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!

Comments

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True. My experience has not been different either.

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

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

      Delete
  3. Logical. Not a single statement that I can deny.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Did I manage to shake your religious faith a little? :)

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

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

      Delete
  5. 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. 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

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The

Country without a national language

India has no national language because the country has too many languages. Apart from the officially recognised 22 languages are the hundreds of regional languages and dialects. It would be preposterous to imagine one particular language as the national language in such a situation. That is why the visionary leaders of Independent India decided upon a three-language policy for most purposes: Hindi, English, and the local language. The other day two pranksters from the Hindi belt landed in Bengaluru airport wearing T-shirts declaring Hindi as the national language. They posted a picture on X and it evoked angry responses from a lot of Indians who don’t speak Hindi.  The worthiness of Hindi to be India’s national language was debated umpteen times and there is nothing new to add to all that verbiage. Yet it seems a reminder is in good place now for the likes of the above puerile young men. Language is a power-tool . One of the first things done by colonisers and conquerors is to

Diwali, Gifts, and Promises

Diwali gifts for me! This is the first time in my 52 years of existence that I received so many gifts in the name of Diwali.  In Kerala, where I was born and brought up, Diwali was not celebrated at all in those days, the days of my childhood.  Even now the festival is not celebrated in the villages of Kerala as I found out from my friends there.  It is celebrated in the cities (and some villages) where people from North Indian states live.  When I settled down in Delhi in 2001 Diwali was a shock to me.  I was sitting in the balcony of a relative of mine who resided in Sadiq Nagar.  I was amazed to see the fireworks that lit up the city sky and polluted the entire atmosphere in the city.  There was a medical store nearby from which I could buy Otrivin nasal drops to open up those little holes in my nose (which have been examined by many physicians and given up as, perhaps, a hopeless case) which were blocked because of the Diwali smoke.  The festivals of North India

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so