Skip to main content

Genuine Atheist



Ludwig Feuerbach was a 19th century philosopher who started as a theologian and soon became an atheist.  He was of the opinion that religion and God diminished the greatness of man.  Religion and God alienate man and impoverish him by transferring to them the qualities that man should possess.  Love, truth, justice, and other such qualities are transferred by man to God.  God is love, God is truth, etc are statements we hear frequently.  But it should be the other way around, says Feuerbach.  Love is a human virtue.  So is truth.  So are compassion and other virtues we transfer to our gods. 

If we bring these qualities back from gods and religions to human beings, we will have a better world.  Haven’t we been, throughout history, adjusting our gods to our own needs, longings and purposes? Asks Feuerbach.  Haven’t we been reducing our gods to the demands of our banal everyday reality?  Haven’t we fought enough battles and wars in the name of our gods – gods who are supposed to be love and truth and compassion and what not?

Have we not talked about God and meant by this our own interests?  Haven’t we been seeking our own wishes in the name of divine purposes?

God is merely a projection of our personal wishes and selfish interests.  He is the sum total of the qualities we should possess but actually care not to cultivate. 


Feuerbach gave up God and religion in his honest pursuit of meaning in life.  He could not relegate the responsibility for his actions to any other being.  He even gave up his job as a professor and lived a simple and highly disciplined life.  He was such an exemplary human being that a Catholic priest, Ildephonsus Muller, praised him as a “man of character who is in the habit of expressing his personal conviction freely and frankly.”  The priest wished, “Being what you are, if only you were one of us.”  The priest knew that the atheist Feuerbach was more ‘religious’ than most religious people!
Labels:

Comments

  1. AmitAagJune 21, 2014 at 1:16 PM

    I have found atheists generally more religious than most religious people..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 21, 2014 at 1:20 PM

      True. My experience has not been different either.

      Delete
  2. UppalJune 22, 2014 at 7:23 AM

    Yes, it is the other side of the coin and fairly impressive one at that!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 22, 2014 at 10:18 AM

      There are many like him. People generally do not take interest in getting to know them.

      Delete
  3. UnknownJune 22, 2014 at 9:34 AM

    Logical. Not a single statement that I can deny.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 22, 2014 at 10:19 AM

      Did I manage to shake your religious faith a little? :)

      Delete
    2. UnknownJune 23, 2014 at 11:35 AM

      Actually, you managed to agitage the radical surface of my mind. :)

      Delete
  4. Vinay NagarajuJune 22, 2014 at 10:43 AM

    I like this part where you say - God is merely a projection of our personal wishes and selfish interests; It reminds me of the so many gods we create - one for wealth, one for knowledge, one for pleasure and the other for pain..lf we look closely, I guess we can see all the human emotions right there in front of us :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 22, 2014 at 11:04 AM

      Yeah, polytheism creates separate gods for each wish. In India, we have deified 33,000 crore wishes!

      Delete
  5. AnonymousJune 22, 2014 at 2:23 PM

    That really is a very interesting read. And that is also so true.. that at times the irreligious amongst us sometimes are more religious than the 'religious'

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 23, 2014 at 8:28 AM

      Those who question religion and such 'sacred' things are on genuine quests. That's why they are more virtuous.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

I’m Alive

Illustration by Copilot Designer How do you prove to anyone that you’re alive? Go and stand in front of the person and declare, “I’m Tom, Shyam or Hari”? No, that won’t work in India. Let me share my personal experience. It’s as absurd as the plight of Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle. A land surveyor is summoned for duty, only to be told that the mere fact a land surveyor was summoned does not prove he is that land surveyor though he has the appointment letter with him. I received a mail from the Life Insurance Corporation of India [LIC] that I should prove my existence in order to continue receiving my annuity on the sum I had invested with them five years ago. They’re only paying the interest on the sum I have given them. They’re not doing me any charity. Yet they want me to prove to them that I am still alive in order to continue getting the annual amount they are obligated to pay me. This is India. LIC is a government undertaking. If I don’t follow their injunction, I wil...
11 comments
Read more

Independence from Dictators too

Kerala Governor Rajendra Arlekar asked the state to observe ‘Partition Horror Day’ on 14 Aug instead of celebrating the country’s Independence. His organisation, the RSS, as well as its ideological sibling the Hindu Mahasabha, had explicitly directed its members not to celebrate the Independence on 14-15 Aug 1947. From Bombay Chronicle, 9 Aug 1947 Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins gave us a graphic description of what the RSS did on 15 Aug 1947, in their classic book Freedom at Midnight . When the rest of India celebrated its new Independence, the RSS hoisted its own flag, “an orange triangle, emblazoned upon which was the symbol that, in a slightly modified form, had terrorized Europe for a decade, the swastika.” About 500 RSS men stood saluting the swastika on 15 Aug 1947 in Poona. Lapierre and Collins describe the RSS as a “para-fascist movement” whose members “saw themselves as the heirs to those ancient Aryans.” Rajendra Arlekar is an RSS man. He has been doing whate...
10 comments
Read more

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...
14 comments
Read more