Feuerbach’s “The Essence of Christianity”.

“The Essence of Christianity” was written by Ludwig Feuerbach. Below are some annotations I made about his work. An annotation reflects what the author thinks about the subject and may or may not reflect what I think about the same subject. Any questions about my personal opinion can be asked in the comments.

1. Naturally, animals have no religion.

2. The animal consciousness is individual, while human consciousness is generic, it can generalize information to it’s species, making science possible.

3. In humans, inner life and public life are different things.

4. Only humans can have monologues.

5. Thanks to the ability for generalization, the human being is capable of empathy.

6. Religion is a way to know yourself.

7. We are limited by the boundaries of our consciousness.

8. A human being is only complete if it has reason, will and feeling.

9. Reason, love and will are the most important characteristics in a human being.

10. A human who doesn’t think, doesn’t love or doesn’t desire isn’t actually human, but another kind of animal.

11. The consciousness sets the human apart from other animals, but it’s not the only thing that does so, because an animal with consciousness will likely develop other characteristics that set him further apart from other life forms.

12. However, the presence of human consciousness doesn’t make humans automatically better, as other animals aren’t worse than humans in every aspect.

13. Once you have reason, love or desire, you can’t rid yourself of those attributes; they are for life.

14. Music is the language of feeling.

15. Is love a human attribute… or the other way around?

16. If love is a human attribute, submitted to men, how come people die for love, something that is in clear conflict with a person’s best interest (survival)?

17. If love can exercise coercion on a person, then it must be something higher.

18. The same goes for reason: a person can get so involved in studies to the point of forgetting about water, food or sleep.

19. The same goes for desire: fasting is a desire (for control) submitting another desire (for food).

20. What happens in most religions is that the human being, feeling that love, reason and desire are stronger than him, but are put within him, comes to conclude that those things could only have been put in him by a higher power, which can be one deity for all attributes or one for each.

21. There’s not enough proof that body and “soul” or emotion and “soul” are different things.

22. Humans attribute existential value to things that entice their intellectual affinity, which could explain why some people worship the sun or the moon.

23. It’s alright to love the whole human species, but loving just yourself is vanity.

24. If something exists, it deserves to be known.

25. If something exists, it has value.

26. Even if we are all humans, there’s no need to attribute your own flaws to everyone else.

27. What is impossible for me may be possible for someone else.

28. We won’t know if it’s impossible if we don’t try.

29. We can’t assume that something is limitless just because we don’t see it’s boundaries.

30. A person is described by her qualities, not by her lacks.

31. If you accept your limitations, you will likely get used to them and live the best way you can.

32. Your world is limited by your knowledge.

33. Noticing the mistake you committed is proof of intelligence.

34. Practicing philosophy is like having a monologue.

35. In a natural state, a human would conceive a god that is pure feeling.

36. Conceiving a god that is pure feeling is like having a feeling (faith) worshiping other feelings, which makes it a cult of oneself.

37. To get rid of natural religion is to get rid of feeling.

38. But if I can’t rid myself of feeling while the natural religion can only worship feeling, then religion can become a cult of oneself.

39. Humans aren’t the only creatures to enjoy music.

40. All religions have a degree of judgment: what I can or can not worship.

41. You need to know God to worship him.

42. Religion comes before philosophy, in the sense that we believe before we start questioning.

43. Feeling isn’t “super-human”.

44. Being agnostic is being atheist without the courage to admit so.

45. The only Christians who can safely say that God exists are those who actually had the experience of God’s acts in their life, but personal experience can not be generalized, leaving the Christian out of proof.

46. Existence is offensive.

47. A person may get bored of God if she gets bored of the religion she follows.

48. Saying that God exists, but can’t show himself as he is, makes religion impossible for as long as religion (re-connection) wants God as he truly is.

49. Separating “God himself” and “God as he appears to me” is skepticism.

50. If animals could worship, they would imagine gods with animal attributes.

51. The tendency to have faith is natural in humans.

52. Having doubts about the God I worship is having doubts about my own faith, which is, in a way, having doubts about myself.

53. If God doesn’t need temples, why are temples all around and why are they so magnificent?

54. The tendency to attribute supernatural causes to natural effects is what makes superstition.

55. Whatever I can not understand probably does not exist anyway.

56. The distance between God and man is always much bigger than the degree of similarity between both.

57. A lot of shameful interpretations of God are actually result of prejudice against atheism: if I must believe, I’ll believe in anything.

58. As a compilation of documents made by different people at different times, it’s natural that some biblical verses contradict each other.

59. Religion and theology are different things.

60. One person can be closer to God than another person is.

61. The Trinity is profoundly contradictory.

62. Catholic Church places Maria where Jesus was supposed to be, in a scale of importance.

63. God is very real for those who live their religion through sacrifices, such as celibacy and fasting.

64. The dogma according to which a perfect God can only love himself contradicts revelation and contributes to the image of a selfish God.

65. Trinity is an excuse to worship Jesus, a behavior not endorsed by Jesus himself.

66. If God really doesn’t care about a behavior other than faith, what’s the point of acting virtuously?

67. One of the things that leads us to faith is the lack of sense in the world; there’s a need for a rational being that is in charge.

68. Freedom is for those who think.

69. If God is God, he can only be one, not many.

70. If you no longer believes in God the way your religion tells you to, then you no longer share that religion.

71. Religion never contributed to science.

72. Only sensible beings are capable of mercy.

73. Real love implies being happy when seeing that the loved person is happy.

74. The biblical texts about love are so pure that it’s hard to believe that they aren’t inspired.

75. If God didn’t love, he would forgive no one.

76. Theology often separates love from God.

77. If no one loved, no one would suffer.

78. If God didn’t love, he wouldn’t operate miracles.

79. If you don’t love, you have no heart.

80. If Christ suffered for sake of others, why are Christians so reluctant to do the same?

81. Socrates and Jesus, reason and passion: the first gladly takes the chalice, the latter would rather not, if possible (Matthew 26:39).

82. It’s strange that theology says that God has no emotions.

83. Christianity and theology have different gods.

84. Only a heartless being can not suffer.

85. You shouldn’t deny a person’s right to love themselves; that’s equivalent to telling the person to suicide.

86. We all need goals and a purpose.

87. Worshiping Mary closes a hole in the trinity: a Father, a Son, but the mother is nowhere to be seen.

88. Only a mother can really love a son.

89. God is more real for those who need him.

90. The arguments against Mary can extent to the trinity.

91. Trinity makes no difference for the Christian morals.

92. If you don’t love a woman, you can’t love a man.

93. Asking saints to deliver a request to God is idolatry, because you end up giving more value to the saint (who can ask something to God and supposedly get it from him) than to God himself.

94. Worshiping Jesus as God’s image on Earth is idolatry.

95. Communication is as necessary as thought is.

96. It’s easier to endure hardships by talking about them to someone who can listen.

97. Knowing yourself is needed for a correct understanding of nature.

98. The biggest pain is feeling love and not being reciprocated.

99. Reason starts with the operations of questioning and answering.

100. It’s reasonable to think that evil always existed.

101. If idealism cuts connection to real life, it will become useless.

102. If kindness and politeness do not work, violence is needed.

103. The conception of personality can only be achieved after the conception of body.

104. Men and women are completely different, not just superficially.

105. Gender isn’t a body attribute.

106. There are two personality archetypes: male and female.

107. A gender doesn’t treat the opposite gender like itself.

108. Every person has a bit of both genders.

109. Gender difference is what morals are rooted on.

110. Separating humans in male and female was the wisest thing nature has done.

111. Creation was the first miracle.

112. To deny a miracle is to deny that God makes any difference in our lives.

113. Paulo didn’t believe in trinity.

114. Theology is bad quality anthropology.

115. Matter and world are two concepts that are impossible to separate.

116. Polytheism is the first step towards science.

117. People who claim to believe only in the “essential” may very well believe in what’s more convenient to them.

118. It’s easy to become fanatic if you give excess importance to faith alone.

119. For a person who is blinded by faith, everything is idolatry.

120. Believing in Hell reveals desire for revenge.

121. Christians aren’t the only people capable of love and, in fact, they are capable of great amounts of hate.

122. Religious conflicts are more hideous than conflicts between nations.

123. A Christian may love just because God said so, meaning that his “love” is actually fear of burning in Hell.

124. Christ wanted us to love each other, no matter what.

125. If a person doesn’t love, isn’t Christian.

126. No such thing as a “philosophy of creation.”

127. Prayer reveals that a person believes in God as someone who is closer than any human.

128. If the prayer wasn’t tended to, the believer may think “it wasn’t in God’s plans”.

129. A loved person doesn’t need violence to have a need satisfied by the lover.

130. Denying resurrection is denying Christ.

131. To give sacred status to both marriage and celibacy is contradictory.

132. Protestantism separates faith and public life.

133. It would be harder to believe in Jesus if he didn’t bleed.

134. Proving that Christ didn’t operate any miracle is proving that he is no Messiah.

135. Everyone sins, but there are sins that are worse than others.

136. We are different because those differences are needed, otherwise there would have only one human in the world.

137. Primitive Christianity didn’t celebrate birthdays, but did celebrate funerals.

138. A Christian can die everyday, by torturing himself with fasting and other sacrifices.

139. But you really need to die only once.

140. Nothing wrong in two single people lust over each other.

141. Marriage is a weakness.

142. You can only improve something if it’s already good in some sense; if it was completely bad, you would throw it away, rather than improving it.

143. A lot of people believe in God due to fear of death.

144. A believer who starts having doubts may face great guilt and anxiety.

145. A Christian is already losing it if he starts thinking that prayer is pointless.

146. There will have no marriage in Heaven, but that doesn’t mean that there will have no sex.

147. A sign of fanaticism: disregarding all friendships with humans as “false”.

148. An animal who doesn’t need others to survive is, of course, the only one in it’s species.

149. There’s one religion for each conceived heaven.

150. You can guess the moral values of a religion by looking at it’s afterlife promises.

151. For as long as there are different nations, there will have different religions.

152. Science can not prove that God doesn’t exist for as long as it speaks in a way that laymen can not understand.

153. Why people who never had contact with Judaism and Christianity sometimes live way better than those who did?

154. It’s possible to understand nature without appealing to religion.

155. Nature is beautiful.