Ludwig Feuerbach

“ The free, objective man doubtless finds things repugnant and distasteful in Nature, but he regards them as natural, inevitable results, and under this conviction he subdues his feeling as a merely subjective and untrue one. On the contrary, the subjective man, who lives only in the feelings and imagination, regards these things with a quite peculiar aversion. ”

“ Whatever lives seeks to maintain itself, to continue alive, and consequently not to die. Subsequently, when reflection and feeling are developed under the urgency of life, especially of social and political life, this primary negative wish becomes the positive wish for a life, and that a better life, after death. But this wish involves the further wish for the certainty of its fulfilment. Reason can afford no such certainty. It has therefore been said that all proofs of immortality are insufficient, and even that unassisted reason is not capable of apprehending it, still less of proving it. ”

“ As death, which the philosopher, the man of science, the free objective thinker in general, accepts as a natural necessity, and as indeed all the limits of nature, which are impediments to feeling, but to reason are rational laws, were repugnant to the Christians, and were set aside by them through the supposed agency of miraculous power; so, necessarily, they had an equal repugnance to the natural process of generation, and superseded it by miracle. ”

“ Protestant morality a comely, fruitful matron. Protestantism is from beginning to end the contradiction between faith and love; for which very reason it has been the source, or at least the condition, of freedom. Just because the mystery of the Virgo Deipara had with the Protestants a place only in theory, or rather in dogma, and no longer in practice, they declared that it was impossible to express oneself with sufficient care and reserve concerning it, and that it ought not to be made an object of speculation. ”

“ The Christians, on the contrary, in the undoubting certainty that their personal, self-flattering wishes will be fulfilled, i.e., in the certainty of the divine nature of their emotions, the truth and unassailableness of their subjective feelings, converted that which to the ancients was a theoretic problem, into an immediate fact,—converted a theoretic, and in itself open question, into a matter of conscience, the denial of which was equivalent to the high treason of atheism. ”

“ The more man alienates himself from Nature, the more subjective, i.e., supranatural, or antinatural, is his view of things, the greater the horror he has of Nature, or at least of those natural objects and processes which displease his imagination, which affect him disagreeably. ”

“ Moreover, the subjective man makes his feelings the measure, the standard of what ought to be. That which does not please him, which offends his transcendental, supranatural, or antinatural feelings, ought not to be. Even if that which pleases him cannot exist without being associated with that which displeases him, the subjective man is not guided by the wearisome laws of logic and physics but by the self-will of the imagination ”

“ But now, since the Fall, we all know and feel what a fury lurks in our flesh, which not only burns and rages with lust and desire, but also loathes, when once obtained, the very thing it has desired. But this is the fault of original sin, which has polluted all creatures ”

“ But with the Protestants, who confined the speciality of the Christian to the domain of faith, and with whom, in life, it was allowable to be a man, even this mystery had only a dogmatic, and no longer a practical significance ”