The history of Christianity has had for its grand result the unveiling of this mystery – the realisation and recognition of theology as anthropology.” [175F-EOC: p. 336]
Ludwig Feuerbach: The Principles of the Philosophy of the Future(7/9/43)
[176F-PPF: p. 15-16]
[P. 15] “The difference between God’s knowledge or thought, which as an archetype precedes the objects and creates them, and man’s knowledge, which follows the objects as their copy, is nothing but the difference between apriori, or speculative, knowledge and a posteriori, or empirical, knowledge. (…) [P. 16] But this divine knowledge, which is only an imaginary conception and a fantasy in theology, became rational and real knowledge in the knowledge of the natural sciences gained through the telescope and microscope.” [176F-PPF: p. 15-16]
[177F-PPF: p. 17]
“We have here an apparent example of the truth that man’s conception of God is the human individual’s conception of his own species, that God as the total of all realities or perfections is nothing other than the total of the attributes of the species – dispersed among men and realizing themselves in the course of world history – compendiously combined for the benefit of the limited individual. The domain of the natural sciences is, because of its quantitative size, completely beyond the capacity of the individual man to view and measure. (…) But what the individual man does not know and cannot do all of mankind together knows and can do. Thus, the divine knowledge that knows simultaneously every particular has its reality in the knowledge of the species.” [177F-PPF: p. 17]
[178F-PPF: p. 22-24]
[P. 22] “… he who makes matter into an attribute of God declares matter to be a divine being. (…) The divinization of the real, of that which exists materially – materialism, empiricism, realism, humanism – and the negation of theology are, however, the essence of the modern era. Pantheism is, therefore, … the essence of the modern era elevated to a divine being and to a religiophilosophical principle.
Empiricism or realism - … the so-called real sciences, especially the natural sciences – [P. 23] negates theology. (…) Spinoza hit the nail on the head … with his paradoxical proposition: god is an extended, that is, material being. He found, at least for his time, the true philosophical expression for the materialistic tendency of the modern era… . (…) [P. 24] Spinoza is the Moses of modern free thinkers and materialists.” [178F-PPF: p. 22-24]
[179F-PPF: p. 43-44]
[P. 43] “The particular belongs to being, and the general belongs to thought. (…) … I owe my [P. 44] existence never to the linguistic or logical bread – bread in itself – but always only to this
