ATTACKS ON RELIGION:

Ludwig Feuerbach

Karl Marx

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sigmund Freud

From a naturalistic point of view, according to which religion in all its forms is a delusory projection upon the universe of our human hopes, fears, or ideals, the truth-claims of the different religions are all false, and the fact that they conflict with one another does not present any problem.

However this is a problem for a religious point. We have already seen how Otto attempts to account for this. But even if religion is a gesture at some ineffable transcendent realty, some “ground of Being” or as Kierkegaard would have us believe, a matter of personal, passionate choice, is it therefore immune from attack? Well, not according to these thinkers.

The truth and falsity of religious doctrines may not be subject to rational scrutiny, but the motivation of religious thinking might be. Why do people turn to religion? Is it just for edification, is it to give them hope, or is it a rationalization for the lack of justice in this world? Or is it an escape, a kind of irresponsible reaction to a world we cannot cope with, perhaps a childish unwillingness to give up an illusion of security we ought to have outgrown in adolescence?

Just a little Hegel (more than enough really)

For Hegel, reality is Sprit. Absolute Sprit is thought thinking. But what is thought thinking? Thought it thinking thought. The true definition of divinity is Spirit/ Consciousness. If we personify this thought as “God” we might say that God is trying to think Himself, to know himself. But it is the nature of consciousness that one cannot know anything unless that thing is an “object” of one’s consciousness. And this is no less true when the “object” of one’s thought is oneself (subject). (Note to see ourselves, we must turn ourselves in to “objects” e.g. reflections in mirrors, images in a photograph, etc.) But when God turns Himself as knower (subject) into himself as known (object) He alienates himself from himself. Reality is God alienated and recovering.

But to know Himself as all that is (Being) is impossible because we cannot know a thing unless we can contrast it to what it is not. There is nothing that “all than is” is not, so the attempt to think “Being” is to attempt to think an impossible thought and leads to the thought of “Nothing.” But if we synthesize these two “ideas” (Being and Nothing) we are lead by dialectic to “Becoming.” In becoming we understand the that which (Being) and that which is not (Nothing) and transcend both.

History then, is the story of consciousness/ Spirit/ God coming to know Himself has externalized, alienated object. Self-consciousness is God returning to himself as thought. And Hegel’s own “Absolute Philosophy” is the point in history when consciousness realizes that It is all that is and world history is its own history. (Like a narrative where at the end of the story the protagonist discovers his true identity.) Consciousness has been moving to ever more adequate understanding of this central truth and the three main ways this central truth has been coming to more and more adequate understanding have been via Art, Religion and Philosophy.

Hegel affirms the Christian doctrine of incarnation as a symbolic manifestation of the central truth of the meaning of history: that perceptible reality is objectified Spirit. Hegel sees nature as the logos made flesh, as spirit, i.e., the infinite “Christ.” World history is the story of logos making itself flesh in the rational state and human rights. He thinks this is the mature understanding of the Christian Trinity (God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit) and while he claims that Christianity is the “Absolute Religion” the mature (Hegelian/ Romantic) understanding of Christianity has little to do with a first century Jewish rabbi. Curiously, he spoke approvingly of the Nicene Creed, but gives it an importantly metaphoric (from an Orthodox perspective at least) meaning. Hegel takes from this that “God is Man.” (where Man is symbolic of self-consciousness consciousness manifested objectively).

Ludwig Feuerbach

Feuerbach's position is a derivation George Hegel's speculative philosophy/ theology. While Hegel taught that “Man is God self-alienated,” Feuerbach taught that God is Man, self-alienated.

Feuerbach argues for what he calls the "true or anthropological essence of religion."

The idea of God is a perversion of the idea of man. There are certain values to which we aspire and sometimes manifest. (Truth, beauty, goodness –the old Platonic ones) However in our frustrated attempts to achieve these ideal the ideals themselves become alienated from us, and projected onto a supposed Ideal Being.

Feuerbach suggests that every aspect God corresponds to some feature or need of human nature.

"If man is to find contentment in God," he claims, "he must find himself in God."

Thus “God” is “man.” (well… Humankind)

God is merely the outward projection of the best of our inward nature.

“a God who is not benevolent, not just, not wise, is no God.”

He notes that we understand these qualities themselves to be what makes “God” divine. In a sense they are logically prior to God. Thus the “God qualities” (i.e. God, which remember are the human qualities) act through man.

According to Feuerbach God,

“is the principle of [man's] salvation, of [man's] good dispositions and actions, consequently [man's] own good principle and nature.”

There is a human tendency to ascribe give qualities to the idol of their religion because without these qualities a figure such as God would become merely an object, its importance would become obsolete, and there would no longer be a feeling of an existence for God. Therefore, Feuerbach says, when man removes all qualities from God, “God is no longer anything more to him than a negative being.” Additionally, because man is imaginative, God is given traits and there holds the appeal. God is a part of man through the invention of a God. Equally though, man is repulsed by God because, “God alone is the being who acts of himself.”

Further, the “Idealization” so surpasses what real-life humans achieve that it demands all be sacrifices for his Glory.

According to Feuerbach, religion keeps us from affirming our own characteristics and abilities, thus alienating what is essential to us by locating those traits in God.

Feuerbach argues that hopes and aspirations for human development are frustrated by believing in God, inasmuch as belief in God means alienating what is essentially human from ourselves. He claims that as long as we remain alienated from our values (and thus ourselves) by this act of projecting, we will never be able to achieve full human flourishing. We can become God (the God of our projection) only by renouncing traditional religion.

Example: The Holy Family

Only by abolishing the image of the “heavenly family” can we (will we) bring peace, love and happiness to our earthly families.

Essentially, religion and its attending practices, doctrine and ontologies are mental projections expressing human concerns and values.

In part 2 he discusses the "false or theological essence of religion," i.e. the view which regards God as having a separate existence over against man. As a result various false beliefs, such as the belief revelation, arise. Feuerbach believes these false doctrines not only injures the moral sense, they "poisons, nay destroys, the divinest feeling in man, the sense of truth,". Likewise faith in the powers of religious the sacraments are "the necessary consequences are superstition and immorality."

According to Feuerbach, religion has played a significant role in human history by pointing out how human existence aspires to what it has not yet achieved. Belief in God (he says) now stands in the way of human fulfillment, however, because it prevents us from seeing how God is simply the infinite extension of humanity, idealized and alienated from our essence.

Karl Marx

Initially Marx was enamored of Feuerbach writing “one cannot do philosophy without passing through the fiery brook.”

However, he eventually came to criticism him with respect to the supposed power he attributed to “idea.” Religion is not the cause of alienation, as Feuerbach suggested, but rather it was a symptom.

In his “Theses on Feuerbach” Marx wrote,

“Once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the heavenly family, the former must be then itself be theoretically criticized and radically changed in practice.”

He concludes with:

“The philosopher has only interpreted the world in various ways: the point is to change it.”

Marx believes that once the hierarchy of the family (power structure) was radically changed along with the hierarchy of power in society (of which the family is a mirror) then the idea of the holy family would simply disappear.

Marx criticizes Feuerbach for not explaining why human beings are so alienated from themselves that they are willing to escape from reality through the "opium" of religion. The real source for why people turn to the illusions of religion, Marx claims, is a willingness to avoid the misery caused by social inequities, structures, and relations.

In a nutshell, Marx claims that humans invent religion to escape their intolerable social conditions. He further claims that once realize this, we should reject religion as an escape and turn instead to the business of correcting those conditions that make such an escape necessary.

FROM CRITIQUE OF HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT BY KARL MARX

The basis of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion; religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man's self-consciousness and self-awareness so long as he has not found himself or has lost himself again. But man is not an abstract being, squatting outside the world. Man is the human world, a state, society. This state, this society, produce religion which is an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human being inasmuch as the human being possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly a struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, the embryonic criticism of this vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Fifty years later, Friedrich Nietzsche opened an even more blistering attack on religion in general, on Christianity in particular. Christianity is accused of being nothing other than rationalizations for impotence, an expression of everything that is most contemptible in human nature.

To see why he says this, it will be important to say a word or two about his concepts of “Life Affirming” doctrines/ moralities and Life Denying doctrines/ moralities

Life Affirming vs Life Denying

Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols

Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (Götzendammerung, oder: Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt, 1889) The book’s title is a satirical reference to the title of Wagner’s opera, Twilight of the Gods (Götterdammerung). Nietzsche’s philosophy is not systematic. His style aphoristic and epigrammatic. He rejects attempts to create a "philosophical system" because he claims that the will of necessity fail to do justice to the uniqueness of the individual. As other of his works are written, the text is largely comprised of maximum aphorisms and short paragraphs on wide ranging topics.

Many of Nietzsche’s statements in Twilight of the Idols are deliberately provocative and controversial. He attacks democracy, socialism, women, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, rationalism, and altruism. His opposition to any concept of moral fact is a result of his opposition to any universal principle of morality. For reasons already stated he see each of these are attempt to anonymize and negate the individual. They can only be instruments of repression and oppression.

Nietzsche is not a nihilist; nihilism asserts that there are no moral values, and that there is no such thing as morality. Nietzsche instead says that there must be a ‘revaluation of values.’ He does not argue that moral value does not exist, but that it has been misinterpreted and misunderstood. He says that morality is false if it supposes that there are moral truths or values which are universal, or which are independent of the particular situations in which morality is applied.

Nietzsche's central concern is addressing affirming rather than denying life. He wants to say “Yes” to life, and is opposed any philosophy or world view that denies life or the "will to life." He offers a "revaluation of values."

Here as elsewhere he is very critical of Christianity. However, by targeting Christianity he is targeting the whole of traditional Western Victorian morality. Consider Victorian culture. It was very "repressive." But what does that mean? Repressive of what?

Sex.

And other things. Acting within the bounds of "decent society" was very regiments and restricting. But this is repressive of life and life urges. According to Nietzsche, this is saying "no" to life, not to who and what we are.

Nietzsche condemns Christianity, describing it as corrupt and decadent. He characterizes the origins of Christianity this way. First century Jews we a beaten, defeated, occupied and impoverished people. The occupying Romans on the other hand were superior: strong, rich, sexual. The Romans were wealthy in the natural values of life (pride, strength, sex) while the people they conquered were not. The Romans manifested the "will to power" fully and were life affirming in a way that the defeated were not and could not be.

Now the natural response of the weak is to envy the strong and curse their own wretched condition. But the genius of Christianity was to give them another option. It teaches that the strong were to be pitied, not envied. Consider the "Sermon on the Mount" from the Christian New Testament. http://kingjbible.com/matthew/5.htm

Blessed are the meek and humbled (not the prideful). Blessed are the poor, and those who hunger and thirst. Now from Nietzsche's perspective this is sheer madness. Everyone knows it is better to rich, strong and sexually vital then not. And a defeated people were in no position to pity anyone, except perhaps themselves.

But this little delusion did make the weak feel better about being weak. It time it came to be more than a source of solace to the enslaved, but an actual sort of perverse strength. It gave them strength to endure their wretchedness and a tool to wield against the naturally superior. They could say to their superiors, "Oh sure, now you think you have it so good now, but in the end God is going to get you!."

And note the inherent hypocrisy. What is the reward for a life of humility; a crown of glory and a seat on the right hand of God. What is the reward for a life an acetic denial of pleasure? Infinite bliss. What is the promised reward for loving your enemies and turning the other cheek? Seeing your enemies burn in hell, tormented eternally. And in time the religion of humility and meekness came to be a means by which inferior people achieved great fame and glory and wealth and power and sex.

That we seek these things should not surprise us. These are the natural goods. They are the natural goods that superior people can pursue and secure for themselves, but the weak cannot. So the weak turn to this "Slave Religion," as Nietzsche called it, and its slave morality as an insidious means to the very same ends. And with it they seek to repress the naturally strong with its propaganda of false values.

Perhaps no Christian image epitomized better the “Life Denying” nature of Christianity that the image of “The Lion Laying Down with the Lamb.” Well, in the real world lions eat lamb. They tear them to bits, actually. To wish for something else, to long for a cartoon world such as this, is to deny this world, to say “No.” to it. Being truly life affirming is not merely resigning oneself to live in the world as it is, but to embrace it and as much as possible imprint your will on it.

Thus Nietzsche calls for a "revaluation of values." The "idols" refers are empty or hollow beliefs which can be "sounded out" with the philosopher’s hammer.

Will to power

In contrast to Schopenhauer who posits a Universal "Will to Life," Nietzsche claims the driving force in man is his will to extend himself, to influence and power. The "will to power" is a striving to gain mastery of the self and of existence and is evident in the striving to extend the self. Compromise and equivocation represent a form of intellectual dishonesty.

Denial of the "will to power" is a form of decadence, reflecting a decay or degeneration of natural value. Denial of instinct is a denial of the ‘will to life.’ He argues that a morality of self-negation and self-denial (life denying) such as Christianity proffers, becomes an instrument of subjugation and oppression.

The Superman:

The concept of the superman (Übermensch) had been developed earlier by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-5). The superman is beyond the traditional concepts of "good" and "evil," because he affirms his ‘will to life.’ He creates are pursues his own affirmative values, which affirm the ‘will to power.’

The superman is the man who can overcome his own instincts, but not deny them. The superman has mastered his instincts, so that he can fully express himself. The superman is the man whose will to power has been sublimated creatively.

For Nietzsche, genuine freedom is embraced authentically when the individual wills to affirm and to be responsible for oneself. Freedom requires struggle and is gained by accepting and affirming life, despite life’s pain and suffering. Freedom is measured by the resistance that has to be overcome, and by the effort it takes, to make choices and be responsible for them. And our struggle and suffering takes on meaning for the formative power it has and the freedom it makes possible. Even Sisyphus is free (an noble) in this sense. Freedom also requires we gain mastery of our instincts Freedom does not mean the denial of one’s impulses and instincts, but we must not be enslaved by them either.

FROM BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL AND THE ANTICHRIST

BY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

In the Jewish "Old Testament," the book of divine justice, there are men, things, and speeches in so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to compare with it. One stands in awe and reverence before these tremendous remnants of what man once was, and sad thoughts come to one about ancient Asia and its jutting peninsula, Europe, which wants so definitely to signify, as against Asia, the "progress of man." Of course, those who are merely wretched tame domestic animals and know only the wants of domestic animals (like our cultivated people of today, including the Christians of "cultivated" Christianity) need neither be amazed nor even sorry when faced with these ruins: the taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone of "greatness" and "smallness." Perhaps they will even find the New Testament, the book of grace, more to their taste (it is full of the odor of the real, effeminate, stupid canter and petty soul). To have glued this New Testament, a kind of rococo of taste in every respect, to the Old Testament to form one book-the "Bible," the book-that is perhaps the greatest audacity and "sin against the spirit" which literary Europe has on its conscience.28

Christianity should not be beautified and embellished: it has waged deadly war against this higher type of man; it has placed all the basic instincts of this type under the ban; and out of these instincts it has distilled evil and the Evil One: the strong man as the typically reprehensible man, the "reprobate."

Christianity has sided with all that is weak and base, with all failures; it has made an ideal of what contradicts the instinct of the strong life to preserve itself; it has corrupted the reason even of those strongest in spirit ... it has in fear of them bred the opposite type-the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick human animal-the Christian.

As long as the priest is considered a higher type of man-this professional negator, slanderer, and poisoner of life-there is no answer to the question: what is truth? For truth has been stood on its head when the conscious advocate of nothingness and negation is accepted as the representative of "truth."

In Christianity neither morality nor religion has even a single point of contact with reality.

. . . This world of pure fiction is vastly inferior to the world of dreams insofar as the latter mirrors reality, whereas the former falsifies, devalues, and negates reality.... Who alone has good reason to lie his way out of reality? He who suffers from it ...

The Christian conception of God-God as god of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit-is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth. It may even represent the low-water mark in the descending development of divine types ....

This pitiful god of Christian monotonotheism! This hybrid product of decay, this mixture of zero, concept, and contradiction, in which all the instincts of decadence, all cowardices and wearinesses of the soul, find their sanction! 29

Nietzsche predicts the decline of Christianity, and religion in general, and could not be happier about it. Nietzsche famously declares “God is dead.”

FROM THE JOYFUL WISDOM BY NIETZSCHE

The most important of more recent events-that "God is dead," that the belief in the Christian God has become unworthy of belief-already begins to cast its first shadows over Europe. To the few at least whose eye, whose suspecting glance, is strong enough and subtle enough for this drama, some sun seems to have set, some old, profound confidence seems to have changed into doubt: our old world must seem to them daily more darksome, distrustful, strange and "old." In the main, however, one may say that the event itself is far too great, too remote, too much beyond most people's power of apprehension, for one to suppose that so much as the report of it could have reached them; not to speak of many who already knew what had taken place, and what must all collapse now that this belief had been undermined-because so much was built upon it, so much rested on it, and had become one with it: for example. our entire European morality.

But this need not be the cause of gloom and sadness, but rather the opposite.

… perhaps the reverse of what was to be expected-not at all sad and depressing. But rather like a new and indescribable variety of light. Happiness. relief, enlivenment, encouragement and dawning day? ... ln fact we philosophers and "free spirits" feel ourselves irradiated as by a new dawn by the report that the "old God is dead": our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation. At last the horizon seems open once more, granting even that it is not bright; our ships cans at least put out to sea in face of every danger; every hazard is again permitted to the discerner; the sea, our sea, again lies open before us; perhaps never before did such an "open sea" exist.

(Because is came up in class I did some research on Nietzsche’s view of Buddhism. While he regarding more positively that he did Christianity (which isn’t saying much) ne nevertheless did condemn it for being, if not “Life Denying,” not “Life Affirming.”

Buddha is said to have become aware of the ephemeral nature of reality through his encounters with a sick man, an old man, and a dead man. This is what he is referring to in this passage from Thus Spake Zarathustra:

'There are those with consumption of the soul: hardly are they born when they begin to die and to long for doctrines of weariness and renunciation. They would like to be dead, and we should welcome their wish. Let us beware of waking the dead and disturbing these living coffins! They encounter a sick man or an old man or a corpse and immediately they say, ‘Life is refuted’. But only they themselves are refuted, and their eyes, which see only this one face of existence.

He seems to be criticizing the retreating from the world that Buddhism encourages, and the lack of individualism and action. Buddhism’s answer to suffering seem to Nietzsche a surrender of life and thus a weaker response to the human condition than his own. He suggest that this way of thinking promotes a “...nihilistic turning away from life, a longing for nothingness, or for life's 'opposite', for a different sort of 'being.'' According to Nietzsche, Buddhism can be described as an effort, through restraint from action, to escape suffering and pass into absolute non-existence.

In Beyond Good and Evil, he contrasts Buddhism and the philosophy of Schopenhauer to his own

“Whoever has endeavored with some enigmatic longing, as I have, to think pessimism through to its depths and liberate it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and simplicity in which it has finally presented itself to our century, namely, in the form of Schopenhauer's philosophy; whoever has really, with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye, looked into, down into the most world-denying of all possible ways of thinking - beyond good and evil and no longer, like the Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the spell and delusion of morality - may just thereby, without really meaning to do so, have opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity...”

Sigmund Freud

Finally. in the twentieth century, the attack on religion was given a psychoanalytic spin. Sigmund Freud suggests that the grand aspirations of religion to mere illusions, but, even worse, the illusions of an insecure immature mind of one who has never properly grown up.

FRO M THE FUTURE OF AN ILL USION

BY SIGMUND FREUD

FROM THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION BY SIGMUND FREUD

... the psychical origin of religious ideas. These, which are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. As we already know, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection-for protection through love-which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfillment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfillments shall take place. Answers to the riddles that tempt the curiosity of man, such as how the universe began or what the relation is between body and mind, are developed in conformity with the underlying assumptions of this system. It is an enormous relief to the individual psyche if the conflicts of its childhood arising from the father-complex-conflicts which it has never wholly overcome-are removed from it and brought to a solution which is universally accepted.

When I say that these things are all illusions, I must define the meaning of the word. An illusion is not the same thing as an error; nor is it necessarily an error. Aristotle's belief that vermin are developed out of dung (a belief to which ignorant people still cling) was an error; so was the belief of a former generation of doctors that tabes dorsalis is the result of sexual excess. It would be incorrect to call these errors illusions. On the other hand, it was an illusion of Columbus's that he had discovered a new sea route to the Indies. The part played by his wish in this error is very clear. One may describe as an illusion the assertion made by certain nationalists that the Indo-Germanic race is the only one capable of civilization; or the belief, which was only destroyed by psycho-analysis, that children are creatures without sexuality. What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. In this respect they come near to psychiatric delusions. But they differ from them, too, apart from the more complicated structure of delusions. In the case of delusions, we emphasize as essential their being in contradiction with reality. Illusions need not necessarily be false-that is to say, unrealizable or in contradiction of reality.... Thus we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification.