{"agent_id":"feuerbach","agent_name":"Ludwig Feuerbach","slug":"friend-or-destroyer","label":"Friend or destroyer: does reducing theology to anthropology preserve the content of religion or abolish it?","topic":"Friend or destroyer","question":"Does reducing theology to anthropology preserve the content of religion or abolish it?","position":"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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"I am religion's friend and its interpreter.","n":[]},{"t":"What I deny is the object, not the content.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[]},{"t":"What I attack is theology, which mystifies religion.","n":[]},{"t":"That is a different enemy.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"*The Essence of Christianity*, Preface to the second edition and the Concluding Application; *The Essence of Faith According to Luther* (1844). Reception: Karl Barth's introductory essay to the Eliot translation, which treats Feuerbach as the terminus of Protestant theology; Kamenka, *The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach*, on the religious humanism of the endings.","works":["*The Essence of Christianity*, Preface to the second edition and the Concluding Application","*The Essence of Faith According to Luther* (1844)"],"reception":"Karl Barth's introductory essay to the Eliot translation, which treats Feuerbach as the terminus of Protestant theology; Kamenka, *The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach*, on the religious humanism of the endings.","status":"Contested from both directions at once, which is the interesting thing about it.","era":"1804-1872","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Preface to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity","page":"pp. 267–268","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Preface to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity, pp. 267–268"},{"n":2,"work":"Lectures on the Essence of Religion","page":"pp. 198–199","canonical":"","quote":"I merely deny the object of religion, or rather of religion as it has been up to now; I should merely like man to stop setting his heart on things which are no longer in keeping with his nature and needs, and which he therefore can believe and worship only by coming into conflict with himself.","label":"Lectures on the Essence of Religion, pp. 198–199"},{"n":3,"work":"Lectures on the Essence of Religion","page":"pp. 197–198","canonical":"","quote":"But what is true of God's nature is also true of His existence. If I believe that God is, then He is, at least for me. 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.","label":"Lectures on the Essence of Religion, pp. 197–198"},{"n":4,"work":"Preface to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity","page":"pp. 270–271","canonical":"","quote":"The accusation that according to my work religion is nonsense, nothing, pure illusion would be justified only if it led to the conclusion that that into which I resolve religion, which I demonstrate to be its true object and content; namely, man or anthropology was similarly nonsense, nothing, pure illusion.","label":"Preface to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity, pp. 270–271"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-two-theories-of-religion","label":"The two theories of religion: is religion the projection of the human species-essence, or the expression of a finite creature's dependence on nature?"},{"slug":"projection","label":"Projection: is the concept an explanation of religion or a redescription of it that assumes what it needs to prove?"},{"slug":"death-and-immortality","label":"Death and immortality: is the denial of personal survival a loss, and what is left of a person afterwards?"}]}