Introduction
A The Death of God
In 1882, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of God. That announcement was made by a lunatic who declared that he was seeking God and shouted the truth in the marketplace to the mockery of the masses:
“Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers, […] Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead, God remains dead. And we have killed him”.1
Even though the lunatic here – like Nietzsche himself – declares that he is ahead of his time, the news of the death of God found fertile ground. It reflect- ed a wave of criticism and attacks against religion, which started appearing on all sides in the Western world in the 19th century and increased in the 20th. The criticism of the German philosopher and anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) was central. It saw God as the product of man, solely a projection of human features, and religion – as the objectification of human needs.2 Ac- cording to Feuerbach, religion indirectly includes the dreams and visions of individuals and cultures, and is the fruit of a self image of humanity in ideal terms. As such, it is a profound expression of the human spirit. Yet, religion is to be stripped of its theological identity, that is, of its definition as a discipline de- voted to divine research, or else it alienates man from himself by depriving him of the best in him and attributing it to God. But Feuerbach preserved a certain positive anthropological value for religion, while other criticisms went further. One of the most important of them, leading to atheism, is the ideological criti- cism of Karl Marx (1818–1883).3 Marx saw religion as a perverse awareness of
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. with commentary Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1974, Book 3, #125, p.181. [Hereinafter: in bold – original emphasis, in italics – mine.]. 2 Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, New York: Harper and Row, 1957; Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, trans. Ralph Manheim, New York: Harper and Row, 1967. 3 Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” trans. Rodney Livingstone and George Benton, in: Early Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975, pp. 57–198.
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4 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Live, trans. Joseph Ward Swain, New York: Macmillan, 1915. 5 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, James Strachey (ed.), with an introduction by Peter Gay, New York and London: Norton & Company (Standard Edition), 1989.