéutico) que deberíamos resolver antes de apelar a ellas. La cuestión es que existen dos versiones: la más difundida, la editada por Engels en 1888, por un lado, y la que escribió Marx en 1845 y fue publicada por vez primera en 1932 por el Instituto Marx-Engels-Lenin de Moscú, por otro. Respecto a esto hay que decidir si las dos versiones afirman lo mismo o no. En este caso, qué diferencias significativas hay en el planteamiento de la cuestión de la relación entre teoría y praxis. Por último, cómo nos situamos ante lo afirmado por cada una de ellas. Añado entonces las dos versiones y su traducción:

-Vesión de 1888 (edición a cargo de Engels)

 Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern (Los filósofos sólo han interpretado el mundo de forma diversa; pero de los que se trata es de cambiarlo).

 -Texto escrito por Marx en 1845 y publicado en 1932

 Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kömmt drauf an, sie zu verändern (Los filósofos sólo han interpretado el mundo de forma diversa, se trataría de cambiarlo).

José Luis Cano: Marx cuelga el retrato de Hegel

1. Alienación. Diferencias con el idealismo de Hegel. Influencia de la alienación religiosa en Feuerbach. Recuerdo de Jenófanes. Ateísmo en Marx y Nietzsche.
2. Dialéctica. Semejanzas y diferencias respecto a la dialéctica en Hegel. Referencia a Heráclito. Materialismo dialéctico: Engels y Lenin.
3. Ideología. Economía política (Adam Smith), el socialismo utópico (Proudhon) y selección natural (Darwin)
4. Materialismo histórico. Referencias a Demócrito y Epicuro. Diferencias respecto a la filosofía de la historia idealista (Kant y Hegel). Presencia de la “astucia de la razón” ilustrada en el discurso de Marx.
5. Enfrentamiento con el anarquismo (Bakunin). Repercusión en la división de la Izquierda durante la Guerra Civil Española.
6. Maestros de la sospecha: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud.
7. Crítica de Nietzsche al socialismo-cristianismo, igualadores de la humanidad.
8. Lenin: Prioridad de lo político sobre la teoría científica de la historia.
9. Críticas liberales al pensamiento de Marx. Löwith (mesianismo), Popper (sociedades cerradas).
10. Teoría crítica. Reformulación del marxismo en las filosofías de Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm o Marcuse.

Bibliografía

1. Ciro Mesa: Emancipación frustrada. Sobre el concepto de historia en Marx. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2004.
2. Javier Echegoyen Olleta: Historia de la filosofía. Vocabulario y ejercicios. Madrid: Edinumen, 1995.
3. Isaiah Berlin: Karl Marx. Madrid: Alianza, 2000.
4. Slavoj Žižek: Repetir Lenin. Madrid: Akal, 2004.

Die Kirbe liegt hinter uns und obwohl der Montag sprichwörtlich ins Wasser gefallen ist, hat sich die Arbeit mal wieder gelohnt. Für alle die nicht dabei waren oder noch einmal ein wenig in Erinnerungen schwelgen wollen, kommen hier ein paar Fotos vom Kirbewochenende:

Wir freuen uns schon auf das nächste Jahr!

Vom 11. bis zum 14. September findet rund um den Festplatz die 45. Feuerbacher Kirbe statt. Auch in diesem Jahr ist der CVJM Feuerbach wieder mit seinem großen Floh- und Trödelmarkt vertreten und bietet Schnäppchenjägern die Gelegenheit, kleine und große Schätze zu erstehen und dabei sogar etwas für den guten Zweck zu tun.

Unser Stand befindet sich wie immer auf dem Wilhelm-Geiger-Platz direkt vor dem Feuerbacher Rathaus.

Essay I wrote on the history of religion and progression towards atheism.

Upon considering the institution of religion, certain universal criteria come to mind, namely: ritual, community, doctrine, various practices and perhaps the most important, faith. Without faith or a belief system, one cannot differentiate religion from secular philosophy. It is precisely a faith in God or the supernatural that is the underlying fundamental commonality of all religion. Although – like ritual and doctrine – the conception of God varies from religion to religion, it is undoubtedly this concern with divinity or the supernatural, which constitutes religiosity itself. And while the content of religious faith varies, I would argue that the function, mainly God’s function, remains basically unchanged. Interestingly, the conception of God is the most powerful and widely recognized symbol in human history. Yet, it is also the most difficult concept to define, agree upon, and therefore study. God has many roles, and functions in a number of ways as: the “one whom humans call in a time of desperate need”, “the creator of the world and of all that is in it”, “the protector and savior who provides for creaturely wants and who sustains women and men undergoing evil of all sorts” and of course “the central object of worship and the ultimate court of appeal in all major crises of life”.[i] So somehow it seems that God, although completely beyond the human sphere of understanding, functions primarily in serving humans’ practical needs. God makes us feel good. He provides comfort, security, answers, protection, and meaning in our lives. The question is not how God provides these luxuries (for we have already concluded that God is beyond our comprehension), but rather how human belief in God serves to better our lives. Understanding God is essential to studying any religious framework, which is why many great thinkers have set out to draw conclusions about human nature based on a proper analysis of God. By examining the progression of thought about God in the writings of these great thinkers, one can also better understand the bigger picture of what role religion plays in the world. I would argue that the ambiguity of God’s nature is a direct result of God being a manmade concept created to provide wish fulfillment and to make humans feel better about their existence.

            In his Natural History of Religion, David Hume sets out to trace a natural or human, progression of religious belief. Hume is the first prominent philosopher to challenge the supposedly ‘revealed’ foundations of religion. He wrote his history of religion in 1779, a time in which challenging the validity of religion, especially the Christian church, was social suicide and being accused of atheism could result in severe penalty. Hume’s central argument is that religion does not arise out of a revelation from God, as commonly believed; but rather is the product of man’s fear and anxiety. As Hume says, “the primary religion of mankind arises chiefly from an anxious fear of future events.”[ii]  This is a radically different view from what the bible says, namely that God revealed himself to man and offered him protection in a covenant exchange for worship. Hume studies the progression of the human belief in God in hopes to show that religion is manmade. In fact, if Hume succeeds in proving that religion is truly manmade, the idea of God is at risk for being determined manmade as well.

            David Hume is an empiricist, believing that the source of all human knowledge and understanding lies in our experience. It is through an empiricist foundation that he examines and critiques the religious framework. In observing the history of religious belief, Hume points out that “mankind, in ancient times, appear universally to have been polytheists”[iii], believing in a vast pantheon of Gods. This multiplicity of gods arises out of the anthropomorphism of nature. Lacking a proper understanding of the natural world, early humans found nature to be both awesome and terrifying. For such primitive people, Hume believes, “the whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion.” The natural world seemed so vast and beyond human comprehension that it came to be worshipped as above human nature. Thus each God comes to represent a specific natural force – wind gods, rain gods, etc. These are not the omnipotent creator Gods people believe in today, but rather a more limited and quasi-human (yet divine) representations of nature. To Hume it is logical that man first saw the Gods as limited beings. He points out, “it seems certain, that, according to the natural progress of human thought, the ignorant must first entertain some groveling and familiar notion of superior powers, before they stretch their conception to that perfect Being, who bestowed order to the whole frame of nature.”[iv] It is this lack of understanding or ignorance that creates the many gods of polytheism and it is not until later that the supreme deity is abstracted. These gods seemed to be directly modeled after human beings. Mythology is riddled with stories of petty gods engaging in human quarrels and trivial affairs. Hume asserts that it isn’t until centuries later that “the Deity appeared to them [humanity] a pure spirit, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, before he was apprehended to be a powerful, thought limited being, with human passions and appetites, limbs and organs.” [v]Most important to Hume’s religious framework is the idea that these Gods are born out of fear and anxiety of nature. By anthropomorphizing nature, man hopes to gain control over these otherwise haphazard powers.

            Hume sees polytheism as a primitive and barbaric worldview and thinks the shift to monotheism represents forward progression in man’s logic and quest for perfection. He also sees this shift as a natural process that could not have happened any other way. In fact, Hume says, “if men were first led into the belief of one Supreme being…they could never possibly leave that belief, in order to embrace polytheism.”[vi] This, Hume thinks, would be a backwards step in the evolution of human intellect. As, “the mind rises gradually, from inferior to superior: by abstracting from what is imperfect, it forms an idea of perfection”[vii]. Although the content of religion has greatly changed since the days of polytheism, the God of monotheism still serves the same function as the many gods of ancient men. And this God is still born out of the “incessant hopes and fears, which actuate the human mind.”

            Hume seems to imply that it was competition among polytheism gave rise to monotheism. Groups of people come to worship and adore particular gods, and this naturally creates competition. Each god thus becomes more powerful in the eyes of its worshippers. About this, Hume asks, “How much more natural, therefore, is it, that a limited deity, who at first supposed only the immediate author of the particular goods and ills in life, should in the end be represented as sovereign maker and modifier of the universe.” [viii] The god is raised from a mere personification of a natural force to a God most high, and thus more promising to appease man’s struggles. Why pray to dozens of Gods when one will suffice?

            Hume argues that the individual Gods of monotheism do not escape the same anthropomorphic features as those of the gods of polytheism, and thus are equally as manmade. Yahweh for example, infinitely more powerful than the nature gods, also seems to be modeled after a profanely human prototype. Hume says he is represented as “jealous and revengeful, capricious and partial, and, in short, a wicked and foolish man, in very respect but his superior power and authority.”[ix] What more evidence does one need than the Old Testament to conclude God is a manmade deity? The stories of Yahweh characterize him as having man-like qualities: misogyny, homophobia, jealousy, etc. In fact, the first four of the Ten Commandments – man’s supposed revealed moral code of law – concern themselves only with the necessity of man’s loyal relationship to their jealous God. Hume believes we ascribe these human qualities to the divine to “bring them nearer to a resemblance with ourselves.”[x] Man then becomes dependent on supposed or imaginary relationships with this divine being to receive protection and security in his darkest times. This dependency on the divine explains why men are “much oftener thrown on their knees by the melancholy than by the agreeable passions.”[xi]

            Where as David Hume uses God primarily to analyze man’s religious progression, German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach seems to directly criticize the idea of God itself. Therefore, Feuerbach does not begin his analysis with polytheism but addresses monotheism and Christianity specifically. Although Feuerbach wrote nearly a century after Hume, he too describes the material basis for God residing in man; but he opposes man’s conception or idea of God and wants rather an actualized God. It precisely because of this opposition that he challenged “everything that has to do with religion” proposing that it is all “an outgrowth of the human mind that, unbeknownst to itself, has “projected” its own internal experiences onto the “blank screen” of the universe and made these images seem externally real by divining them in the hypostasis of a projected Godhead.”[xii] Consistent with Hume, Feuerbach was concerned with God’s function in describing man’s need for God. However, where Hume thought God primarily served to lessen mans fear and anxiety of future events, Feuerbach proposes God fills the gaps in man’s limited knowledge and understanding of the universe. God is able to answer man’s most profound questions, which is why “man in relation to God denies his own knowledge, his own thoughts, that he may place them in God.”[xiii]  God appeals to mankind’s toughest questions, death, meaning, salvation etc. and offers an easy solution – believe in God and you will be saved. However, these securities come at a great price. Feuerbach seems to think that faith or belief in God is a detrimental quality of mankind and unless God becomes somehow manifested or actualized, we must discard faith entirely.

            According to Feuerbach, in projecting their desires to onto God, humans create an oppressive dictator they cannot escape, and in his creation, degrade their own nature. Of this, he says, “man gives up his personality; but in return, God, the Almighty, infinite, unlimited being, is a person.”[xiv] In order to strengthen and uphold God’s personality, man must sacrifice part of his own, and then remain the subject of His power. Man denies his own egoism only to further God’s. Thus “God is the very luxury of egoism.”[xv] Unfortunately for his believers, such affirmation of his superior being necessarily degrades human existence. It seems that in nearly every monotheistic religious tradition, there is some inherent quality of man rendering him imperfect. Feuerbach supposes that this flaw is a direct product of man’s belief in God. God is inherently good and so therefore man is naturally less than good. To Feuerbach, belief in God “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.”[xvi] Interestingly. Feuerbach makes the point that if God is supremely good and man is inherently wicked, then how then could humans have any conception of a deity so outside their nature. This incoherence in the God-human relationship further proves that He is a manmade idea, not an actualized being.

            Feuerbach characterized man’s entire relationship with God as a cyclical process of giving and receiving pleasure. Man offers up himself to please God, and in return, God answers mans most difficult questions and provides safety and protection. Feuerbach claims that, “when man makes his moral improvement an aim to himself, he has divine resolutions, divine projects; but also, when God seeks the salvation of man, he has human ends and a human mode of activity corresponding to these ends.”[xvii]Put more simply, man lives his life for God, while God functions to improve man’s life. As Feuerbach says, “God acts, that man may be good and happy.”[xviii] The mystery of religion, according to Feuerbach, is in man projecting himself into objectivity. He projects himself to an image of God, creating a divine subject and thus objectifying himself in relation to God. But because God is merely a projection of the human mind, man thus becomes an object to himself. Man no longer attributes his greatest qualities to human nature, but rather to the realm of the divine. Feuerbach argues that when man attributes a quality to God, he is actually reaffirming the quality as being most valuable to human nature. For example, “to affirm that God is love, for example, is to affirm that love is divine.”  But unfortunately for man, “by projecting these qualities onto an object other than the human species, one alienates the human species from itself.”[xix] So although Feuerbach concludes that man’s relationship with God is cyclical, it clearly is not equal relationship of mutual benefit. The idea of God alienates humanity from itself. So it seems there is more to be lost than gained in putting one’s faith in God.

            Sigmund Freud wrote his work on religion, The Future of an Illusion, in the early twentieth century – a time when modern psychology was developing into the vast field it is today. Naturally, Freud is most interested in the role God plays in the psychology of man. In his work, he argues that religion is man’s most compelling illusion, born out of human desire. Freud differentiates between faith being an illusion rather than merely being an error in logic. He says, “what is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. In this respect they come near to psychiatric delusions.”[xx] Where Hume was more concerned with man’s fear and anxiety, Freud, perhaps elaborating on Feuerbach, bases his religious framework around wish fulfillment. But like Hume, Freud believes God originally was conceived out of anthropomorphizing of nature. He says that, “it is in fact natural to man to personify everything that he wants to understands in order later to control it.” However, Freud goes further by psychoanalyzing man’s relationship with God, concluding that is based on an infantile prototype.

            In his essay, “Totem and Taboo”, Freud claims, “the psychoanalysis of individual human beings…teaches us…that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father…and that at the bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.” But where did this parental relationship begin? Freud suggests that primitive man comes to worship his father out of fear and guilt. He thinks that primitive man was organized similarly to the gorilla horde. Often, the alpha-male gorilla would be overthrown and killed by his sons out of jealousy of women and power. Freud believes that early human tribes were no different in their organization and that this Deed, as Freud calls it, of killing the father, later gives rise to father becoming God. The sons feel guilt for the Deed and later come to worship the father God out of fear, hoping for forgiveness.

            Freud characterizes the human relationship to God as ambivalent. Man, like a child, is both scared and dependent on his father for protection. He comes to love his father because of the securities the father provides, but never ceases to fear him. Freud says, “as the growing individual finds that he is destined to remain a child forever…he creates for himself the gods whom he dreads, who he seeks to propitiate, and whom he nevertheless entrusts with his own protection.”[xxi] Man is incapable of being fully independent, so as he ages he transitions his trust from his earthly father to that of the heavenly father. Protecting man from the cruelties of nature is not enough; God must also fulfill man’s desires by reconciling “men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death” and also by compensating them for the “sufferings an privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.”[xxii]Praying to this exalted father for answers and wish fulfillment and attributing the goodness of one’s life to God is all part of the illusion.

            One might wonder what is so bad about giving into this illusion of God. It seems only to make people feel better about their existence. However, I would argue that the pleasure a certain belief generates does not justify the belief. If ones considers all the hours of productivity lost to prayer and worship done in the egoic hope of wish fulfillment or the like, it becomes clear why man must see past the illusion. If all the hours spent building churches or temples were used in attempt to eliminate suffering here and now, God would no longer have a place in the world. Although Hume, Freuerbach and Freud each have a different approach towards analyzing God, they all seem to agree that He is manmade and degrading to human nature. Feuerbach points out that man is reduced to mere filth in relation to God. He says, “ every tendency of man, however natural – even the impulse to cleanliness was conceived by the Israelites as a positive divine ordinance.”[xxiii] And as these profane human qualities like cleanliness are attributed to God, man detracts qualities from himself until he reaches a state of self-humiliation.  Freud goes further by predicting that this “universal obsessional neurosis of humanity” will eventually bring about its self-destruction. He asserts that this illusion is dangerous and “civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.”[xxiv] We can only hope that in the twenty-first century, when we now have the technology destroy human civilization, those in power do not become too entangled in the illusion. Perhaps if Hume was right, that the natural progression of human thought was from polytheism to monotheism, the next evolutionary step (and only hope for mankind) would be to remove one more God and shatter the illusion forever.

[ii] Hume 176.

[iii] Hume 135.

[iv] Hume 136.

[v] Hume 136.

[vi] Hume 137.

[vii] Hume 136.

[viii] Hume 155.

[ix] Hume 142.

[x] Hume 142.

[xi] Hume 143.

[xii] German Essays on Religion 86.

[xiii] Feuerbach

[xiv] Feuerbach 90.

[xv] Feuerbach 90.

[xvi] Feuerbach 90.

[xvii] Feuerbach 91.

[xviii] Feuerbach 91.

[xix] Taylor 147.

[xx] Freud 39.

[xxi] Freud 30.

[xxii] Freud 22.

[xxiii] Feuerbach 92.

[xxiv] Freud 45.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Taylor, Mark. Critical Terms for Religious Studies. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1998.

Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. Norton and Company Inc: New York, 1961.

Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. Norton and Company: New York, 1961.

Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Continuum: New York. 1994.

Hume, David. The Natural of History of Religion. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2000.

(NYU year 2 Theories and Methods of Religious Studies)

Consciousness of God is human self-consciousness, knowledge of God is human self-knowledge. By the God you know the human, and conversely, by the human, you know the God. The two are one. What God is to a person that too is the spirit, the soul; and what the spirit, the soul, are to a person, that is the God. God is the revealed and explicit inner self of a human being…The historical progress of religion consists therefore in this: that what an earlier religion took to be objective, is later recognized to be something human. What was earlier religion is later taken to be idolatry: humans are seen to have adored their own nature. Humans objectified themselves but failed to recognize themselves as this object. The later religion takes this step; every advance in religion is therefore a deepening in self knowledge.

Ludwig Feurbach,Essence of Christianity, 1841, ch.1

No doubt humans do created gods in their own image, but did he, could he know that is always what occurs?

Why in fact should I not be permitted to wish? Why should I not be allowed to wish that the sweat, blood and tears, all the sufferings of millenia, may not have been in vain, that definitive happiness may finally be possible for all human beings – especially the despised and downtrodden?…May I not feel an aversion also in regard to the idea that the life of the individual and of mankind is governed only by the pitiless laws of nature, by the play of chance and by the survival of the fittest, and that all dying is a dying into nothingness?

It does not follow – as some theologians have mistakenly concluded – from man’s profound desire for God and eternal life, that God Exists…But some atheists, too, are mistaken in thinking that what follows is the nonexistence of God and the unreality of eternal life.

Hans Küng, Does God Exist? p.301

The Divine Being is nothing other than the being of man himself, or rather, the being of man abstracted from the limits of the individual man or the real, corporeal man, and objectified, i.e., contemplated and worshiped as another being, as a being distinguished from his own. All determinations of the Divine Being are, therefore, determinations of the being of man.

Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, (1841).Essence of Christianity: Introduction, §2 The Essence of Religion in General

…the secret of theology is nothing else than anthropology – the knowledge of God nothing else than a knowledge of man!

Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity: Part II, The False or Theological Essence of Religion, Chapter XXI. The Contradiction in the Revelation of God

It may be true that ‘(some) people project religion’ but it does not follow from that that ‘all religion is projection’.

Heute früh war es soweit, ich wurde von der Umzugsfirma geweckt. Die eindrucksvollen Bilder von Ralf Metzenmacher haben mein Atelier verlassen und sind nun unterwegs zur nächsten Ausstellung ins pan kunstforum nach Emmerich.

In den letzten Monaten hatte ich viele, interessante Gäste – und für alle anderen, die leider nicht kommen konnten, Pech gehabt!

Das war vorerst die letzte Chance in Bamberg, die Originalgemälde vom Pinselartist® Metzenmacher zu sehen, da diese ausschließlich für renommierte Galerien und Museen vorbehalten sind. Daher danke ich hiermit noch mal dem Künstler, dass ich die Ehre hatte, in meinen Räumlichkeiten diese Exponate zu zeigen und sogar die Premierenfeier vom “Feuerbach 2008″ stattfand.

Abtransport vom Feuerbach - die anderen Bilder sind bereits verladen.

Im großen Treppenhaus wird die Größe des Bildes richtig sichtbar.

Schon verladen, "Punching Boss"

Feuerbach 2008 - ab nach Emmerich