The Essence of Religion (Great Books in Philosophy)
by Ludwig Feuerbach
Category: Philosophy

"Originally published in 1845, this digest of thirty lectures by one of Germany's most influential humanist philosophers extends the critique expounded in The Essence of Christianity (1841) to religion as a whole." The main thrust of Feuerbach's analysis of religion is aptly summed up in the original subtitle to this work: "God the Image of Man. Man's Dependence upon Nature the Last and Only Source of Religion." Feuerbach reviews key aspects of religious belief and in each case explains them as imaginative elaborations of the primal awe and sense of dependence that humans experience in the face of nature's power and mystery. Rather than man being created in the image of God, the situation is quite the reverse: "All theology is anthropology," he says, and "the being whom man sets over against himself as a separate supernatural existence is his own being."