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Quote by Ludwig Feuerbach

“The salvation of the soul is the fundamental idea, the main point in Christianity; … this salvation lies only in God … But God is absolute subjectivity, … separated from the world, … set free from matter, severed from … life … and … from the distinction of sex. Separation from the world, from matter, from the life of the species, is therefore the ultimate aim of Christianity. … [T]his aim had its visible, practical realisation in Monachism.”

Quote by Ludwig Feuerbach

Work

Essence of Christianity

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Author

Ludwig Feuerbach
Ludwig Feuerbach

Ludwig Feuerbach, a prominent German philosopher born on July 28, 1804, and died on September 13, 1872. He was a significant figure in the German classical philosophy and had a profound impact on the birth of Marxist philosophy. more

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“The true Christian not only feels no need of culture, because this is a worldly principle and opposed to feeling; he also has no need of (natural) love. … God supplies to him the want of love, of a wife, of a family. … [T]he man who does not deny his manhood, is conscious that he is only part of a being, which needs another part for the making up of the whole of true humanity. The Christian, on the contrary, in his excessive, transcendental subjectivity, conceives that he is, by himself, a perfect being. But the sexual instinct runs counter to this view; it is in contradiction with his ideal: the Christian must therefore deny this instinct.”

“[M]arriage is not holy in Christianity; … an unholy thing … excluded from heaven. … Where his heaven is, there is his heart, - heaven is his heart laid open. Heaven is nothing but the idea of the true, the good, the valid, - of that which ought to be; earth, nothing but the idea of the untrue, the unlawful, of that which ought not to be. … [T]here [in heaven] dwell only pure sexless individuals: … the Christian excludes the life of the species from his conception of the true life[.]”

“The future life is the feeling, the conception of freedom from those limits which here circumscribe the feeling of self, the existence of the individual. … The natural man remains at home because he finds it agreeable, because he is perfectly satisfied; religion … commences with a discontent, a disunion, forsakes its home and travels far, but only to feel … more vividly in the distance … home. In religion man separates himself from himself, but only to return always to the same point from which he set out [himself]. Man negatives himself, but only to posit himself again, and that in a glorified form: he negatives this life, but only, in the end, to posit it again in the future life.”

“The religious man renounces the joys of this world, but only that he may win in return the joys of heaven; … and the joys of heaven are the same as those of earth, only that they are freed from the limits and contrarieties of this life. Religion thus arrives, though by a circuit, at the very goal, the goal of joy, towards which the natural man hastens in a direct line. To live in images or symbols is the essence of religion. Religion sacrifices the thing itself to the image.”