The God Who Is: The Christian God in a Pluralistic World

By Hans Schwarz

Who is the God in whom Christians believe? Is he just a figment of the human mind as critics of religion claimed in the nineteenth century and as crusading atheists assert again today? Since the beginnings of rational thought the brightest minds among humanity have attempted to assert that God does indeed exist. But even the so-called proofs for God's existence always started with the assumption that there is someone to prove. As soon as we move beyond that which is within space and time mere proofs or disproofs no longer suffice. Both believers and unbelievers live to a certain degree by faith. Yet religion is inextricably connected with human history.

When we journey through the landscape of religion and witness its gradual unfolding we soon realize that not all religions are equal. Though they may be witnesses of the same God, the way they talk about God is so different that this not only leads to very different concepts of God but also to different approaches to life on this earth. At the end of this long journey we finally arrive at the Judeo-Christian tradition which witnesses to the God in whom Christians believe. This book seeks to show how this belief matured and what difference this belief still makes today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781621890928

Hans Schwarz

Hans Schwarz is Professor of Systematic Theology andContemporary Theological Issues at the University ofRegensburg, Germany.

Book preview

Preface

The vast majority of the more than six billion people who populate this earth believe in a God or some higher power beyond themselves. But what or who is it into which they put their trust? Is it something or someone they have simply imagined as the variety of religious beliefs might indicate, or is there something real behind humanity’s religions? If we concede that this something is real, can that something be proven, or are we simply abiding by the principle that one must believe in something? If we leave the object of our faith to human arbitrariness, we might be politically correct, but at the same time we undermine our own faith, which calls us to total dedication. Yet how can I be dedicated to the right object if the person next to me is also totally dedicated, but to something or someone totally different? A discernment in what we believe is badly needed. Yet how can we discern which faith is right or more appropriate? Even if we have decided on a proper understanding of God, what would that entail for us or rather what kind of God would that be?

It is understandable that questions of this kind cannot be dealt with extensively or to everyone’s satisfaction in just one publication. Nevertheless it is important to face these issues squarely and to deal with them honestly. I have had the privilege of teaching in the U.S., first at Trinity Theological Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, and for the past twenty-some years biannually at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. My home is in Germany and I have taught at the University of Regensburg since 1981. In addition I have presented more than four hundred guest lectures mostly in Eastern Europe and Asia. I share this to say that I have discussed the following pages with many people, especially students in the U.S. and in Germany and with others around the world. Dealing with the issues both openly and honestly has helped clarify my thinking on the subject at hand.

I am thankful to my former graduate research assistant, Dr. Anna Madsen, and to Dr. Terry Dohm, also a former doctoral student of mine, for improving the style and the content of these pages, then to my long-time secretary Hildegard Ferme who typed the various drafts with unfailing speed and accuracy, helped compiling the indices, and who also detected many infelicities. My Old Testament colleague Ted Swanson of Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary who taught for many years at United Theological Seminary in Bangalore, India, and before that at the United Seminary in Kingston, Jamaica, also went through the manuscript with his usual care and suggested many improvements. Many thanks! My graduate research assistant Dr. Andrea König also deserves thanks for providing the necessary help with books and other supplies. Finally I am indebted to my wife Hildegard for putting up with a husband who all too often withdrew to his catacombs to put the finishing touches on yet another project.

Introduction

At a regional meeting of the American Academy of Religion I got into a discussion with a colleague whose expertise was not in theology or religion, but in one of the secular pursuits. He told me very bluntly that the belief in God should be eradicated altogether. His reasoning was that belief in God ensues in ideology, and ideology breeds violence. Wherever you look, he claimed, when there is an atrocity, it is motivated by religious causes. Therefore religion is the real culprit of people hating and murdering each other. Indeed, the veneration of something or someone higher than humanity has often led to an exclusive and arrogant attitude which to some extent still continues today. For instance more Christians have been martyred in the twentieth century alone than in all the centuries before. But most of these killings were not committed by adherents of other religions. The Communists, for instance, were strictly anti-religious insofar as a veneration of a higher being or beings was concerned. Nevertheless they left a trail of blood causing the death of approximately 70 million people among whom were many Christians and believers of other religions. The Communist attempt to eradicate religion, however, was without success.

People are intrinsically religious, always prone to venerate God or other higher beings. Though scientists have not yet discovered a gene that makes people religious, neuroscience has detected certain areas in the brain that are responsive to religious cues similar to other areas which are responsive to visual impressions. The question then needs to be addressed whether religion is really a human epiphenomenon, so to speak a reflection of the human mind or the human psyche, or whether that to which religion witnesses is something independent of humanity.

In other words: Do people believe in God because there is a genetic or psychological need to do so? Or is God, or the higher beings that are venerated in religion, an entity independent of humanity to which humanity responds through religious exercises? To approach this issue, we will first analyze the attacks on the God phenomenon through which it is has been declared a figment of the human mind. Then we ask ourselves whether there is any possibility to prove God’s existence as an entity independent from ourselves.

Once we have wrestled with these preliminary issues, we can ask what kind of entity it is which we assume to be beyond ourselves. To that effect we will first tackle the issue of religion. What is religion and how is it related to the understanding of God? We should also not forget to ask whether we can ascertain a historical origin for humanity’s religious consciousness. Moving beyond that, we will view the confusing religious landscape attempting in bold strokes to trace the different religions starting with pre-historic and tribal religions via polytheistic religions to monotheistic manifestations. We will concentrate in the latter field primarily on three embodiments that have been embraced by people from many different nations, tribes, and walks of life: Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. The latter may sound odd being labeled a monotheistic religion. Nevertheless we want to consider it here because it too focuses only on one ultimate object, not naming it God, but Nirvana.

Having traversed the religious landscape, the decisive question is how we can differentiate these religions. Are they all equal? Are some better than the others? Or, are those questions already ruled out, since all religions are the manifestation of the same ultimacy? We will note that one cannot evaluate religions in a value-free vacuum, but can only approach them from one’s own vantage point. While such a point is necessarily historically and geographically conditioned, for the believer it is the only standpoint he or she can occupy. For this person then it assumes the position of ultimacy. From our vantage point the decisive criterion for evaluating the religious landscape is Jesus the Christ. To establish this criterion, we can put down some significant markers. The God disclosed in the Judeo-Christian history is a God of history as shown especially in the Old Testament. It is a God who communicated God’s self in an unsurpassable manner through Jesus the Christ. This self-manifestation is decisive because if God were different, salvation might be in jeopardy. Through its universality, entailing hope for everyone, this self-manifestation is not exclusive. The God whom we encounter in that history is also not a God of our likeness. To the contrary, God wants us to be in God’s own likeness. To that effect God summons us to become ever more like the One who has guided humanity through the ages. This is, of course, but a brief introductory synopsis; it is now time to consider some details.

Part I

Approaching the God Phenomenon

The belief in God has a checkered history. In the first centuries the Christian faith and with it the Christian belief in God were outlawed in the Roman Empire. At times Christians were actively persecuted and at other times merely tacitly tolerated. During the expansion of Islam, from the seventh century onward, Christian believers in God again faced hardships or were even forcibly converted to Islam. The Spanish conquistadores of the sixteenth century then in turn used force in Latin America to make the Indios believe in the Christian God. These atrocities, though regrettable, were always carried out in the name of one religion against another religion or other religions. Only in the twentieth century did an anti-religious ideology evolve that wanted to wipe out every religion. Especially in Russia, the Communists tried every means to exterminate religion altogether, since they considered it to be superstition.

There were certainly political reasons that motivated this persecution. The Russian Orthodox Church was so closely connected with the Tsarist rule that abolishing the Tsar also meant to reduce the power of the Orthodox Church. But the Communist contempt for religion and anything resembling faith in God is a thought pattern that has its roots in the nineteenth century. That religion belonged to a bygone era was evident for the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) and the revolutionary Karl Marx (1818–1883), and also to some extent for the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and many proponents of the Darwinian notion of human evolution.

Both Feuerbach and Marx were students of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and his philosophical system. For Hegel the notion of God was a most natural presupposition. Due to the rapid industrial progress, Feuerbach and Marx were more materialistically inclined. For Feuerbach, God was not the foundation and opposition of the material as Hegel had thought, but at the most an epiphenomen of the material. Being involved with the workers’ movement, Marx noted the close association between the religious and the political establishment. Moreover, similar to Feuerbach, he was dissatisfied with the Hegelian system which saw a most natural logic in the antithesis of God and the world and their synthesis found in the incarnation. For Marx such a synthesis did not exist. God and the world were opposites.

Since Feuerbach had claimed that religion is a human product and A god is man’s striving for happiness, fulfilled in his imagination the idea evolved in Marx that this God notion had to be eliminated.¹ The attempt was then made in Marxist Communism, the single most powerful political ideology of the twentieth century, to execute this idea. While religiosity took a heavy toll in Socialist countries, the God notion was not eliminated. In the West too skepticism has increased about anything religious. Especially organized religion has often been considered as a tool to keep people, especially children, under control. Religion is a means to pacify people and through religiously imposed rules to make them more docile. Yet such an understanding of religion as a political instrument already closes the door on the God phenomenon as a living reality which makes religion possible. Still religion in its various forms seems again on the upswing in Western countries.

One: A Figment of the Human Mind?

From the very beginning, the New World, established by the Pilgrims and other persecuted religious minorities coming from the Old World of Europe, had a religious focus. The European immigrants settled in this New World and they tenaciously defended their newly won religious freedom. To safeguard this freedom the notion of inalienable human rights was introduced and monarchy as a form of government was rejected. In Europe, however, monarchies were too well established for this kind of freedom to gain much of a hearing. Attempts toward democratization were quickly squelched. The only exception was France where in 1789 a violent revolution swept away the old monarchy. But soon the French re-established a new monarchy of sorts.

Since in Europe religion was considered part of the government establishment, the questioning of religion became more and more an issue in intellectual circles and also among political radicals. Here the deistic critiques of John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–1776) paved the way for the primacy of sense experience and reason while relegating religion and everything non-material to secondary status. The elevation of reason as a goddess in the wake of the French Revolution and with it the clear designation of religion as a private matter, had an impact beyond France. While Hegel could still wed revelation and reason, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) showed that they belong to different dimensions; reason to the realm of phenomena, as that what we can see and touch, and revelation to that of the noumena, meaning that which underlies the world of phenomena and which is not accessible by reason. It was the criticism of Hegel’s synthesis of reason and revelation that became the catalyst for Feuerbach’s criticism of God and the Christian religion in general.

The Anthropocentric Turn: Ludwig Feuerbach

Feuerbach had been a student and follower of Hegel. But he could not accept his teacher’s organic and developmental thinking when Hegel, for instance, postulated: The development of Mind [i.e., the Spirit] lies in the fact that its going forth and separation constitutes its coming to itself.² For Feuerbach there was no thesis and antithesis, with a subsequent synthesis on a higher plane. Thesis and antithesis became identical for him. Hegel distinguished the absolute Spirit, i.e., God, from the subjective spirit in individuals, and the objective spirit of the human community which shows itself in the legal system and in morality. But Feuerbach collapsed all three into one spirit. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge, wrote Feuerbach.³ God and humanity are the same, because the secret of theology is anthropology.⁴ Man’s knowledge of God is man’s knowledge of himself, of his own nature.⁵ Humanity becomes the starting-point and the focus of human reflection. Feuerbach confessed very pointedly: God was my first thought, reason my second, humanity my third and last thought.

⁶

Theology, according to Feuerbach, must not (just) be seen as a derivative of, but must be dissolved into anthropology. The reason for this is that there is only one reality, the one given through our senses. There is no other reality, since truth, reality, and the sensually given are identical.⁷ Feuerbach objected here also to the idealistic notion of Hegel that reason would be the most truly real in humanity since human reason is in touch with God as the world reason or the absolute Spirit. For Feuerbach the sensually given is the essence of humanity.⁸ This materialistic vision of Feuerbach focuses exclusively on humanity, because man, especially the religious man, is to himself the measure of all things, of all reality.⁹ This anthropocentric materialistic vision is now employed to analyze religion, because as Feuerbach asserted, his writings have strictly speaking only one purpose, one intention and idea, one theme. This theme, of course, is religion or theology and everything connected with it.

¹⁰

Since religion is a human phenomenon, Feuerbach sought to discover the origins of religion, primarily the God concept. He noticed that the theist conceives God as an existing and personal being external to reason and in general apart from man.¹¹ The implications insist that neither God nor religion is primary, but humanity, since the concept of God is declared to be a projection of humanity. The beginning, the middle and end of religion is MAN, Feuerbach summarized his assessment of religion at the conclusion of the first part of his book The Essence of Christianity.¹² God is perceived as a being outside and beyond humanity but all the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.¹³ Even the Trinity is brought into this anthropocentric focus. The Trinity is explained as the secret of the social life of the community, and the incarnation as the secret of God’s love to humanity is seen as the secret of humanity’s love to itself.

¹⁴

However, Feuerbach sees that the problem with religion and the God concept is that it is not simply a projection of humanity’s own being. Such a direct projection would pose no problems. But in religion God—in actuality an imaginary being—becomes a being that is differentiated and even contrasted with humanity. This God who is thought to exist in and of itself exists only in one’s imagination, as an idea, but not in reality and in truth.¹⁵ Feuerbach now sees his task to deny this fantastic imaginative construct of theology and religion and to affirm the true nature of man.¹⁶ Religion and the God concept are dangerous, because they provide an illusory world that has nothing to do with humanity’s actual world and humanity’s actual essence. For Feuerbach, God needs to be discarded, and humanity emerges in God’s place.

Feuerbach asserted: The sentence, ‘Humanity is God, the highest essence of humanity’ is identical with the sentence, ‘There is no God, no highest being as theology holds’.¹⁷ Still Feuerbach feels himself to be a follower of Hegel, because, "if in the consciousness which man has of God, first arises the self-consciousness of God, then the human consciousness is, per se, the divine consciousness.¹⁸ While Hegel saw God reflected in humanity, this divine self-reflection is now identified with humanity. But this did not mean for Feuerbach that material humanity, able to be perceived by our senses, is finite like everything material. To the contrary, in nineteenth-century idealistic and optimistic fashion, Feuerbach declared that if religion is the consciousness of the infinite, then religion can be nothing else than the consciousness which man has of his own, not finite and limited, but infinite nature.¹⁹ Strictly speaking, human consciousness and consciousness of the infinite are inseparable, indicating the elevated status which Feuerbach accords to humanity. Feuerbach can even equate the highest feeling with the highest feeling of self.²⁰ Since humanity is so elevated, then the concept of God can emerge. Thus God, as an object of feeling, or what is the same thing, the feeling of God, is nothing else than man’s highest feeling of self. The affinity and yet the contrast to Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is obvious, for Schleiermacher asserted that God is the feeling for the infinite. Schleiermacher, however, would have never dared to regard God as a human construct, since for him humanity did not yet possess such a high status as it did for Feuerbach.

This said, Feuerbach also realized that a human being is nevertheless finite and therefore he was opposed to the idea of a personal immortality. The reason for rejecting the notion of immortality is that, according to Feuerbach, any existence needs a material base. Therefore no disembodied existence is possible. Moreover, he claimed: All proofs of immortality are insufficient, and even unassisted reason is not capable of apprehending it, still less of proving it.²¹ But Feuerbach did not object to immortality altogether, since for him the species is still immortal. The human individual being can become conscious of his limits, his finiteness, only because the perfection, the infinitude of his species, is perceived by him.²² But according to Feuerbach such perception is a mistake. Every being is in itself infinite. From the infinity of the species Feuerbach conjectured the infinity of the Godhead, and thereby the human species became the foundation for the God concept. This notion of the infinity of the human species is typical of nineteenth-century optimism with its enchantment with advancement and progress. But it remains an unproven hypothesis.

Feuerbach did not only focus on the human species. In his later writings he expanded his anthropocentric base to include nature. He surmised: If we now consider the attributes of the Godhead, we shall find that they are all rooted in nature.²³ Nature is related to humanity, since it is presupposed by humanity and without it, humanity would have no existence and no being. Conversely humanity also belongs to the essence of nature, because humanity is the being in whom nature becomes personal, conscious, and rational.²⁴ We are reminded here of the Hegelian antithesis between the ultimate spirit and the human spirit. Somehow Feuerbach could not totally rid himself of his master’s influence.

These convictions led Feuerbach to the conclusion that humanity and nature work together in producing religion. However, he precluded the argument that the reverse way to presuppose God is that God is the one from whom humanity and nature would have their origin. Feuerbach declared: The God from whom nature is deduced . . . is itself a being originating from nature, deduced from it, and expressing the effects, properties and appearances of nature.²⁵ Infinity pertains not to God, but rather to nature. The idea that Nature or the universe in general has a real beginning, and that consequently at some time there was no Nature, no universe, is a narrow idea. . . . It is an imagination without sense and foundation.²⁶ Nature is neither created nor brought forth by anyone or anything. It is from itself and in itself, it has no beginning and no end; the beginning and end of the world are human concepts, concepts which humanity transfers from itself onto nature because humanity begins at a certain time and also ends.²⁷ Therefore not only humanity, but also nature is infinite, and a God is no longer needed.

Feuerbach’s proposal is atheistic in the sense that it involves the abandoning of a God who is different from humanity.²⁸ But this kind of atheism is not negative as Feuerbach asserted, since we must replace the love of God by the love of man as the only true religion, the belief in God by the belief in man and his powers.²⁹ Feuerbach was convinced that Christianity and faith in God are passé. In place of faith there is faithlessness, in place of the Bible there is reason, in place of religion and the church there is politics, in place of heaven there is earth, in place of prayer there is work, in place of hell there is the material want, and in place of the Christian there is humanity.

³⁰

Feuerbach certainly knew how to read the signs of the times, since the nineteenth century was the century of the large-scale desertion of the church by the working class, most prominently in Great Britain and Germany. Feuerbach also thought he realized what the problem was with God and religion. Man deifies the being or thing upon which he knows or believes his life to depend.³¹ This conviction led to the fallacy that God is more efficacious than humanity and infinitely transcends human powers. Humanity in turn becomes limited, powerless, and has the feeling of dependence. This is the problem that Feuerbach endeavored to solve. Dependency on the transcendent God is wrong. While the foundation of religion is a feeling of dependency; the first object of that feeling is nature.³² Since humanity is dependent on nature with every step it takes, nothing is transcendent or otherworldly in nature. Therefore humanity can tackle nature and focus on that which is the ultimate longing of humanity, the pursuit of happiness.³³ Here religion enters in because according to Feuerbach a god is man’s striving for happiness, fulfilled in his imagination.

³⁴

Feuerbach did not want humanity to indulge in fantasy, i.e., in religion, since religion has it all wrong, it does claim that the semblance of reality is reality.³⁵ God does not exist in sense perception or in reason but only in faith, that is, imagination.³⁶ "For a god as such is an imagined, unreal, fantastic being, which however is supposed to be a real being."³⁷ God therefore is a superfluous hypothesis, and diverts our attention to a figment of the human mind, instead of focusing on the object matter, the material. God is supposed to satisfy our yearning for happiness, but because God is a mental illusion, such happiness can only occur in our imagination and not in reality. Therefore the whole idea of God and religion must be abolished to attain real happiness for humanity.

Although Feuerbach’s wholesale accusation is too sweeping to be accurate, his diagnosis that humanity is yearning for happiness and love is certainly correct. But how can this be attained if we live in a finite world? Here the sentiment of the nineteenth century was much more optimistic than that of today. Even if we still believed in a universe without boundaries and without beginning or end in time, we people of modernity are painfully confronted with our own finitude and also with the finitude of the resources we employ to master our lives.

The Radicalization of Feuerbach: Karl Marx

Feuerbach’s ideas were too contagious to be soon forgotten. When Karl Marx came across Feuerbach’s book The Essence of Christianity he enthusiastically welcomed this new concept, since Feuerbach re-established materialism as the prime concept.³⁸ As Feuerbach, Marx was influenced by Hegel and uneasy with his dialectic. While estrangement for Hegel is something positive in which self-consciousness objectifies itself and therefore posits a world over against itself, for Marx this is something totally negative, because the objectification as such applies to an estranged relatedness of humanity which does not correspond to the human essence, to its self-consciousness.³⁹ For Marx estrangement is not a theoretical and abstract philosophical thought-pattern. It is something eminently real, though according to Marx, Hegel postulated "an estrangement of the pure, i.e., abstract philosophical thinking."⁴⁰ Marx, however, had no interest in philosophical abstractions but focused on the tangible, on economic matters.

Yet the charge against Hegel that he does not deal with reality, Marx also lodged against Feuerbach. In his Theses on Feuerbach which Engels published in 1845, Marx stated in thesis 11: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."⁴¹ Marx was not actually a philosopher, but a revolutionary who set out to change the world. Therefore he accused Feuerbach of not noticing that the abstract individual whom he [Feuerbach] analyzes belongs to a particular form of society.⁴² Feuerbach conceives of men not in their given social connection, not under their existing conditions of life, which have made them what they are.⁴³ Since Feuerbach as a philosopher neglected the practical and societal aspect of humanity, he also neglected the historical aspect of human life and the concrete historical evolution of human history. Therefore, according to Marx, he never arrives at the really existing active men, but stops at the abstraction ‘man’. This goes hand in hand with the charge that Feuerbach neglected to ask why religion even came into being—in terms of social conditions—and how this religious self-estrangement could be overcome.

Marx had little interest in interpretation, but focused on inducing change. He surmised that humanity creates religion because humanity’s world—and this means primarily the social world—is felt wanting. But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis.⁴⁴ Since humanity is dissatisfied with the kind of world in which we live, it creates this divine supra-world. Religion therefore becomes the fantasizing realization of the human being, because this supra-world society is a wrong world. The origins of religion, according to Marx, are the warped conditions of this world, the actual estrangement of human existence from itself. Therefore religion serves as the opiate of the people.⁴⁵ Karl Marx asserted that Feuerbach does not see that the ‘religious sentiment’ is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyzes belongs to a particular form of society.⁴⁶ This is a society which needs religion, which needs an opiate, because people are exploited. Yet Marx contends that millions of proletarians feel by no means contented with their living conditions, if their ‘existence’ does not in the least correspond to their ‘essence’.⁴⁷ Therefore they will bring their ‘existence’ into harmony with their ‘essence’ in a practical way, by means of a revolution.

One cannot just talk like Feuerbach about religious self-alienation and the dichotomization of the world into a religious world and a secular one. This opposition has to be resolved and after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.⁴⁸ Humanity will not attain its true essence as long as it perceives its essence above and beyond itself in a heavenly realm. Marx detected the main culprit for this dilemma in Christianity. The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, dejection.⁴⁹ Since the proletariat needs courage, self-esteem, pride, and a sense of independence to attain its goal, it must do away with religion. "The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man, hence with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence."

⁵⁰

Since the religious world is but a reflex of the real world, Marx demanded that we abandon the search for a superman in the fantastic reality of heaven where we find nothing but a reflection of ourselves.⁵¹ Marx therefore claimed that "the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.⁵² As soon as religion as the general theory of this world is abolished—a theory which according to Marx provides the justification for the exploitation of the working class and the consolation for a better future—we will abandon the fantastic heavenly reality and face our reality on earth. His conclusion therefore was: We do not change the secular questions into theological ones. We change the theological questions into secular ones."⁵³ Indeed, this was the agenda of Marx and the Marxist Communist Revolution, not only to see religion wither away, but to make it wither away through closing churches, monasteries, and theological faculties and, worse yet, starting a full-scale deadly persecution of Christian leaders.

The atheism of Karl Marx is much more radical than that of Feuerbach. The reason for this is not just that Marx was a revolutionary, but that he understands humanity not only embedded in nature and stemming from nature, but as an active species of nature.⁵⁴ Human activity is not primarily thinking or reflection, but concrete activity and this means productivity. According to Marx human history starts when humans begin the production of the means to satisfy these needs [of everyday life], the production of material life itself.⁵⁵ This is even true for subsequent history, because individual human beings depend on the material conditions of their production.

Marx is not as materialistic as is Feuerbach, but he is convinced that humans depend totally on themselves and also forge their own history. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.⁵⁶ In the same way history has a material basis, because the whole so-called world history is nothing but a human production through human labor.⁵⁷ While humanity lives in the world and is dependent on it, humans also produce a world and thereby they have a history. Yet in contrast to Hegel, history has nothing to do with the Spirit, i.e., God, or the ideal, i.e., some supra-material values, since history is the true natural history of humans.⁵⁸ Therefore anything abstract or anything beyond the natural, such as morals, religion, metaphysics, or any ideology and their conceptuality, have no independent existence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.⁵⁹ Consciousness therefore is an epi-phenomenon of the material basis of humanity. Since there is a basic estrangement in the societal existence of humanity, human consciousness has gone astray. The societal problems are then reflected in the wrong ideas of individual human beings, in their illusions, and their religious fantasizing.

On the human and material level, the basic problem is the division of labor which results in unjust labor conditions and the accumulation of private property (or the lack thereof) which leads to the exploitation of one human being by another. If both the division of labor and private property are abolished, humans can return to their own non-estranged communal and egalitarian existence. The positive abolishment of private property as the appropriation of human life is therefore the positive abolishment of all estrangement, the return of humanity from religion, family, state, etc. into its human, namely societal, existence.⁶⁰ Through this communal existence humans become totally human and this society of the future produces a "humanity in its whole richness of its being, a rich and deeply sensuous [allsinnig] humanity as its continuous reality."⁶¹ Similar to Feuerbach, Marx showed little regard for the individual human being. All-important for him was society from which he expected that which an individual human being cannot accomplish, the production of happiness and new sustainable living conditions. Similar to Feuerbach’s ideas, in which humanity becomes divinized now, society assumes the status of a new divinity. Therefore Marx, too, could not do without an absolute, though he located it within the material world.

Religion as an Earlier Stage of Human Development:

Sigmund Freud

While Sigmund Freud knew that religion is too complicated to be derived from a single origin, he was convinced that "the last contribution to the criticism of the religious Weltanschauung was effected by psycho-analysis."⁶² We should take Freud’s claim at face value that his psychoanalysis made the final contribution to the criticism of religion. Both Feuerbach and Marx talked about religion as a projection. Yet for Freud this projection no longer originated from the conditions which humanity faces on this earth, but from the sickly mind of humanity at an earlier developmental stage. This meant that humans who are still religious are sick. They have not yet reached the presently available stage of human development. Freud leveled these devastating