Only in the later Judaism was Jehovah separated in the strictest manner from man, and recourse was had to allegory in order to give to the old anthropomorphisms another sense than that which they originally had. The Church first identified him with God, made him the exclusive Son of God, defined his distinction from men and angels, and thus gave him the monopoly of an eternal, uncreated existence. In the genesis of ideas, the first mode in which reflection on religion, or theology, makes the divine being a distinct being and places him outside of man, is by making the existence of God the object of a formal proof. The proofs of the existence of God have been pronounced contradictory to the essential nature of religion. They are so, but only in their form as proofs.
Religion immediately represents the inner nature of man as an objective, external being.
And the proof aims at nothing more than to prove that religion is right. From a being to whom man gives all, offers up all that is precious to him, he cannot withhold the bliss of existence. But that every religion in its idea of God makes a latent, unconscious inference, is confessed in its polemic against other religions. Your God rests on a conclusion, the premises of which are your sensual impulses, your passions. Your God was your carnal nature, your heaven only a free theatre for the passions which, in society and in the conditions of actual life generally, had to suffer restraint.