A religião em Feuerbach: Deus não é Deus, mas o homem e/ou a natureza divinizados

Abstract

In his main work, The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach shows that Christianity posts to its summit a personal limitless God who creates by means of “pure thinking” and “will” nature and man. On the other hand, in The Essence of Religion in Complements and Clarifications for the Essence of Religion, Feuerbach analyses natural religion in which God is a physical being not different from nature. In the same fashion that religion changed human essence in God, likewise natural religion changed nature into God. But, according to Feuerbach, the Christian God is not a non-human being, but man himself adored as divine, likewise the physical God of natural religion is not God but nature itself in a divine configuration. Faced by those religions, Feuerbach aims at rescuing not only man but also nature and establish between them a new relationship: man not only as a spiritual being but also created out of necessity who is finite, sensible, dependent on nature, while nature is not as a work of God, neither of man, but a original instance, having itself as cause, and man owes his existence, its birth and preservation to nature, but it is by means of man that nature is better preserved, developed and known.