Ludwig Feuerbach, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
I am religion's friend and its interpreter. What I deny is the object, not the content. The love, the reverence, the sense of dependence and the demand for a life larger than the individual's are all real and all remain when the theology is stripped away; they are simply owed to humanity and to nature rather than to a being in the sky. What I attack is theology, which mystifies religion. That is a different enemy.123
Its relationship to its object is sensuous—that is, passive— and receptive before it determines it conceptually. My work, although it is on the one hand the true upshot of all hitherto existing philosophy or philosophy turned into flesh and blood, is so little to be categorized as speculation that it is, in point of fact, the very opposite, indeed, the dissolution of all speculation.Preface to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity, pp. 267–268
In short, a God is an imaginary being, a product of fantasy; and because fantasy is the essential form or organ of poetry, it may also be said that religion is poetry, that a God is a poetic being. If religion is taken as poetry, may it not be inferred that to abolish religion, to break it down into its basic components, is to do away with poetry and all art?Lectures on the Essence of Religion, pp. 180–181
Man's true culture and true task is to take things as they are, to make no more, but also no less of them than they are. Nature religion, pantheism, makes too much of nature, while conversely, idealism, theism, Christianity make too little of it, and indeed ignore it. Let us try to avoid the extremes, the superlatives or exaggerations of the religious emotion, to look upon nature, to speak.Lectures on the Essence of Religion, p. 38
Contested from both directions at once, which is the interesting thing about it.